Jan's already stated that Panny will license P2 to other companies--so yes, expect to see non-Panny P2 cards. Hopefully, the licensing fees will be reasonable.

I wonder if, just like with all memory cartridges, it will be long before other companies start offering 'P2 Compatible' cartridges, at half the price.

Ah that's great news. That's a sure-fire way to make sure that P2 sticks around.

Excuse my skepticism, but . . .

Does this direct to GENERIC firewire hard drive recording exist on any camera right now?

The firestore hard drives work because they have software that recognizes the data stream and creates the appropriate files on the hard drive, the camera doesn't have to do anything special.

For a generic firewire hard-drive it would be a bit more complicated; for example, the camera would have to go into different I/O modes based on whether it was connected to a firewire hard drive or to a computer (or TV w/ firewire). It would also have to know about file systems, etc. The firewire port on almost every camera just outputs a raw data stream and depends on software (on the computer or TV) to detect the stream and start capturing/playing.

Not saying it is impossible, but given a) the fact they are already working with Firestore, and b) that they have such a large investment in P2 technology, it seems unlikely that they would support generic firewire hard drives. Hope I'm wrong though.

Ben

P.S. What is the sustained data rate on the inexpensive small firewire hard drives? Is it enough to support DVC PRO HD (100 Mbps, roughly 13 MB/s) without dropped frames?

Well, this camera is a slightly different beast than most anything else on the market right now...

It's already encoding the footage into MXF files to place on the P2 cards... so why can't it send that data stream over the firewire or USB port to a harddrive, just like transfering files from harddrive to harddrive, or USB drive to SATA drive or whatever... in fact, when you use the P2 cards in camer and hook the cam up via firewire and/or USB, the computer supposedly will see the camera as a hdd or other storage device...

So I think it's fairly likely that Panasonic CAN make this work... it's just a matter of do they WANT to...

For a generic firewire hard-drive it would be a bit more complicated; for example, the camera would have to go into different I/O modes based on whether it was connected to a firewire hard drive or to a computer (or TV w/ firewire). It would also have to know about file systems, etc. The firewire port on almost every camera just outputs a raw data stream and depends on software (on the computer or TV) to detect the stream and start capturing/playing.

Actually it wouldn't be difficult at all. Both the Firewire and USB specifications have full support for storage devices, including various standard file system protocols. There are plenty of USB and Firewire devices in this world that talk to off-the-shelf USB/firewire hard drives right out of the box, including network routers, print servers, video conferencing systems, phone/PBX systems, etc..

There are several 2.5" drives on the market that have sufficeint data rates to handle the full 13MB/sec with a little head room. Most of the mainstream 5400 and 7200 rpm drives with 8GB (or larger) buffers these days will do this.

I am skeptical about Panasonic actually supporting this ability though... Supporting direct recording to HDD would really cut into their push for P2 cards and it would also cut third party licensee partners out of the picture (like Firestore).

I think the only reason that Panasonic will go ahead and consider adding this ability is to keep up with the JVC HD100 which will have an internal hard drive option. However, I'm not going to hold my breath on this...

Not to nitpick or anything, but the JVC cam will be using a firestore device designed for JVC, just like the 5000 did (I believe it was the 5000, wasn't it?), not an internal harddrive.

It's already confirmed that the HVX200 will be able to dump files from the P2 cards directly to off-the-shelf hard drives plugged into the camera. That's confirmed. So the HVX200 already has the ability to act as a HDD controller. As Jeff mentioned, many currently shipping drives will be able to handle the data stream. I think there's some concern on Panasonic's part regarding the variety of devices that might be plugged in and how to support this feature. For instance, an iPod might be able to handle the DVCPRO50 stream and only *some* of the smaller HD streams. So naturally, you'll have users trying to shoot all day in 1080 30P with their first generation iPods and cursing Panasonic's name. Maybe they can include it as an "undocumented feature".

Barry, where is this confirmed? Not saying it's not true, but I'd like to hear it from a Panasonic rep myself.

