check it out.. cant wait, heres hoping they bring out a firewire box which allows us to connect these things to our DVX's or any other DV cam...

imagine NO MORE TAPE and NO MORE DROPOUTS, and better yet, NO MORE CAPTURING HOUR UPON HOUR of video to the PC!!!!

WOOOOOHOOOOOOO!!!

http://www.abcdv.com/article/articleview/126/1/53/

Just heard it, the 4 Gig cards will cost around 2000 USD. Panasonic plans on bundling a 5-cards set with the AJ-SPX800 camera wehn they release it. Most likely to mask that cost :-)

Yikes! 2 grand for 4GB? I'll stick with tape for now, until we are able to get enough to hold a hour on for your everyday camcorder for around $10. ;)

At that price, it certainly won't be intended for the consumer market. Like Alex says, "I'll stick with tape for now."

Look at it this way, from a TV-station point of view: how much is your tape cost and maintenance over 4 years (typical lifetime of such a camera in ENG work)? Compare that to these 5 P2-cards you will need in a typical shooting condition.

Also remember Moore's law: all IT products double in speed/performance each year while dropping in price by 40% ...

A 2GByte USB 2.0 Compact flash card can be purchased today for
for about $500. If tape is never used, the device will slowly pay for itself. The MAJOR advantage is eliminating the
video digital capture overhead, not only reducing transfer time by
probably 1/2 but also the camcorder setup/teardown and the constant searching overhead. Just imagine a capture where you can instantly index your scenes because the flash memory access is not serialized like tape access. Set your capture points/file and
walk away for a break. This is the major reason I'm stuck with
crappy video from digital cameras. The digital camera sceneselection and transfer take so much less time that I actually USE the videos instead of doing, ahem, archiving on miniDV.

A major disadvantage for USB flash cards is their flimsy construction in their current format. My 64 MByte key chain broke at the connector. These devices need to be made with a solid metal case. I bought it for $15, but still, it's not suitable on the key chain.

The JVC DR-DV5000U (http://pro.jvc.com/prof/Attributes/tech_desc.jsp?model_id=MDL101380&feature_id=02) looks to be the near future and it's reasonably priced. It's only for the DV5000 at the moment but i can see other manufactures following suit. Sony has their DV1, JVC have this, maybe it will be an accessory for the next XL version.

The JVC unit is actually a FireStore FS-3. About $2000.

There are many others out on the market, including the Laird CapDiv (about $1300) and the CitiDisk DV (about $600 or so). These are hard disks mounted in portable cases with power supplies, that connect to the camera by firewire, and record directly to disk so you can unplug it from the camera, plug it into your computer, and edit the clips immediately.

It'd be nice if it could use solid state storage or some other RAM-type system, but at $2000 for 4GB, the $600-for-40GB hard disk looks like a more viable solution right now.

I think the announcement that tape is dead is a bit premature. How about a show of hands of everybody ready to spend $2,000 USD for about 15 to 20 minutes of recording time. If you shoot ENG it might be worth considering, but for anybody else it's just not there.

The problem with the HD recording systems is that you need 2 drives or you haven't really saved anything. One drive doesn't allow you to shoot and edit at the same time. The size is limiting too, 40gb is only 3 hours. I've been known to shoot 20 to 30 hours of tapes in a week when I'm working on a project with a client. So, I would need 10 of those drives at $600 each. Boy, $6,000 buys an awful lot of tape.

I think Alex got it right. In about 10 years it will be practical and affordable to switch.

Two things to note:
1-The Focus Enhancements FS-3 with Anton Bauer battery system for the XL1s is $1500US by mail.
2-ADS just released a one button 30 Gb HD system for $700US, half the price of the FS-3 and half the features.

Unless you're a gadget freak, the ADS Pyro system is suitable for a couple of hours worth recording on an interchangeable hard drive system. I've ordered one to check it out. I beleive it acts like a removeable hard drive when plugged into the firewire port on my computer, has an onboard lithium rechargeable battery, and is small enought to be unobtrusively worn on my belt....smaller than a battery pack or the old CAPDIV. I beleive it rivals the size of the FS-3, could be mounted to the camera, but why lug the weight on my shoulder when I can put it on my belt?

