HARD DRIVE Support: This is huge

[Aaron Koolen]

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

[Barry Green]

Originally Posted by Dan Euritt

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.

[Dan Euritt]

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.

[Gregory Doi]

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

[Aaron J.H. Walker]

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?

[Barry Green]

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.

[Radek Svoboda]

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