Aaron

I'm not sure I get it (or maybe it's that others aren't) but why do we need to worry about a HD being fast enough to handle the HD stream. It's data. I don't want to edit from my iPod. I just want a place to put the data (video) so I can free up a P2 card. If it takes a little longer because it's a slower harddrive, fine.

It seems to me unless Panasonic does something to actually disable this function, it should be easy. It's just transferring a file from one harddrive (P2) to another (external harddrive, iPod, whatever).

Am I oversimplifying this?

KW

I spent three hours with Jan and Phil Livingston, going through every aspect of the camera that I could, and verifying the workflow in every possible way. They told me that the dub feature allows you to dub the contents of the P2 card over to either tape (which would involve downrezzing to DV) or over to a hard disk, and that's what the SPB2 protocol is for. The camera supports both AVC and SPB2, AVC is the protocol used when a camera and deck are talking to each other, SPB2 is the protocol used for file transfer. When using SPB2, you can transfer files directly off of the P2 card to a USB2 hard disk.

Ahh OK. I think I misread, I was reading it as "realtime" capture to HD.
That's still up in the air right?


Aaron

Ahh OK. I think I misread, I was reading it as "realtime" capture to HD.
That's still up in the air right?
There are conflicting reports on that. Noah talked to some engineers who apparently said that yes, it could capture directly to hard disk (unless I misunderstood his report). When I talked to the product manager, it was made clear that definitely it will be able to dub to hard disk, but as to whether it can capture directly to it, there are issues that need to be sorted out. They definitely know we want it, but it may not be practical to implement it. Fortunately for us, this is one of those areas where the long lead time before introduction may work in our (the consumer's) favor, as there's plenty of time to hopefully sort through the issues and come up with a rock-solid, reliable way to guarantee the footage.

Like someone else said, I'm sure there will be people who try to plug an ipod in there, and then when it only sort of works and mostly fails, they'll scream and cry (and I'm sure some will try to sue Panasonic over it). Even the FireStore only supports 40mbps sustained capture rates, so there are issues that need to be resolved. 3.5" drives can sustain the capture rates easily, but they're big and unwieldly and not designed for portability. So there are apparently a lot of issues, and some pretty smart engineers at work on the problem, so I'm hoping that it will indeed do direct capture to off-the-shelf USB hard disks, but at this time the reality is, that particular aspect can't be confirmed.

Why hasn't Panny considered using the new blue ray DVD burner for a record medium? 23 gigs (and some change) on a Disc would be a lot cheaper than the flash cards.

Could it be that- the blue ray DVD is Sony technology, and they aren't sharing?

Or the data rate isnt fast enough for the camera (although some newer cameras -IMX etc. are using it).

With Moore's law and all, it'll be a long wait until I can afford those flash cards.

Jeff Patnaude

Just musing here, but if one of the issues is buffer overruns with slower hard drives, maybe they could utilize the the on-board SD card. The SD card is designed for storing scene files, but what if you loaded a 1GB or 2 GB SD card? It would be interesting if that SD memory could be used to buffer the datastream going to the hard drive. Of course the camera may already be hardwired so that's impossible, but that SD slot is sort of interesting to me.

Just musing here, but if one of the issues is buffer overruns with slower hard drives, maybe they could utilize the the on-board SD card. The SD card is designed for storing scene files, but what if you loaded a 1GB or 2 GB SD card? It would be interesting if that SD memory could be used to buffer the datastream going to the hard drive. Of course the camera may already be hardwired so that's impossible, but that SD slot is sort of interesting to me.

No reason it couldn't record/buffer to the P2 card and then stream to the HDD. Seems like a natural extension given some of the other pre-record and loop record features already announced. IMO, if Panasonic chooses to not allow recording of the video to HDD (only the ability to offload P2 data to a drive), then it won't be for any real technical reasons, but rather for business motivated reasons on their end to satisfy their P2 push and/or their licensed partners bringing companion products.

No reason it couldn't record/buffer to the P2 card and then stream to the HDD.
Then that just makes the P2 card an expensive buffer and defeats the purpose of wanting to record to cheap, off the shelf, HDD's.

