Ideas on Speeding up P2 Card Import to FCP via Powerbook?

[Noah Kadner]

I’d try FW 800 or SATA raid- much faster transfer than USB-2 despite what the claimed USB-2 numbers might be. Also a second 8GB or even 4GB card would help a lot in avoiding downtime.

Noah

[David Battistella]

John,

You do have two cards going right. And the problem is that the first card can not be offloaded fast enough to do a continous record of a longer interview or something like that?

Maybe you need to go to a Firestore, (if they record HD yet) or maybe a THIRD p2 card? It seems to me that two cards just aren’t enough for continous recording in 1080 HD. Is that right from what you have seen so far? You can’t get teh media off the P2 card fast enough to rotate them?

David

[John Chater]

>You do have two cards going right. And the problem is that the first card can not be offloaded fast enough to do a continous record of a longer interview or something like that?
>Maybe you need to go to a Firestore, (if they record HD yet) or maybe a THIRD p2 card? It seems to me that two cards just aren’t enough for continous recording in 1080 HD. Is that right from what you have seen so far? You can’t get teh media off the P2 card fast enough to rotate them?

Hi David

Yes I have two 8gb cards. Im not so much having problems as just trying to understand how this will work in the field. Between my own professional use of the camera and the renting of it through my rental company, I need to have an accurate troublefree workflow to recommend. Faster downloads would be better for certain. But having a bullet proof download workflow is critical. Only then will I know how to advise my clients and steer them clear of trouble.

Buying more 8gb cards is not an option right now. From what I hear I am lucky to have a camera at all and even luckier to get two 8gb cards. Im keeping my mind open about the Firestore. From experience Im hesitant about piggybacking a third party mission critical/software enabled/cable connected/battery powered device onto any camera. Who knows it may work very well. However I think the P2 cards work wonderfully ( so far ) and would like to continue recording that way.

Best
John

[John Chater]

>I’d try FW 800 or SATA raid- much faster transfer than USB-2 despite what the claimed USB-2 numbers might be.

Hi Noah

How much faster with FW800 and SATA raid? Want to guide me to a drive you like?

Best
John

[Tony]

John,

Honestly I don’t think two cards would be the most ideal scenario if someone is using the HVX 200 as the primary camera for longer records on a daily basis. Unless of course the shooter adopts a film shooting mentality and “rations” the amount of record time he or she shoots.

Maybe in addition to a solid post workflow clients need to adopt a different stragedy for the amount of recording time one intends to put onto a P2 card. For example if time is of the essense to speed up the dump to hard drives than instead of filling up the card 100% one would record 50-75% of the card capacity thereby reducing the amount of data to be copied.
This is similar to a practice I have had to use in the past when I have a limited number of batteries and must account for the recharge time factor.

Even if you had a faster transfer system have you accounted for a 2nd backup in the event the first hard drive is damaged, corrupted or worst lost etc etc.

An established workflow for digital photography is to make multiple backups of the files onto various hard drives or other storage device before blowing away the original files and/or media.

I personally have adopted a policy when dealing with important media on hard drives to back up multiple times as a precautionary practice to reduce the chance of losing precious data but more importantly a solid relationship with a “trusted client”

I spoke to a major hard drive manufacturer tech support employee yesterday regarding what is the number one cause of failure for hard drives. He said quite simply “environmental issues” which can be items such as “shock” due to repeated movement from location to location, exposure to the elements heat and cold, constant physical abuse. Given all these issues it does not seem logical to expect that a single xfer would provide 110% confidence for me. Keep in mind I am not talking about the actual media itself from the HVX-200 but the actual possible problems with external or internal hard drives themselves.

One last note I was also told a quick rule of thumb regarding the lifespan of hard drives is as follows: External hard drive 3 years, internal hard drive 3-5 years again both subject to change based on the environmental working and storage conditions.

Tony Salgado

[John Sharaf]

John,

Let me get this right; your tests reveal that it takes 14 minutes to “process” one 8 Gb card that contains 20 minutes of DVPRO100 24p? and if it were written as 720 30p or 60p or any permutation of 1080 the card would hold 8 minutes and take 14 minutes to download?

Is this correct?

JS

[John Chater]

John Sharaf wrote >Let me get this right; your tests reveal that it takes 14 minutes to “process” one 8 Gb card >that contains 20 minutes of DVPRO100 24p? and if it were written as 720 30p or 60p or any permutation of >1080 the card would hold 8 minutes and take 14 minutes to download?

Based on the the FCP/ Powerbook/ HDD workflow I tried yesterday, those are the results I got. Would be great to make it happen faster wouldnt it? Slower than realtime at anything other that 720/24PN is not the greatest. Computer hardware is far from my area of speciality,so Im hoping someone will guide me here.

Best
John

[Jan Crittenden livingston]

Hi John,

Are you transfering the footage or importing to FCP? I found tranferring an 8GB card from the P2 Card slot to be under 7 minutes, regadless of what I shot on it. If you are using 1394 for tranfer to a tower, then again it should be faster. USB is not the way to go from the camera to an Apple computer.

Hope that helps,

Jan

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

[Ron Shook]

Tony,

Nice, well reasoned post!

This is a rather frightening thread to me. Anything more than about 80% real-time to dump to hard disk, presents insurmountable problems for many types of production. I would dearly like to use the HVX if it proves to perform solidly and I’m commited to my next camcorder being IT enabled, but I’d already determined that for the mostly longer form production that I do, that P2 cards at their current capacity and cost were out of the question, so that leaves me with on-cam hard drives as a recording medium. I can no more hand a client an expensive on-cam hard drive, than I can hand them a stack of P2 cards, so I have to hand them a cheap commodity hard drive and…

[tony salgado] “I personally have adopted a policy when dealing with important media on hard drives to back up multiple times as a precautionary practice to reduce the chance of losing precious data but more importantly a solid relationship with a “trusted client””

Exactly! I also need to have a backup cheap commodity hard drive of my own before I leave the job site as a backup for the client until they can backup the media themselves. That means that for most jobs I need 2 copies on 2 inexpensive hard drives before I leave the site and I need to be able to dump to those two copies in somewhat less than the real time it takes to fill up either P2 cards or on-cam hard disks. I’m starting to think that this HVX puppy is just a little too young to hunt for me yet.

In the hope that we can find a way to make HVX hunt for me, I’d like to mine the collective knowledge base for something someone else mentioned on this thread or another near one. Someone asked if there was a diskcopy utility on the Mac to enable copying identical files to two hard drives simultaneously, i.e., to be able to dump from HVX or HVX media to 2 hard drives concurrently? I’m on PC. I ask the same question of that operating system?

Ron Shook

[John Chater]

Tony Salgado wrote> Honestly I don’t think two cards would be the most ideal scenario if someone is using the HVX 200 as the primary camera for longer records on a daily basis.

I completely agree and I couldnt find anything in my post where I suggested it was. Fact of the matter is there are no other 8gb cards available now. As I said before Im lucky to have two.

Years ago I worked with a cameraman who had only two mags for his Aaton. Every shoot was incredibly stressful turning mags over fast enough. I dreaded doing interview shoots.

For now I am testing what weve got available. People want to work with the camera today so Im looking for field based solutions that I can use right away. In three months it will be different. Years from now Im sure we will find that HDD’s were only a temporary solution. But right now it is the only solution.

I should stress that the camera is a wonderful piece of technology and the picture looks pretty good for the price point limitations Im sure Panasonic were working under.

Best
John