David, This question is probably a little early but do you guys plan on supporting the Blackmagic Design: HyperDeck Shuttle

thanks in advance for your reply...

I to am very interested in the answer to this question.

Thanks,
Garrett

how would an uncompressed .mov file compare in size to an avchd file transcoded to cineform?

how would an uncompressed .mov file compare in size to an avchd file transcoded to cineform?

I would imagine the file sizes should be roughly the same size as long as you have the quality setting for both CinieForm AVI files set the same. I could be wrong but from my XDCAM HD MXF files converted to CineForm Files and AVCHD files shot of the same scenes they are roughly the same size.

-Garrett

Once it's in Cineform it should be more or less the same size wherever it comes from, but if you mean the difference between uncompressed HD (as captured by Blackmagic) and Cineform compression, as a rule of thumb I've found uncompressed 1920x1080 at 25p comes out between 8GB and 10GB per minute. Cineform files are around 1GB per minute.
Ian

that means with a 128gb ssd installed I would have about 16 minutes of recording time. Yikes. Could you even edit one single 128 GB file in realtime? I don't exactly have a Pixar grade PC.

Oddly enough, it's not so much the editing, as the disk speed. Since the video is uncompressed, no processor cycles are used up in uncompressing and recompressing. I've edited uncompressed HD on quite a modest PC.

But you need a constant disk read/write data rate of 160Mb/s and more to shovel the data off the disk to the screen. Until SSDs, no single disk solution could offer that. It had to be a multi-disk RAID. Blackmagic's gadget is a little ahead of its time, but when SSDs become cheaper and larger it becomes more interesting. Except of course, as the Davids will say, compression techniques like CIneform's are improving all the time, and you can argue about what benefit uncompressed HD really is in the real world...

(After all, all tape formats, including the venerable Digital Betacam and HDCAM are compressed to a greater or lesser extent, and nobody bothers much about that because there was/is no alternative.)

In which case you could say that Blackmagic's widget is an attempt to stay in a game which is passing them by...

Ian

If a codec is installed on your system - Cineform can encode from it as far as I know.