Then that just makes the P2 card an expensive buffer and defeats the purpose of wanting to record to cheap, off the shelf, HDD's.

Not necessarily. It would still eliminate off-loading time, allow you to only use (read: buy) one P2 card, and helps allow you to use the camera in long take scenarios such as performances, weddings, or documentary shooting.

- If you need a hand wih a project in the NY/NJ area, email me!
BTW Jesse, I tried to email/IM you here, but you've got your accept emails turned off in the user CP. I was actually going to offer you my help.

BTW Jesse, I tried to email/IM you here, but you've got your accept emails turned off in the user CP. I was actually going to offer you my help.

Yikes! I'll turn that on!

...my email is phatkodiak at aol.com

I'm free on the weekends right now, and my semester is over in 2 weeks (freeing up more days).

I spoke to Jan at length yesterday about real time video streams over Firewire. She said they all would be present on Firewire and any capture app that supported DVCPROHD could capture the stream to hard disk. So, use of a laptop is a possibility. Focus Enhancements and Jan told me they were discussing a portable; however, the FS-4 drives don't have the horsepower yet to manage the data stream plus they would have to design the electronics to support the codec. Focus Enhancements is trying to gauge the market before they leap.

Focus Enhancements is trying to gauge the market before they leap.

Which is why I've already emailed Focus Enhancements and told them my opinion... PLEASE SUPPORT IT!

"Focus Enhancements is trying to gauge the market before they leap."

Now that is nutty to me. Support for the JVC would be worth doing some research as it might be a harder sell. But EVERYONE is talking about the HVX200. This does not require research, they should be all over it. Even loyal Vegas users, who I'm one of and can attest to how aggresively loyal we can be, are all up in arms b/c Sony owns Vegas now and it's not clear if DVCPro HD is ever going to happen for us. Scores of Vegas users are now ready to jump ship to FCP to be able to use this camera. Never thought I'd see the day, but b/c Vegas is so in bed with HDV...

Why not just chnage to Avid Xpress Pro instead of FCP? At least they wouldn't need to change plataforms.

i dont understand what the panic is all about.. :(

eventually units like this

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5188990564&rd=1&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWA%3AIT&rd=1

will come with PCMCIA adapters to plug straight into a laptop and run as an external drive, these same plug (adapated PCMCIA) , could theoretically be used as a mobile storage device.. personally id prefer to record to P2, and xfer to a lapto.. at least id be able to see my clips and make sure that i didnt have a HDD failure.. all these mobile HDD units seem to be having issues..

PCMCIA to IDE adapters do exist, I dont see any reason why we couldn't trick the camera into thinking that a 250 gig ide/ata hard drive is a P2 card, they're both simple storage devices, the camera has firmware which is automating the file writing process to the P2 card.

has anyone used the ol' car analogy yet? panasonic has introduced a powerful new sports car at an affordable price. only problem is instead of running on premium unleaded, it runs on a special rocket fuel that only panasonic "gas stations" sell for now. the fuel is scarce and about 1/5 the price of the car. yes the fuel is reusable but you can only travel about 20 miles before you need to refill.

not sure where i'm going with this but it doesn't seem panasonic knows where they're going either. they introduce a prosumer camera but alienate most of their prosumer market by rushing to get out their camera that requires superfast p2 cards. but at a maximum of 100mbps data rate, why would dvcprohd require p2's 640mbps? why wouldn't any 7200rpm or even 5400rpm 2.5" hdd work at this sustained rate? how does jvc offer this option on their new hd prosumer cam? is their data rate that much different? just asking some questions that i haven't seen answered yet.

This has been debated ad infinitum -- it's getting up there with the "mac vs. PC" or "video vs. film" threads as far as overdone...

Here's the answers, all in one place, so hopefully everyone can see this and not be confused about it:

Panasonic is trying to sell cameras. They have made the camera do things that no other camera in this price class can do. They have been able to do that by offering P2 recording, and not recording to tape. Why not record to tape? A DVCPRO50 deck would add about $7,000 to the cost -- and still wouldn't record HD. A DVCPRO-HD deck would add $15,000 to the cost -- just for the deck mechanism. Panasonic has instead brought DVCPRO-HD to the market in a camera that costs less than $6,000.

