Homemade P2 card?

[Graeme Nattress]

I think the P2 cards need the “extra” reliability due to them being 4 SD cards in a RAID 0 configuration, so each card has to be 4 times as reliable to equate to the reliability of a single card in a digital camera.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP

[Lawrence Bansbach]

But how do you measure “0% defectivity”? If there are bad gates on a card, wouldn’t it fail pretty much immediately? If so, then all functioning cards are 100% reliable, at least until they fail. And, as far as I know, no P2 card has been around long enough to outlive its estimated MTBF, which has got to be several hundred thousand hours — or 15 or 20 years. The edge connectors will wear out sooner.

[Barry Green]

Interesting idea. That Extreme III CF card looks like it might have enough sustained read/write speed to support DVCPRO-HD as well.

At this time I have no idea what level of controller circuitry is on a P2 card — we know at the bare minimum that it has a RAID controller to process dividing the workload across four SD cards. And the transfer rate is much, much higher on a P2 card — 80 megabytes per second, vs. 20 on that fastest CF card. That may or may not have any effect on direct writing speed, but it’ll certainly have an effect on transfer speed when offloading the card.

Obviously it looks like it’s worth a try — anyone here have an SPX800 we could experiment on? 😀

—————–
Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available at https://www.dvxuser.com/articles/dvxbook/ and at Amazon (https://tinyurl.com/54u4a)

[Chris Baldwin]

Yes I would be most interested to see the results of this type of test for both 720 and 1080.

Chris Baldwin
Shoulder High Productions
Media of the World; For the World!
https://www.shoulderhigh.com
newsletters@shoulderhigh.com

[Christopher S. johnson]

It would be good to see this conversation continue. Please write back with more info as you find it.

Remember Jan has confirmed this week that they ARE working with FireStore and that a “smart” external hard drive would work with the HVX.

I’m going to tell a producer here that I think there is a 90% chance of alternative (cheaper and longer) capture technology for HVX this coming winter. What do you think?

-Christopher

[Barry Green]

I think there’s a 100% chance. There’s already a 100% chance, if you’re willing to tether the camera to a laptop or desktop — you can use FCP-HD or Avid Express HD or Canopus Edius and capture straight from the firewire, with no need to have a P2 card at all.

And, Serious Magic’s already working with Panasonic to try to get an HVX-compatible version of DV Rack out there.

But for on-camera: at the bare minimum you’ll have direct-to-disk from FireStore. There may be other options as well.

—————–
Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available at https://www.dvxuser.com/articles/dvxbook/ and at Amazon (https://tinyurl.com/54u4a)

[Kevin Dooley]

I seem to remember in the announced specs that the firewire would handle both types of streams (ie: data transfer and just streaming out the video). So has all hope been abandoned of just using an off-the-shelf firewire drive? To my knowledge, it was never fully ruled out by Panasonic… Did I miss something?

Kevin Dooley
Director of Video Services
Imago Dei Media Group, Inc.

[Christopher S. johnson]

Jan of Panasonic ruled out the use of an off the shelf hard drive in an early morning post to an older thread last Sunday. She said the drive would have to be a “smart drive” like the FireStore, and that Pnasonic was a partner with the company that makes FireStore and was actively working with them right now.

Now, that doesn’t mean there wont be some kind of P2 card/hard drive hack by some adventuresome teen in a cramped Tokyo apartment at some point, who knows…. In the meantime, I would start saving more than a thousand dollars for some kind of FireStore device and think about where your going to put it. Iits gonna be a belt holster for me, although I thought about using a bandana to strap it to my forehead. Maybe it will come in colors to match an iPod mini?

-Christopher

[Kevin Dooley]

It seems to me that it would be a fairly easy thing to do to make a plate of some sort, that attaches where the tripod plate does (actually a plate with a hole in it so the tripod plate would still attach), and then comes up behind the camera to mount the firestore on… I have a very simily plate mounted on my XL1s for the attachment of wireless mic receivers… (which with the introduction of decent solid state audio recorders will be migrating very soon to another person entirely…)

Kevin Dooley
Director of Video Services
Imago Dei Media Group, Inc.

[Toke]

In the early photos (from NAB?) there were SBP2 with big letters on the screen.
What ever happend to that?
Was anybody there?

Or was it fw works in sbp2 only when record is off?