4:4:4 12-bit Uncompressed DVX100

I think FW800 is the way to go (EIDE drive in a FW800 enclosure) using a FW800 cable from camera to drive. Yes, there are some using SATA external, including myself, but it is not proven itself yet and the cables are not as durable as FW especially on the road. My 2 cents.

[Stephen van Vuuren]

Ben:

I think my point is an excellent point despite it's alleged unpopularity. And I always think having various perspectives is important.

Having a SATA drive in a FW800 enclose gives far more options than a EIDE drive in a FW800 enclosure. Especially if Juan offers a removable tray that could plug into a hot-sway SATA enclosure. That would be a nice speed boost over FW800. That would provide both FW800 and SATA options as well as being backwards compatible with EIDE systems (via SATA/EIDE adapter). Everybody wins.

I'm not confused about what I'm proposing. I was continuing previous discussions about this in this thread from several months ago that you were not a part of.

I said then, that by the time Juan had a working prototype, SATA II had a good chance of being ratified, which it is. I also felt that once he knows if he's just going to self-assemble a few unit on a low scale or look for a larger business model and outsource manufacturer/assembly, looking at SATA drives makes sense to me.

I still think Juan is some months at a bare minimum away from having a product to sell. While SATA II looks like pie in the sky for external drives to you right now, it might be different in several months.

I personally don't think calling something a "FW800 drive" in this thread is accurate. While that's fine for a label on a box, we are discussing Juan building a item from scratch and technical accuracy is very important. He could outsource and buy a direct drive recording but I got the impression he wanted to design and build his own.

Per the market share studies, I don't have the money for them either and sorry if I gave that impression. I did look at a number of the articles written about them and made my own conclusions. Which could be wrong.

Bottom line: All the bold lettering in the world is not going to make me less of SATA proponent. I understand why you favor FW800. Why not agree to disagree?

[Stephen van Vuuren]

<<<-- Originally posted by Don Barzini : I think FW800 is the way to go (EIDE drive in a FW800 enclosure) using a FW800 cable from camera to drive. Yes, there are some using SATA external, including myself, but it is not proven itself yet and the cables are not as durable as FW especially on the road. My 2 cents. -->>>

Don:

There are several FW800 external enclosures on the market using SATA drives - I've seen mostly rack mount styles so far, not portables, but the chipsets must be out there. I recently was shopping for all sorts of drive options and recall seeing them.

Also, SATA II changes the external cabling and hopefully new, durable, longer cables will come to market quickly.

Anybody else desperate for more clips from Juan :)

[Ben Syverson]

Why not agree to disagree? Because you fundamentally misunderstand what Juan is building.

He's not building something with an internal drive, hence a "removable tray" is of no use. He's building a box that will connect to an external hard drive of your choice.

Here's the important part: your choice. So if you really love SATA II that much, you'll be able to get a SATA hard drive in a FW800 enclosure.

However, you also don't realize that the FW800 drives Juan is using are perfectly adequate for this application. There's absolutely no need for a "nice speed boost over FW800," because we're not even approaching the max transfer rate of the drive, let alone the interface.

Furthermore, although Juan may be months off from shipping a product, he's developing and testing right now. You don't develop with non-existant technologies.

I just really, really, really don't understand how we can still be having this conversation...

- ben

[Jon Yurek]

I think the question is why are we arguing over what's going inside the FW enclosure when the FW enclosure itself is hot swappable? You could have SATA, EIDE, SCSI, or Fibrechannel hard drives... or a RAID-style multiplex across 50,000 floppy drives for all I care. If the connection from the drive to Juan's capture device is FW800, then we, frankly, don't need to worry about what's going on inside the enclosure as long as it can handle 50MB/s sustained write speeds.

It's really not that critical. Juan said he's going with a FW800 interface, so that's what he's going with. If, at some later point he decides that SATA2 would make a better choice, then we can jump off that bridge when we come to it.

[Edit: ... yeah, and what Ben said. :P :) ]

[John Cabrera]

Ben,

No one wants to be told that they "fundamentally misunderstand" something. By making statements like that you invite the converstation to continue.

