Grass Valley have released a new storage device, the RevPro, which is essentially a high-capacity, cartridge-based system for storing video media. It is based on an Iomega drive format but optimized for video performance.

The cartridges are 35GB in size so enough for 2-3 hours of DV or HDV footage. The Rev Pro is not quite as fast as an internal hard drive, but in our tests with Grass Valley/Canopus Edius Pro 4, we could run two simultaneous streams of video from the device while editing on our Core2Duo laptop. It was not quite fast enough to play Canopus HQ HDV footage directly from the cartridge, although performance is reasonably good with MPEG HDV streams.

The really clever thing about the Rev Pro is that unlike normal portable hard drives (FireWire or USB) the cartridges do not contains the heads that read the data - these reside in the main Rev Pro unit. This means that the cartridges are a lot sturdier than other forms of portable storage. The demo from Grass Valley includes people practically jumping up and down on the cartridges and then using them immediately afterwards, demonstrating that they can put up with a lot more punishment than you would normally expect from a portable device. Anyone who has managed to kill a FireWire drive by accidentally knocking it over while in use will appreciate this!

The Rev Pro is a particularly good option for archiving projects - if the project is about 2 hours in length, you can trim the media to fit the cartridge and just store it on the shelf; then when you need to revisit the edit, just plug it in and either copy it on to the main system drive for reediting, or just edit direct from the device itself.

This storage system could also prove useful for schools and colleges - fit a Rev Pro reader in the editing station, and students can then store their work on their own individual 35GB cartridges.

The RevPro comes in 4 variations, depending on how you would like to connect it to your PC - 2 internal, either IDE or SATA, and 2 external, either FireWire or USB2.

Although developed by Grass Valley, the Rev Pro is not just usable with Canopus/Grass Valley Edius. It can also be used with Avid Media Composer, Avid Liquid (although we would recommend not using the USB version with this program because of possible conflict between the dongle and Liquid Pro Box), Adobe Premiere Pro, Sony Vegas, and pretty much any other editing software - the Rev Pro is just seen as a removable disk drive by the computer, and as such is extremely flexible.