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OT slightly, setup for 8hour unmanned field record
Hi,
Sorry for the OT but not sure where else to put this.
I’ve been asked to research a setup for unmanned 8 hour records for a wildlife program.
Camera is Sony EX1 – SxS cards and new hard disk thing are too small to give us 8-10 hours of recording.
I think, but haven’t been able to test, that the ilink to a firestore (or whatever those firewire harddisk are called) will be able to record HDV to the drive. I might however be talking out of my ear.
The program producers would prefer full HD, so that leads us to getting the HDSDI out signal to hard disks somewhere.
So far i’ve looked at the Matrox MXO2 and AJA IO HD for expresscard/firewire connectivity to get HDSDI to final cut pro for digitising to firewire/expresscard esata drives.
(mxo2 = express + drive = firewire) or (iohd = firewire + drive = express esata)Or there is the newly announced eliteHD from ffv which will put hdsdi to an sata drive directly in jpeg2000 format. but i think the $5000 price tag (which i’m not sure if this is correct of the eliteHD) is too much for the producers.
Also to note:
apparently power isn’t a huge problem with an engineer getting car battery rig together .. or is it?what happens if you try and capture for 8 hours straight with FCP .. does it crash die/give out?
anyone know about mxo2 and 1080 prores 422 HQ capture and laptops .. can it manage it?
What do you guys do in this situation?, if you do .. do this? 🙂
Help me cow-wan kenobi you guys are my only hope … for sanity
(…………. its late and i’m tired)
Thanks
Donal -
5 Replies
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Just to be clear, You’re asking for straight actual real-time 8-hour recording, not time-lapse of 8 hours, or paused recording that goes into record when motion is automatically detected in the camera view, and pauses again when there is no more motion detected? I’m thinking FCP might not be what you really want for this, but maybe Adobe OnLocation or something of that nature is.
If you really mean shoot 8 hours of HD, that’s a lot of battery power, not just for the camera but the laptop I imagine you’ll need to go along with it, plus a drive array. Using HDV would help reduce the drive space needs a bit. But this sounds like you’re going to need a customized solution.
I’ll be curious to see what they come up with for you.
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Well I was thinking of trying to setup an automator task in leopard to start and stop the recording every hour or so. To try and avoid having one single 8 hour file. Kinda like this one, https://library.creativecow.net/articles/cowdog/automator.php … that or I’ll write a java program to do it.
I haven’t tried this yet. The first question I guess I should ask is which gear I should get for work in the field.
Apparently our power requirements will be met by a car battery rig. I’m not sure of the details of that exactly.
I’ll look up Adobe OnLocation also
Thanks
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Interesting challenge. I don’t have a solution, I don’t even have a suggestion. But I do have questions.
Such projects are often imagined by a clueless producer. A director gets the fire and expects his/her crew to figure it out without considering the realworld technical details or possible budget and schedule impact caused by hacking unproven bits and having the rig fail at the worst possible moment.The “need to capture continuous 8 hours of HD” should raise all kinds of warning flags instead of making everyone salute that flag. You obviously cannot use all 8 hours of the material so one might ask what exactly needs to be captured and then work out a way to trigger the recording of that event.
It may, in fact, turn out to be easier to roll the 8 hours. But the need for environmental protection for the rigs, manual exposure compensation, manual focus, and duplicate media (if it’s important enough to shoot the 8 hours, you certainly want a backup) are going to be costly.
Please come back someday and tell us how you pulled it off. Best of luck and I hope it’s a fun project.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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Must be the season for unmanned solutions. I’m spec’ing such a shoot now. We need to do trigger recording as well as remote manual trigger. REALLY remote. Like Web-based control, if we can. Maybe from 60 miles away, maybe from 3000 miles away. Depends on budget & whether I have the sea legs to spend 90 days on a boat hitting record on a bunch of lipstick & other stationary cams. Oh, then there’s the storage dilemma. But that’s another forum.
Reid C
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