Why fuss with expensive and flimsy memory cards? HD recording is here, now.

i dont think people are getting my post...

i put this up as a look towards the future, not the be all and end all..
im sure there will be many solutions coming to the fore....

memory cards and HDD seem to the be the way were going with DV, and it can only be a good thing.

i dont think people are getting my post...

If you hadn't announced that mini DV was dead and that there was no more need for tape and no more dropouts, the posts might have a different tone.

building up a bit of excitement never hurt anyone... especially when its the beginning of a major change to the way we do things.

on top of that i didnt mention anything about eta or cost.

its just a thread to show what is goin on out there

That is all

on a side note,
I run a couple of forums and with our tech forum, we have over 14000 members.

Bit of a gripe here, but in THIS forum, where the age group is higher, education levels is higher and the household income is also higher, some of the comments i have heard <not just directed to me, but within afew other threads from different ppl as well> make me wonder why i bother posting, as there is an EXCESS of nit picking.
In this board, ive noticed people cant jsut leave it be...

Considering the "level" of patronage here, i have never seen so many retortic and pedantic counter comments... EVER.

This isnt directed at anyone, its just a general observation throughout the whole DVinfo forum.

Its sad when you think about it, as considering the high level of intelligence from the members here, one would like to think that there would be no need for the kind of comments mentioned above.

If we cant discuss something without it being over-analysed to the point of distraction, whats the point in starting a thread?
The title clearly states Panas zero dropout and storage solution.

and yes, one day miniDV will die... and this is the beginning of that phase.

is it that hard to accept?

who knows...

If i notice a forum is slow in activity, i will do what i can to spice it up a bit. This comes from years of BBS, NG and thruout the early days of VBulletin. Hence the lead in title.

Whats a forum without a bit of controversy? Whats a forum without speculation? whats a forum without activity??

i think we all know the answer to that...

Im just here to post any new info i come across and help people out when they need it... and maybe one day if i ever need help, i can ask for it and the same courtesy would be given to me.

WELCOME to the world.
Welcome to the sidebar story, individual experience and personal opinion.
We Americans are a contentious lot, videographers more contentious than most, and still image photographers are the whiniest bunch you'll ever not want to meet.
Such is life.

With disk prices falling so quickly, miniDV will eventually be only on the consumer end. Heck, 160 GB Maxtor sells for less than $120 USD. If it can be ruggedize then people will use it in the field.

well, the world as a whole isnt THAT bad in itself.. LOL

I was actually going to mention the fact it might be a cultural thing but i didnt wanna rub anyone the wrong way...

but i think the attitude your describing is accurate, and i also agree 10000 percent about the still photographers...

we're straying of the topic...

ok so here goes... soes anyone know, apart from the standard DV deck backup kind of configuration, whether or not something mobile like this (either SD, HDD or otherwise) is possible at this point in time??

I saw the JVC HDD a while ago about 5 months ago from memory, does anyone know of something like this for Pana gear??
Maybe something in the works?
or are we stuck with DVTape backup systems?
hmm....

SD can work, but I am pretty sure they are not the cheap and slow ones you can typically buy. There are high speed varieties that cost quite a bit more.

A HDD system would have to be light, tight on power, rugged (ask Chris about the trouble with flying laptops), with interchangable disks and batteries.

Technically, I see no reason why someone could not build a system using HDD. The larger question is whether potential manufacturers think there is a market for a portable, prosumer system for what it costs to build one.

SD can accomplish all of that, but the big problem would be the high cost/GB.

>With disk prices falling so quickly, miniDV will eventually be only on the consumer end.

Imagine higher video data rates that aren't limited by the miniDV tape data transfer rate. You will probably be able to choose from MPEG2 HD?, DV25, DV50, DV200 (made that up), uncompressed, or whatever. 320 GB disks are now available for a bit less than $1/GB , which is about 3x the cost of miniDV, if you use the entire tape. I only use about half a miniDV for each of my sessions, so I would totally go for something that would skip the serial Firewire "capture" process.

"Imagine higher video data rates that aren't limited by the miniDV tape data transfer rate. You will probably be able to choose from MPEG2 HD?, DV25, DV50, DV200 (made that up), uncompressed, or whatever."

Maybe one day Glints, we wil have the option of this kind of format seelction...

