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P2 workflow out in the field
Okay you mad geniuses… I need your advice.
This week I’m picking up my HVX-200a with 2 x 16GB and 1 x 32GB P2 cards and a PCMCIA to Express Card adapter for my MacBook Pro. I will be shooting 720p/24N out in the elements in Central America – often far from electricity BUT in proximity to my vehicle. I will need to quickly ingest the footage and turn around and begin shooting again with the formatted P2 cards.
The problem:
I need to ingest the data to two separate drives in one step – as mentioned in this other COW post, but I won’t have electricity. I could, however, get a DC/AC adapter for the vehicle that I have seen online, but it makes me nervous for so many reasons.
G-Tech’s G-Store is out of stock until next month (too late), and the G-Speed is bigger than I need. I like the sound of the Sans Digital MobileSTOR Raid 1, but still the electricity problem. Or is there another solution right under my nose? Am I up poop creek and asking too much? Damn you HD!
Thanks in advance.
Kirk -
14 Replies
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While I like the idea of backing up to two physical drives at once, I have found that the WD MyBookPro 1TB drive is nice because it is a RAID 1 500GB drive. Problem is that it’s AC powered only although it has a DC plug.
When I am in remote locations, I usually use a bus powered little notebook drive, then clone it to another drive at night.
It leaves me a little bit exposed to disaster but so far, no problems.
Not sure if there is a bus powered RAID on the market and also not sure at all about the DC plug from car. Might work great, might be a bit unreliable in supplying steady current.
Dan
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Thanks Dan. Have you had any problems with the performance or transfer speed of that WD drive? And what notebook drive(s) are you using?
Kirk
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I have stacks of the Western Digitals. I usually only edit DV on them though. For DVCProHD, I use my RAID, I mainly just use the WDs for storage. They work fine.
I built my own Notebook drives with these sweet little aluminum cases I bought from Other World Computing. I think the case is called a Speedzter 2. Can’t recall which drive I stuck in the cases, I think that the might be Hitachi or ?? Anyway, they work like a dream.
Dan
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These drives are powered off of your firewire bus and can be set up raid 1:
https://www.sonnettech.com/product/fusionf2.html
You’d probably need a couple of them as you’d get 300Gigs or so after formatting for raid 1.
Also, 64GBs (which is what you have in your cards) will get you about 160 or so minutes of record time in 720p24N.
Don’t know how that effects you, but that’s a decent run time right there.
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Oh yeah, Ned Soltz just reviewed those in DV Mag. He really liked it. Looks like the sweet little setup.
Dan
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[Dan Brockett] “Looks like the sweet little setup. “
Yes it is. If you look closely at the bottom of that page, you’ll see my setup 🙂
I’d imagine 1TB models would be coming pretty soon with the advent of 500GB 2.5″ SATAs.
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On our HVX200 DVD we show different ways to handle this out in the field. Two drive backup is definitely recommended but not an absolute essential. I’d almost recommend simply getting more P2 cards so you can make it to a night and power without recycling any cards. In 720p 24pN you can fit a *lot* onto a 32 GB card.
Noah
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Thanks for the responses, guys. Keep them coming. The Sonnet Fusion F2 article and website make it sound like a great option, although it ain’t cheap… but neither are P2 cards.
Noah, where is that DVD? I was looking for something like that the other day and did not find it.
Kirk
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Although the price on the Sonnet Fusion F2 seems to have come down a bit, it still doesn’t alleviate the problem of being able to ingest straight to the drive. It is powered via firewire, but it has to be plugged into the Express Card slot through a SATA adapter. Thus the PCMCIA adapter couldn’t be used simultaneously. Right?
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[Kiko Maniko] “Thus the PCMCIA adapter couldn’t be used simultaneously. Right?”
Good point and correct.
You can use your camera as a card reader. I have a P2 store for such tasks. I always use the express34 slot for storage.
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