Is the AG-MSU10 worth half the cost of the HPX-250?

[Sam Lee]

The mythical MSU10 that costs about half the price of a new HPX250. All I can say it works very well for $2,500. If you find buying P2 cards $700/64 Gb is expensive, this is the interim solution to such problem. It's a peace of mind, cumbersome laptop-free P2 archival device that is suitable for a wide variety of production environments.

Some shooters I encountered hated doing P2 field offload. Perhaps a fear of data corruption. But I don't see anything wrong w/ doing field copying w/ the MSU10. If money is not a limitation, I'd buy all SSD drives and just copy to a single source vs 2 separate hdds.

[David Heath]

Originally Posted by Sam Lee

Some shooters I encountered hated doing P2 field offload. Perhaps a fear of data corruption. But I don't see anything wrong w/ doing field copying w/ the MSU10.

Far and away the biggest source of data loss I've heard of is from human error - not hardware failure.

I don't doubt that such as this is far more convienient than the laptop route, but it still doesn't protect against the "good, copied that, now to format it.... oh god, wrong card!!!" scenario. And that's one I've heard many people say would never happen to them - until it did.

If you must download in the field, then the cameraman doing it themselves just seems an accident waiting to happen. No problem until the workload increases for whatever reason - then finger trouble is just round the corner.

Personally, I strongly feel that data offloading should be done back at the edit suite with no distractions. And if the amount shot at a time makes it too expensive to have enough P2 cards to do that, then maybe time to look at a different format. When Sony brought out SxS cameras like the PMW500 it was originally seen as the death knell for disc based XDCAM - in practice, they have co-existed, and that seems to be very much down to field downloading disasters.

[Sam Lee]

Got a valid point of human error in handling the card and not knowing which one gets copied or not. The MSU10 has a double copy warning if it gets copied twice. It's just very hard not copy the P2 card unless you're totally distracted from all other stuff. It's a liability factor nevertheless.

Things did get quite hectic w/ 4-5 cameras rolling @ full AVC-I 100. Ideally I'd love to get 20 (64 Gb) P2 cards. But can't afford it at this stage ($14,000) just on P2 cards is just a bit too much for indie producer like myself. And if you only use it several times a year, it may be cheaper to rent them vs buying. If 64 Gb P2 cards were to be within $300, I'd probably not need the MSU10.

During the 2012 Olympics I'm sure they have hundred of them. I never have any accidental format in the field since 2008 as I always compare it against the main P2 before formatting it for immediate reuse. But not to say it'll never happen in the future.

[David Heath]

Originally Posted by Sam Lee

During the 2012 Olympics I'm sure they have hundred of them. I never have any accidental format in the field since 2008 as I always compare it against the main P2 before formatting it for immediate reuse. But not to say it'll never happen in the future.

I'd suspect that for the Olympic Broadcaster the vast majority was mixed live and recorded direct to server and sent out over satellite links.

Unilaterals for individual broadcasters may have been more likely to be recorded in camera, but from what I heard XDCAM was the main format used here, I believe by at least both the BBC and NBC who were the biggest two individual organisations. (I think the BBC used solid-state SxS, NBC mainly XDCAM disc.)