But you have to buy a card. Or do you? For those who complain about the P2 price, please keep in mind that a) you don't ever really have to buy a P2 card if you don't want to, and b) there may be many alternatives to P2.

For those who are enamored with hard disks, Focus is building a FireStore that will work with the camera. Using that, you would never have to buy a P2 card, and you could still use the full HD capabilities.

Or, if you can stand being chained to a laptop or desktop via firewire, you can use the camera out of the box and record HD straight to the computer, without having any P2 cards at all.

Or, several efforts are underway to determine the feasibility of P2 alternatives -- perhaps a Sandisk Extreme III compactflash card mounted in a PCMCIA adapter will work. Others are talking about using PCMCIA firewire adapters or PCMCIA USB2 adapters. Others are talking about the next generations of MicroDrives.

Also, Panasonic has no intention of having any sort of "monopoly" on P2 cards. They've licensed their SD memory card technology so widely that there are now 700 companies making their own SD cards, or products to go with them. You can bet that you'll see P2 cards from PNY, SanDisk, Kingston, Lexar, basically anyone that makes memory cards.

And, the part that people really seem to not get -- you don't buy lots of P2 cards. You buy one, or maybe two. Maybe if you're really, really gonzo about it, you'll buy three. And that's it. For the rest of the camera's life. It's not like tape or disc or other disposable media. P2 is more like the RAM in the camera, like a part of the camera. It is not media that you hand over to the client.

And, even if you get just one P2 card, you can plug in a hard disk and dub the contents of the P2 card over to a cheap off-the-shelf USB2 drive whenever you want. No other camera can do that. You could dub your footage onto a hard disk that actually costs *less* than a DVCPRO-HD tape does!

If you really want to record to hard disk, you can. P2 cards are faster, more reliable, more rugged, more shockproof, more environmental-proof -- in fact, they're superior to hard disk in every way except one: cost per gigabyte. A hard disk is a far inferior product in all ways except one: it's cheap. So the solution is, shoot to card, dub to hard disk.

If you want to shoot to hard disk, go ahead -- get a FireStore. Panasonic recruited them to be a partner specifically for this purpose.

Please, let's put a rest to the "Panasonic's extorting big money from us for P2 card" conspiracy theory. Competition and licensing will drive P2 cards to rock bottom prices. And there are plenty of alternatives, now and forthcoming, that make it such that you may never need a p2 card at all, if you choose to do without it.

.....A hard disk is a far inferior product in all ways except one: it's cheap...

Barry, you wrote a great summary of all the posts and arguments of the last couple of weeks - you must have been taking notes!

I didn't understand that one sentence though. In what ways wold an HD be "far inferior"?

Yes, in many ways a hard drive is "inferior" to P2 cards in as much
as they are not nearly as robust, nor reliable as memory. This might not be an issue when it comes to most hard drive applications, but when the drive holds what is now the camera original data then one had better think long and hard about dependability and back up. Other than that they seem a very viable option!

Yes, in many ways a hard drive is "inferior" to P2 cards in as much
as they are not nearly as robust, nor reliable as memory. This might not be an issue when it comes to most hard drive applications, but when the drive holds what is now the camera original data then one had better think long and hard about dependability and back up. Other than that they seem a very viable option!

All true, but here's the pinch. Where is all my incredibly valuable footage archived? Oh, it's on an HDD, isn't it??? The data's only on the P2 card for about 20 mins.

I did a degree in computer science at UCL when I was a lad - and I'll tell you this much, I don't trust solid state systems as far as i can p*ss... I'll keep my tape backups, thank you very much!