How good would that be??!!! I mean can u imagine the time its going to save just literally plug and play and edit and burn straight off.

on top of that, the drop out and wear and tear ratio would decrease dramatically... heres hoping for a cheaper HDD alternative to tape, SD aint bad IMO, but price is a major issue...

U know what id like would be to have a HDD deck like those HDD portable mp3 player recorders... instead, it has a 1394 connection and when connected, replaces the tape mechanism of the cam.. (bit like when recording with a backup deck)

i'm sure it can be done, and with regard to weight, a belt clip or shoulder pack would be a good alternative to camera mounting.

see, the thing is, this technology is already made available... sure there are people eperiencing issues with the new technology, however like most things there are teething problems.

maybe soon enough we'll have this option we all dream about...
maybe Pana will take notice one day and recognise that there is indeed a market for this alternative media...

Didn't Hitachi or another company announce development of a multilayer optical storage that is using some kind of a blue laser and that has a capacity in the Tara range? And I think that there is an UV laser drive under development -- I read it somewhere, that would have even greater storage capacity. I don't think that flash memory is the future. Optical drives will be the future.

Well, actually, why can't we have this today? My Sony vx2000 has
a smart media card port. So does my Sony Wega TV. However, I'm stuck with cruddy JPEG images.

Just design a camcorder with slots for two flash cards, running in parallel. Or, make a device that sticks in the Firewire port that can house 2-4 cards. To transfer them to the computer, the 400 MBit Firewire or USB 2.0 interface will do it. Hell, I'll pay $200 for a little contraption like this. For a while, I was looking for a 2x miniDV tape reader. This will blow the doors off that.

The parallel cards will yield the flash memory bandwidth necessary to store DV25 or DV50. The tape will continue to work as a backup or whatever. When the cards fill up, oh well, they no longer store material. The rest overflows to tape. I've read announcements of higher bandwidth flash cards with wider data busses.

It still doesn't make financial sense for most users. Several manufactures just announced 4gb CF cards. They're only $499 USD each. So, for about $2,000 plus $200 for your parallel adapter I can do what $3 or $4 dollar mini DV tape does. I agree that the future will be solid state, but not today or tomorrow.

<<<-- Originally posted by Christopher Toderman : Didn't Hitachi or another company announce development of a multilayer optical storage that is using some kind of a blue laser and that has a capacity in the Tara range? And I think that there is an UV laser drive under development -- I read it somewhere, that would have even greater storage capacity. I don't think that flash memory is the future. Optical drives will be the future. -->>>

yeah mate, its called blue ray.. sony were the first to develop it and apparently its taken peoples attention...

this wont be availabelk for a long while yet, as im sure piracy and other mass media storage issues will need ot be looked at first...

Well, Sony had a LOT of blue ray stuff on it's stand @ IBC here
in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago. They seem to be pushing
this quite hard for the professional marketplace. Probably will
take a while to filter down into the consumer/prosumer market
indeed

>It still doesn't make financial sense for most users. Several >manufactures just announced 4gb CF cards. They're only $499 >USD each. So, for about $2,000 plus $200 for your parallel >adapter I can do what $3 or $4 dollar mini DV tape does.

Not really. Such an adapter could allow for parallelization of several cards to exceed the tape data transfer rate. This would allow for better DV formats in shorter durataions or "burst mode" photography, a particular application I'm chasing.

>I agree that the future will be solid state, but not today or >tomorrow.

Tomorrow is getting closer. Check out this advertisement for
compact hard disk drives. This is all I could find on this device, for now.

According to the Japanese website PC Watch and also EE Times, GS Magicstore will release a 4.8GB version of its 1" HDD in November. It is a Type II CF format card and will be compatible with digital cameras from Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Sanyo, Olympus and Minolta. Additionally the GS Magicstore product road map indicates a 7 - 8 GB unit late in 2004, 10 GB at the start of 2005 and 16 - 20 GB late in 2005. The company is also developing a 40 GB 1.8-inch drive which it will launch in April.

The 40 GB minidrive would make an ideal portable video accessory. Imagine being able to rapidly inspect your shoot while on location. This is where digital video should be. I would MUCH rather use the miniDV tape as a one-shot backup rather than an interactive recording/transfer medium.

Pretty soon, the miniDV tape drive will be an optional backup device.