Why not agree to disagree? Cause you can't say that in one sentence and then in the next tell someone their wrong.

[Stephen van Vuuren]

Ben:

I am encouraging Juan to build a interface and drive mount box and/or belt-shoulder rig for the DVX or offer it as an option, perhaps even supplying the drives as well.

If he just does a port only, ie. just a Firewire FW800 and the stream down the port, a number of issues may come up:

e.g. controlling the start/stop record process, dealing with all the possible drive, enclosure and chipset combos, dealing with cable length and quality issues. It might be a real tech support compatability issue. Now if he just decides to hand assemble a few units on the side or build a few prototypes to market around, a simple FW800 port is fine.

But I think an elegant, secure, supportable drive solution is a vital part of this soluiton and would vastly increase it's usability. A partnership with an existing company that already does the direct drive recording is also an option.

[Ben Syverson]

Now we can agree to disagree.

FW800 is a robust standard that can easily support groundbreaking features such as "stop" and "start," and you need only look at the many FW DTD solutions to see that this is easily done.

I don't believe you'd have to support chipsets individually -- I think FW800 abstracts them and provides a common interface. However, you may need some way for the device to know the physical details of the drive -- can these be queried from the drive over FW? Juan may know.

Having a port is the most elegant option, since it allows the maximum flexibility. It may not be as easy as an affixed drive, but from what Juan has said, it doesn't seem to be a massive hurdle either.

Now, since Juan has all but settled on a box with a FW800 port, can we once and for all drop this aspect of the discussion?

- ben

[Stephen van Vuuren]

Ben:

If you find the discussions tiresome, don't particapate. Your recent posts directed towards me appear to contain a lot of frustration, sarcasm and condensation. If that's not what you intend, perhaps you should re-word them.

I realize firewire supports start/stop commands, but external firewire drives lack controls for it. I would also like to see onboard shuttle/review controls for going back to the monitor as well a LCD display for dropped frames, time/space remaining etc.

The QuickStream DV drive from MCE has an interesting approaches to some of these issues. However, a standard firewire portable enclosure won't have these features (redundant buffers, internal battery, LCD etc.).

However, I feel this field is wide open - if I were a hard disk engineer, I think the QuickStream could be improved.

[Obin Olson]

can't you guys let Juan do the work and stop bombing him with this stuff? I don't even want to read the board anymore..drop it

[Ben Syverson]

Obin's right -- I think there's only one person here still invested in this discussion, so maybe he can continue it with himself...

[Stephen van Vuuren]

I think it's unfortunate that Ben chose personal attacks over healthy discussion of the issues.

I realize Juan is hard at work on getting this to work - I've been in this thread from the start. However, I still think the drive/recording issue is a vital issue to the success of this unit, especially since it should be able to work on other cameras and a reliable field recording setup will prevent it from being something that requires a bunch gear ro record with.

However, since the vocal opposition is to drop it, I will. I also will remove all the drive discussion from the thread between Ben and I if Juan wants to us to clean it up to make the thread easier to follow.

[Ben Syverson]

Stephen, I didn't mean for any of my comments to seem like personal attacks; I was indeed trying to have a healthy discussion of the issues, however I didn't understand the context you were discussing SATA II in, and you didn't make that context clear until your last couple of messages. That was frustrating.

I (like a few others here) mistakenly thought we had all moved past the idea of a dedicated drive and tether, when clearly this is still a big issue for you. If I had understood that from the beginning, I would have politely ignored you. Instead, I thought you were arguing for a SATA II port on Juan's box, which is neither what you wanted nor a good idea.

I apologize that I became frustrated -- it's clear now that we weren't even arguing about the same thing...

- ben

[Stephen van Vuuren]

Ben:

That's one problem with this thread - it's so long and has been going on for so many months it's hard to keep all the tangents up to speed.

The Agus35 suffers from the same issues. I would like to see some type of branching thread for these heavy topics here - I'll mention something to Chris as it would make it far easier for people coming into long-standing threads easier.

Anyway, no hard feelings and sorry for the confusion.

[Ben Syverson]

No hard feelings here either, and my apologies.

Here's an idea: could we make this topic its own forum under the "Special Interest Areas" section?