It doesn't look like a new Panny for me :( Oh well...

dominic, i just spent $400 to get new heads put on my xl1s... the footage i lost at the shoot can't be replaced... don't anybody try telling me that tape is reliable.

coming from an i.t. background, i can also say that tape formats come and go far too often... right now i'm sitting on a bunch of precious hi-8 footage that i don't know what to do with, it needs to be copied off somewhere before the tape itself completely falls apart... and the $5k sony 9850 hi-8 tape deck just took a nose dive.

several years ago i got a frantic call from an old co-worker who desperately needed to restore a dos-based tape... they had lost track of the computer software it was made on, but it probably wouldn't have helped anyway, because nothing runs on dos anymore... i suggested that he pay big $$ to send it to a data restoration service.

what you will be using for long-term storage of your p2/hdd hd footage are cheap hard drives, and the new dvd hd discs, which will be available in quantity within two years... the deck will plug into a pc just like the dvd burners we have now, you'll be able to use it for data storage or as a master copy of your production.

In the old days archives of any kind was static. You spooled something to a tape, and the big issue was to make sure that the data you recorded remained unchanged.

But it is not so anymore in the IT-world of today. Data in any archive is alive. Meaning that they got metadata assigned to them and they can be transformed to another format as need be. One example is plain Word documents on a storage server. Lets say you changed your wordprocessor. Then what about the older documents? How do you make sure that you can read them? When you restore an older document because you need it, then it a baad time to discover that your old documents and your new wordprocessing program are incompatible. The solution for this is to have the storage subsystem to convert all documents as a background batch process.

The same goes for video. Larger files - yes. Much larger files - indeed. But storage and processing power is getting cheeper by the minute.

So it is possible to build a videostorage system, that could convert your HD to Mpeg4/uncompressed/MPEG2/... And based on metadata convert older projects to a suitable archive format and unload it to DVDs. My old pc was doing exactly that for me. Using Cleaner and a 160 GB USB2-harddisk it worked in the backgrund converting my raw takes to highbandwith MPEG2. Right now it is a Linux-server, but that is another story.

But the morale of all this is that standard fileformats is very important, and paired with metadata it is possible to keep data alive. It might be that it is ones and zeroes we are keeping on the disk, but it is images we are storing.

It seems this camera will record to ANY firewire or USB2.0 drive that will support the datarate.
That means, no need for an expensive 3rd party solution.
Apparently the Panasonic engineers had it working with an Ipod.
:)Sorry I have been really busy this last week. Let me clarify this. The Firewire needs an intellignet reception like a Firestore, and they are working on something. The USB port will offload the cards, but it does not stream to the USB port, it is only file transfer. This is much different that what is the interpretation here. Sorry I didn't catch this sooner.

The iPod was a file transfer, the iPod is not fast enough for capture.

Best regards,

Jan

Yeah, it looks like the initial reports were a bit premature, and possibly due to a misunderstanding.

My apologies for spreading the news too quickly.
I was only repeating what I had read was a confirmed feature.

Hopefully panasonic will make this a feature on the final model.



Jan, i originally got that news off another board...my fault for spreading it I guess, but I did think it was true at the time.

Anyhow, it's already been clarified, I don't think anyone is under this confusion anymore (although it would be nice, if you could pull it off).

Thanks.

I need tape. I have over 300 dv tapes with old concert footage. I record shows and weddings and do not just edit and distribute, I archive the concerts as well. I might need a few hundred terabytes of hard drive space, much more in HD. I can't afford a hard drive for every gig.

IMNSHO, if Panasonic cares to sell this camera to consumers or prosumers, they will need an HD capable recording tape drive. Whether it means coming out with a more robust tape that can handle the bandwidth, then so be it. Myself and others cannot go the P2 or hard drive route as it's just way too expensive and an inconvenience to be switching memory cards, whether P2 or compact flash.

Also, do we already have computers capable of editing that bandwidth? What about distribution, where is Blu Ray or whatever other recording option? At least with the JVC, I'll be able to go to DVHS, not even sure if the Sony FX1 records to DVHS.

I am not sure about this move away from tape, in fact I believe the need for tape is greater as the bandwidth of the medium increases, as far as I see, there is no alternative. With HD material streaming at such high rates 100MB/sec or whatever it is, I believe tape storage will be more crucial. If not tape storage, then some Blu Ray style optical disk recording format that isn't too expensive but more along the current price of DVDs/tapes and if not that cheap let's say around $25/1hr tape or disk. I hope Canon is listening.

