Firestore? Will they make a hardrive that will record DVCPro50/HVX??

[Noah Kadner]

Have a peek down the board archive a bit- this is a well-worn topic.

[Christopher S. johnson]

The answer is that it is about a 99% chance that it will happen, from the evidence given so far. Even Panasonic has said they are in communication with the FireStore people about it.

-Christopher Johnson

[Barry Green]

Probably more than 99% chance. Focus isn’t just in communication with Panasonic, they’ve signed up to be a P2 Partner, and they’ve already delivered one product so far (a file format conversion utility). They’re on the bandwagon…

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[Blub06]

Jan C. gave a helpful talk yesterday in NYC regarding the new camera and she had with her a little silver box which has inspired my imagination.

The box was a battery powered small hard drive which is meant to copy P2 cards in the field.

The imagination part came when I asked myself, why cant we have a P2 size card slip into the P2 slot on the HVX on the back of the card a cable which goes directly to another P2 size card which slips into this portable drive? The drive copies P2 cards at 1 gig per second, the speed of 1080p in real time, why cant it just record 1080p in real-time through the high speed P2 connections on the camera?

I recognize that technical things have to be attended to in order to make such a thing work, like the software side that allows recording from the camera when you push record on the camera and the feature of reviewing the footage on the cameras LCD.

Panasonic has the answer in hand, unfortunately they are blinded by the desire of stopping Sony from making so much money from tape stock sales and from selling themselves as data acquisition visionaries, what about my vision?

Wish I knew how to do it…

Chris

[Jan Crittenden livingston]

[Blub] “The imagination part came when I asked myself, why cant we have a P2 size card slip into the P2 slot on the HVX on the back of the card a cable which goes directly to another P2 size card which slips into this portable drive? The drive copies P2 cards at 1 gig per second, the speed of 1080p in real time, why cant it just record 1080p in real-time through the high speed P2 connections on the camera? “

Hi,

It does not copy at 1 gig per second, it is one gig per minute and that is the same time as HD in real time. And why not just do a 1394 recording to a much larger drive, like a firestore device. They will cost about the same. Then you don’t have this thing sticking out the back into your face. Or when you take a small breater, why not shove the P2 off the card to a standard off the shelf USB hard drive.

[Blub] “Panasonic has the answer in hand, unfortunately they are blinded by the desire of stopping Sony from making so much money from tape stock sales and from selling themselves as data acquisition visionaries, what about my vision? “

We could care less about Sony tape sales, we do a tidy sum in tape sales all on our own. And as far as selling ourselves as visionaries, those are your words, not ours. Perhaps I don’t understand how your vision would be advantageous over that which is already possible.
Care to give a greater example?

Best regards,

Jan

Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems

[Blub06]

One gig per second, oops, silly me, what a treat that would be…

Although I know of this firestore company I would rather buy a Panasonic product for the Panasonic camera. I guess part of my point was that someone said that firestore, or someone, was 99 percent to the point of having a workable product. I think we all know how hard that last 1% is, with out a real company talking about a real product, as in the opposite of rumors I would rather hang my hopes on Panasonic.

I guess I am a little frustrated, I anticipate a great camera yet I don

[Lawrence Bansbach]

[Jan Crittenden Livingston] “Perhaps I don’t understand how your vision would be advantageous over that which is already possible.”
Not to put too delicate a point on it, but one vision would be 1 to 2 hours of continuous shooting (without swapping cards) on a medium (memory, storage, or whatever one may wish to call it — I don’t want to start another semantic discussion) that didn’t cost $2,000, but preferably less than $100 and certainly less than $500.

[Lawrence Bansbach]

Woops. What I meant to say is “1 to 2 hours of continuous shooting at 1080p24.” I also forgot to add that Panasonic could have included hard-disk storage as an interim solution for DVCProHD shooting until P2 capacities and prices became more practical.

After all, a DV tape drive is included, even though you could record 80 minutes of DV on two 8-GB P2 cards.

[Blub06]

I was wondering…

As I understand the P2 cards have a record speed of something like 680mbps, the highest rate they will have to record from the HVX camera, as i understand, is 100mbps. The question is, is the memory used in the P2 cards too high end with regards to performance and they could be made much cheaper if lesser speed memery was used?

Just a simple question.

Chris

[Christopher S. johnson]

Hey guys,

You know, it has been very interesting watching this whole HVX thing unfold over the last few months. I do longer form documentary stuff, so I was one of those originally concerned and skeptical about this camera and its potential usefulness to me.

But then the info about the FireStore came out. We’re guessing around a grand, right? So $7000 for a complete kit. Well, this kind of fills in the gaps that so many have been concerned about. So, I don’t understand all of the continuing skepticism about the workflow. Its getting out of place now. If you cannot afford $7000 to shoot long form DVCPRO HD, then please move on to another format and have fun.

I dont see much room for bitching about the cost and workflow of this system now. What do you want Panasonic to do; put a $10,000 additional mechanism for recording DVCPRO HD to tape?

I’m not saying it wouldn’t be cool if some one came up with some interesting hacks, or that P2 cards came down in price, but man, its becoming like an unwarranted bitch session now.

Lets move on and talk about cool ideas for filing away client projects on the shelf and delivery methods. Or we could speculate about the lens and chip quality. Or we could talk about different ways of securing the firewire cable in the field so it doesn’t fall out. But please, I think Panasonic was/is answering the call for relatively affordable long time recording.

-Christopher Johnson