I believe the LaCie big disk has USB2 and holds about 500gig.
Would that have enough bandwidth for capture Juan?

I found a really cool product made by Jadoo at Vegas.
A fuel cell generator that will produce up to 60 watts of
12v for 2 hours using hydrogen.
What we might need is for one to produce A/C to drive laptops and
hard drives.

The Jadoo system with two gas cartridges, charger and fuel cell
generator was on sale for $2400.
It has Anton Bauer gold series mount. Pretty light weight,
silent and produced no water I could see.
They make a larger cartridge that is expensive, but will last for 10 hours.

I haven't tested the newer lacie drives, but I have an older d2(?) which was the first one to come with firewire800. It works great over FW800 but the USB2.0 is slow.

This is not because of the USB protocol, but limitations on the chipset used on either the host or the slave...in this case it is the slave because the mac host can go pretty darn fast. It is very possible that the newer lacie drives use a newer faster USB chipset and can meet the specs just fine.

My tool of choice for testing a hardrive is called 'iozone', which you can download for free at www.iozone.org. It is a command-line tool and there is a version on the internet for MacOSX somewhere, if you google iozone and MacOSX.

You can customize the tests, and target a specific drive, plus specific operations, such as just write()/fwrite()/pwrite() which is what is relevant for Andromeda. It takes a while to run, but it gives you the actual continuous write rate for the drive.

Juan

A compact HDD enclosure that includes a rechargeable lithium-ion battery with 10+ hours of usage per charge:

http://www.macpower.com/productdetai...&catid=311,316

I feel something like this would be perfect in tandem with the Andromeda. It is much smaller than a laptop, lasts for longer between charges, and HDDs could be swapped out of the enclosure easily. Would this be a possible solution Juan?

Assuming the drive is fast enough, this would require a USB/Firewire HOST inside the DVX, which is a lot more expensive, and it would require a battery itself. In addition, it would be larger such that Andromeda would need to be outside the camera, thus limiting the addition of some accessories.

Juan

Has anyone experience with long runs of cable for USB2.0?
Would using "repeaters" be feasible?

We've tested it with a 15 feet cable, no problems. USB cables can be longer than this, i don't remember the exact figure now.

Hubs will act as repeaters, the only problem is that some hubs slow down the signal a bit, so it might cause a problem with larger data rates.

Juan

Sorry if I missed it, but is there a mailing list one can join to find out when new images or information is posted to reel-stream.com?

Yes, if you go to www.reel-stream.com, select CORPORATE->CONTACT, or just click here:

http://www.reel-stream.com/corp_cont

We have posted some frames from footage we took at vegas, together with the corresponding DV frames which where recorded simultaneously on the same camera to the DV tape. So literally we have posted the exact same frames, from the same camera at the same moment in time, just recorded via two different mediums.

Because we were recording with Andromeda, we exposed for the uncompressed footage which has 2-3 stops over the DV footage. This is why the DV frames look overexposed.

Here is a link to the gallery:
http://www.reel-stream.com/cap_hd


Cheers,
Juan

That's really interesting Juan. Any plans on making Andromeda for any interchangeable lens cameras like the XL2 or maybe even the HD100 when it comes out?

If there is enough support for the current version of the device(which at the moment it seems so), we will definitely be adapting the concept to another camera, either the XL2 or one of the new HD cameras. We haven't decided which one, but i'm leaning way away from the Sony FX1 because it is interlaced.

We already posted some HD stills from footage shot in vegas on our website www.reel-stream.com.

We've been debating how to post video, just because uncompressed HD is so large, some people suggested compressing it but i'd rather not. So we will be posting a ~5 second clip in uncompressed 1540x990 frames together with what the DV tape recorded. Should be done today or tomorrow.

Juan

Oooh, sorry to hear that. Can you explain a bit as to why? Alot more difficult to work with?

Not really. And I like the way the camera controls and everything is setup, very cool. But the sensors are interlaced, and there is just no way to get around it. There are very few people (if any) that have contacted me looking for uncompressed interlaced video. Everyone wants progressive.

In order to get something close to progressive out of the Sony, we'd have to de-interlace and that looses a ton of resolution together with a whole host of other problems.

It just doesn't make sense, when there are several other cameras that have HD chips and have progressive scan.

Cheers,
Juan

Wouldn't you better start from a camera that has real 720p instead of 1080i? 720p would give better images than the recompiled 1080i.

Yes, that's exactly what I mean. De-interlaced 1080i will probably yield less than 720 lines. Not to mention that the actual images are taken at completely different moments in time than a camera recording 24fps.

Juan

I understand your reasoning. Why work with 1440x540 when you can have the full resolution with other cameras.