Seems my skepticism was warranted after all.

This is one case where I wish I was wrong, that feature would have made the HVX200 a no-brainer.

Still will be a very nice camera (especially when P2 prices come down), but Firestore drives are usually in the $15 - $20 per GB range, where normal external drives (even very fast ones) are less than $1/GB. I would imagine Focus would want to design a 160GB drive for the high bitrate of DVCProHD (to cover "all-day" shooting, or roughly 3 hours of footage), which would probably put a Firestore designed for the HVX200 in the $2,500 range. Hope I'm wrong though.

Ben

Sorry I have been really busy this last week. Let me clarify this. The Firewire needs an intellignet reception like a Firestore, and they are working on something. The USB port will offload the cards, but it does not stream to the USB port, it is only file transfer. This is much different that what is the interpretation here. Sorry I didn't catch this sooner.

The iPod was a file transfer, the iPod is not fast enough for capture.

Best regards,

Jan

Don't count the AG-HVX200 out yet Ben.

Jan is just talking about the HD out FW. I am sure there are going to be some people trying cards that go into the PCMCIA slot that have a ribbon or other output to a Hard Drive. I have seen it for DSLR cameras where they stick a dummy card in and the data travels out external.

Plus, there are some brand new PCMCIA HD's that can sustain easily 40mbs for the 24p 720 and I am sure more as well.

So stick in there, the HVX will have many options.

You could always wait for Canon. I think 2009 for their HDV cam. Just a Joke Canon.....:-)


Here are some ARTICLES in case you haven't read them on the HVX and HD100u!

(1) : Read by 1,013 people in little under 64 hours.
DO AG-HVX200'S DREAM OF OPTICAL ENLIGHTENMENT
WELL , MAYBE NOT YET. BUT.............

http://www.pbase.com/aghvx200/do_hvx200s_dream_of_lenses

(2)
JVC GY-HD100u and It's Second Coming
Will JVC realize they have a chance for the gold medal or just settle for the bronze.

http://www.pbase.com/aghvx200/pappasarts_entertainment_

http://www.hdvinfo.net/articles/jvcprohd/pappas5.php


Michael pappas
http://www.Pbase.com/Arrfilms







Seems my skepticism was warranted after all.

This is one case where I wish I was wrong, that feature would have made the HVX200 a no-brainer.

Still will be a very nice camera (especially when P2 prices come down), but Firestore drives are usually in the $15 - $20 per GB range, where normal external drives (even very fast ones) are less than $1/GB. I would imagine Focus would want to design a 160GB drive for the high bitrate of DVCProHD (to cover "all-day" shooting, or roughly 3 hours of footage), which would probably put a Firestore designed for the HVX200 in the $2,500 range. Hope I'm wrong though.

Ben

Good to have the clarification, but possibly unfortunate news. Firestore MUST make whatever solution they have, use interchangeable drives. Otherwise we get into the problem of handing stuff off after a shoot. As people have tried to convince us all, handing over a hard drive is probably the way to go now with P2, but if we have to hand over an expensive Firestore, then it becomes a problem. Of course, we can copy via USB as Jan has mentioned which is nice, but the speeds on USB2 aren't that good and if we have to DUB after the shoot, then it's more downtime. One solution would be if the camera allowed dubbing off AND recording to P2 at the same time. So you could dump one P2 card while the other was being recorded to. Of course, this would have to be faster than realtime, or you're in trouble when the other one runs out.

Jan, do you know if this will be a feature?


Aaron

Keep in mind what's being said here -- you *can* use off-the-shelf hard disks, as cheap as they get. You just can't stream directly to them.

The FireStore product will be designed for those who need to capture long takes continuously, instantly. It has the ability to capture the firewire stream and write it directly to disk. It will be a specially designed unit that supports the high data transfer rate, manages files, names them, etc.

