View Full Version : SDHC Recorder?


Ron Edwards
June 11th, 2009, 04:42 PM
Is there a SDHC recorder that I can use to store video projects on cards to free up my hard drive. I would need to FIREWIRE into the recorder.

Thanks
Ron

Robert M Wright
June 11th, 2009, 05:58 PM
Any card reader that works with SDHC cards should do. Blu-Ray disks would be cheaper though.

Mark Job
June 17th, 2009, 10:25 AM
Is there a SDHC recorder that I can use to store video projects on cards to free up my hard drive. I would need to FIREWIRE into the recorder.

Thanks
Ron...Yeah. Our recorder, if we ever get a functioning prototype to show you.

Mark Job
June 17th, 2009, 10:32 AM
Any card reader that works with SDHC cards should do. Blu-Ray disks would be cheaper though....Our SD recorder will actually capture and build an authentic Bluray .ISO image you can burn to disk ! Right now its vaporware, but we finally figured out a chipset and circuit design which will build the disc at the press of a button. Did you know there are at least 35 steps to program to build a Bluray disc ? It looks easy, but it's really complicated to break the process down into a series of tasks and then program each task step by step. We capture to the SD card, then suck the data back off the card and reprocess it, then spit the .ISO image onto the card ! Sounds easy right ? -Nope !

Ron Edwards
June 17th, 2009, 10:53 AM
Hey Mark,

While your at it ... If your company could develop a card reader (SDHC) that could receive the card and send out a NTSC signal via COMPONENT out to the Broadcast truck I would think the TV stations would like to have a few.

Mark Job
June 18th, 2009, 10:31 AM
Hey Mark,

While your at it ... If your company could develop a card reader (SDHC) that could receive the card and send out a NTSC signal via COMPONENT out to the Broadcast truck I would think the TV stations would like to have a few....Done ! This is easy to build into our SD card recorder box. Our SD card DDR will automatically downconvert anything recorded in HD to SD on the fly ! Since our box is being designed from the ground up to function as a full VTR replacement as well as an on camera video capture device, it *must* have these kinds of capabilities.

Robert M Wright
June 18th, 2009, 07:40 PM
It's been well over a decade now, but I've developed a little software in my time (my Dad started teaching me computer programming at the ripe old age of 6 or 7, way, way back in the early 60s - he was one of the pioneers in computer science). I'm not sure what you mean by 35 steps to generate a Blu-Ray video disk ISO image. Are you talking about doing the compression too? How does the image get from a camera (or another device?) to your device? If you're talking about something somewhat akin to a nanoFlash unit, 35 steps sounds like a whale of an underestimate to me.

I don't see a point to generating NTSC SD output, to send to a TV station broadcast truck. Analog broadcasts shut down last week.

Robert M Wright
June 18th, 2009, 07:43 PM
Ron - I think I misunderstood your original post, that started this thread. What exactly is it that would be coming over the firewire, that you want to record onto an SDHC card?

Robert M Wright
June 18th, 2009, 08:05 PM
Holy buckets. I just read your thread on this device. Yeah, that sure sounds like vaporware, to be sure! That's not a 35 step software development project (unless your idea of a step is my idea of hundreds). You're talking about a serious R&D project there. Heck, just cooling such a device, is likely to present a major challenge.

Mark Job
June 22nd, 2009, 02:10 PM
It's been well over a decade now, but I've developed a little software in my time (my Dad started teaching me computer programming at the ripe old age of 6 or 7, way, way back in the early 60s - he was one of the pioneers in computer science). I'm not sure what you mean by 35 steps to generate a Blu-Ray video disk ISO image. Are you talking about doing the compression too? How does the image get from a camera (or another device?) to your device? If you're talking about something somewhat akin to a nanoFlash unit, 35 steps sounds like a whale of an underestimate to me.

I don't see a point to generating NTSC SD output, to send to a TV station broadcast truck. Analog broadcasts shut down last week.....No. No. My unit will capture a firewire HDV signal, or a 10 BIT HD SDI signal, and simply record that to an SD card *in HD* of course. To make the Bluray .ISO image, my unit will have to grab the video recorded on the *single* SD card and then pull that back into the unit for post processing if user presses .ISO button; then data is *converted* to the other format and spit back out to the SD card, thus erasing it - OR - data is pulled from one SD card socket and processed into Bluray image, then delivered to an SD card in *second* socket. (I think this is the more elegant way of doing it, but more costly to build) The second way would leave the originally captured video data fully intact on the original (read first socket) SD card.

With firewire capture of HDV material, things are straight, simple, and cheap, since the Long GOP MPEG 2 encoding is NOT done in our box, but in whatever HD camera and delivered (Streamed) to an SD card socket - OR - / - AND - sent to our crazy video encoding engine (NOT MPEG 2 Long GOP). The steps to creating a . ISO Bluray image must be programmed into the right capacity EPROM Chiparoo and the software written for it must carefully and perfectly carry out each step of the process, then move onto the next step and so on and so on until all audio, video, TC error checking, redundancy calculations are run. There's more too, but I won't get into that yet.

What can I say, it's a hobby, it's a business, it's an obsession, and it will get done, because I think it would be so cool to create my very own custom made SD Card DDR camera capture VTR replacement thingy. (Actually, it's slowly bankrupting me, but that's OK cause I will eventually get my dough back and then some !)

My proto-type cost is now estimated @ $30,000.00 Canadian ! Heck ! It's more than I thought, but still doable at this point. :-)

Robert M Wright
June 23rd, 2009, 04:30 PM
Unless you have engineers (and some dang good ones) working essentially for free, $30k (CAD) isn't going to come anywhere near covering software and hardware development costs (for what you describe in the thread you started about the device).

Mark Job
June 25th, 2009, 11:39 AM
Unless you have engineers (and some dang good ones) working essentially for free, $30k (CAD) isn't going to come anywhere near covering software and hardware development costs (for what you describe in the thread you started about the device)....Actually, for what we're trying to do and they way we're working, for now it does. I'm not saying this amount will not go up. (This is a rather *conservative* budget indeed)

....When I started, I actually thought I could do it for less ! Our project is half garage hobby at this point, but that doesn't necessarily imply we won't go full commercial manufacture at a later stage. Right now, this is not our goal. Our stated goal is to produce a functional prototype we can slap on my Canon XL H1 production camera to be able to make public demonstrations of what our device can do. Once we have come thus far, then we can look at attracting investors to go mass production. It's a process.