But the camera itself can transfer the contents of a P2 card onto any cheap USB2 hard disk (including the ipod). So you shoot to the card for a while, and then between takes you plug in your USB drive and offload it. Using that method you could store about 8 hours of 720/24p footage for under $200. You could use your ipod to store DVCPRO-HD data. You could edit directly from the ipod or from the cheap USB2 hard disk. You could deliver that hard disk to the producer at the end of the shoot, rather than handing over a box of undigitized tapes.

So you can do both. You just won't be able to capture directly to the cheap drive -- unless someone develops an intermediary solution; something like a FireStore that doesn't include a built-in drive but rather writes to external USB drives.

I need tape.

there are current alternatives that may help... right now, for instance, you could transcode everything you shot into cineform, or canopus hq vbr, and save a huge chunk of storage space... and i bet that your footage would still look better than if it was shot in raw hdv.

when blue ray hd dvd hits, it'll hold 25 gigs per layer, and the spec goes up to 200 gig disks... 100 mb/sec = 6 gigs/minute(?), i guess that it won't help much for long-form work :-(

aaron, the usb 2.0 bitrate spec is faster than the 1394 firewire bitrate spec.

Hi Dan, yeah I know they are faster than Firewire, what I really meant was that dubbing altogether will take time. I guess it's not tooooo bad at the moment. If you have 2 8GB cards, and can, say get the footage off at about 300Mbps (After drive speed is taken into account - I have not seen super speeds with external USB/Firewire drives),it will take you around 4 minutes to dub off. This isn't a huge amount of time I guess, but with tapes we just hit a button and out of pops, and hand it off. Also if we were HDD recording straight out of the unit then there is no dub time. But what really matters is that the issue of dub time will get worse when the card sizes increase. For instance, when we have 128GB cards, we have 16x the storage and so that dub time goes from 4 minutes to about an hour - even if the cards were 32 or 64 GB we're getting a little worrisome. We would then have to look at another workflow - and that's where I'm hoping the Firestore solution has interchangeable drives.

I'm fine, cause the sort of work I do I can spare the time, but I'm concerned that in the "real" world this might become an issue.

It's weird that Panasonic will include firmware and hardware to support straight copying to USB2.0 but not just give us straight recording to a Firewire drive.

Anyway, I'm still getting one :)
Aaron

100 mb/sec = 6 gigs/minute(?)
It's a lot less than that ... it's under 1 gigabyte per minute. So a 25-gig disk will store somewhere under half an hour of footage.

yeah, that sounds more reasonable! so much for my math skills, lol... a couple of single-layer hd disks for an hour of footage shouldn't be a problem.

think about the time involved with capturing a tape to the hard drive, and you'll see that solid state memory is actually a big advantage... it should be faster than real-time tape capture.

i'm with ya on the lack of a firestore-type of capture solution, but jan did say that they are working on it.

get a couple cards. upload one while you shoot with the other.

Hi Folks;

Read the whole seven pages of post about other options for the HVX but am still confused:/ And I know this is an older thread but it just caught my attention.

I followed the two links about other solutions to the P2 cards and got really excited because of the prices but then ...

What I am unclear on is this: can a seperate hd record directly from the firewire port or not? One of the links I followed said the HD was firewire powered, well, I've got a firewire port. So...?

I am a current Panny user (DVC-80) who wants to go tapeless NOW. The HVX, if it has all of these alternate forms of capture besides the P2 actually happen, really interests me.

But I think it was Barry who said they are for file transfers not capture, why is that? One of the links for the Lacie drive (I believe) said I can capture avi files. Being a Sony Vegas user, that's what I need. But then does that mean the HD won't capture the files even though it can store them?

Can anyone tell me what exactly is being output via my firewire connection? What is "raw footage"? Logic says since it is a digital format it must be output in a way that can be digitally understood. And since different NLE use different file systems, it isn't logical that every camera outputs them all. So, it must output a base format that would be readable for FCP, Vegas, Avid, Pinnacle, etc.

Obviously I am really confused. Has anyone actually hooked up a firewire powered HD to their existing camera and tried capturing this way?

Firestore's are nice and, if that is the only solution to going tapeless now then so be it, but if there are other alternatives for people on a tighter budget, I am all for it.

Third party HDs may be less robust but I would baby it just as I baby my DVC-80 so that isn't such an issue with me. Price is my issue. And I am chomping at the bit to go tapeless at some of the prices I have seen for mobile HD.

Anybody have any answers for my rambling question?

There are two types of protocols that a firewire connection can use: AVC, or SBP2. AVC is the protocol used during streaming. That's when a camera or deck sends its compressed DV or DVCPRO50 or HDV or DVCPRO-HD data over the firewire, with no idea whether there's anything attached on the other end. If there *is* something attached, it's up to that device to know how to record what it's seeing. AVC also provides for transmitting transport commands, such as "stop", "play", "record", etc.

SBP2, on the other hand, is a file transfer protocol. That's what your computer and hard disk use to talk to each other, when you're using a firewire hard disk.

The two are not the same, and can't be used in the same way. You can use one or the other, but not both.

So no, you can't plug in an SBP2-compatible hard disk (meaning, any external firewire drive) and record to it from any camera. That just doesn't exist. No DV camera, or HDV camera, or DVCPRO-HD camera, can do that.

What the HVX offers is the first camera that CAN use SBP2 protocol, and can transfer files and control a drive. But it can't do that when recording video! It does that in playback mode. So if you've recorded something on a P2 card, you can switch to playback mode and plug in an off-the-shelf hard disk, and copy the P2 card contents over to the hard disk (and, perhaps, copy from the hard disk to the card? Haven't thought about that one yet).

This is far more control than any other firewire camera has ever had. It's still a step short of what we were all hoping, which was direct streaming control of off-the-shelf hard disks, but that just can't happen yet. For streaming, the camera outputs AVC protocol. And AVC protocol requires that the device on the other end have "intelligence", so it knows what to do with the data that's being sent its way. Which means, you need a Firestore type of drive, which actually intercepts the AVC commands and then uses its internal computer to convert the data into a file system that it writes to the drive.

It is entirely possible that some clever engineer will make a firewire-less firewire drive type of thing. A piece of hardware that understands AVC protocol, captures the firewire streaming data, and then converts it to SBP2 for writing to a USB2 or firewire drive. But any such products have yet to be announced, that I know of. A laptop computer can serve the purpose, but is obviously a bit bulky!

The HVX outputs AVC, which means that any computer that understands DVCPRO-HD data will be able to capture the firewire feed directly. The proposed forthcoming HD Rack, for example, or Avid Express HD, or FCP-HD, or Canopus Edius, or any other editing program that understands DVCPRO-HD should be able to capture the stream off the firewire port. The AVC stream can also be captured by an AJ-HD1200A DVCPRO-HD tape deck, for direct recording to tape. And it's there and available for enterprising hardware developers to develop new solutions as well.

The SBP2 protocol gives the camera the ability to control firewire (or USB2) drives, and copy files to them. You can shoot on P2 cards, dump the footage to a cheap $60 external hard disk, and hand that hard disk over to the client at the end of the shoot day -- no need for a laptop computer, no need to buy tape, you give 'em a pre-digitized hard disk that they can plug into their computer and edit immediately (and it's less expensive than high-def tape!)

It would be nice if you could record directly to the hard disk, rather than having to record to the P2 card first, but that doesn't appear to be the way it'll turn out. However, final specifications are always subject to change, and Panasonic is quite aware that we'd love that feature, so if it's possible, they'll do it. If it's not possible, or not reliable (after all, they have no control over what type of slow/cheap hard disk the user may plug in!) then they won't do it.

People think that manufacturers don't listen to customers. They do but main objective is not satisfy customer but optimize profits, which makes sense, since competition is doing same thing. Another thing is keep product development in secrecy so your competition not find out what you're up to. NDA don't protect this secrecy. There is too much industrial espionage going on.

There was affair in Israel recently where large companies were planting trojan horses in competitior's systems. Some security company did this for fee, then creator of the system fled to London with bunch other people.

Radek