Question about USB backup for Jan

[Ron Shook]

Steve,

This is facinating. I don’t know enough technically to know how facinating, however. If it has a host controller in it, does that mean you could plug the USB from drive to camera, turn on both devices and hit the record button on the enclosure and be recording the data stream from the camera? Would you even need P2 cards to do this? If this is possible, it could be the answer I’m looking for to make this camera feasible for me. I checked around enough to find out that the speed of 2.5″ drives might or might not be reliably fast enough for 1080iDVCProHD but oughta be reliably fast enough for DVCPro50 or 720p30HD.

Someone tell me more?

Ron Shook

[Steve Freebairn]

Sorry that I was misleading, what I was thinking was that after you recorded onto 1 p2 card or even 2, you could plug this into the camera and turn both of them on. I think that once you did that and then hit the “transfer/Backup” button on the enclosure that it would transfer the footage from the card. I know that the 2.5 hdd wouldn’t be reliable/fast enough for direct capture, but this setup if it worked would allow those of us that don’t want to haul a laptop around or a $2000 firestore to be able to transfer data off of a p2 card.

[Steve Freebairn]

Ok, this is yet another possibility, https://store.yahoo.com/cooldrives/usbotgshcou2.html This might also work to hook a camera to. You’d pay $40 bucks for this device, then take two usb cables and an external usb2.0 hdd of any make. You could even make one yourself from one of seagates 500 gb drives and then you’d be able to transfer your p2 cards to the hdd whenever they got full.

[Ron Shook]

Steve,

[Steve Freebairn] “Sorry that I was misleading, what I was thinking was that after you recorded onto 1 p2 card or even 2, you could plug this into the camera and turn both of them on. I think that once you did that and then hit the “transfer/Backup” button on the enclosure that it would transfer the footage from the card.”

You were not in the slightest misleading, and I understood what you were thinking. I was just trying to imagine if such a device could be used with the HVX-200 to record very long form stuff uninterrupted by changing cards, etc, i.e., when the camcorder is turned on can the USB and/or firewire ports spit out a data stream in whatever format the camera is set to record to in P2. If so, there are possibilities here that I haven’t considered. In looking over the specs closer on this device, I noticed that in host mode it can’t address NTFS, so I guess file limits in FAT32, would squirrel it’s use as I fantasized even if it were possible to use it this way with the HVX-200?

Ron Shook

[Barry Green]

[Steve Freebairn] “, but this setup if it worked would allow those of us that don’t want to haul a laptop around or a $2000 firestore to be able to transfer data off of a p2 card.”

You don’t need to go through any of those hoops. The camera includes the ability to do exactly what you’re asking: you can plug in any firewire drive (not USB2, but 1394 firewire) and the camera itself will handle controlling the drive and offloading the contents of the P2 card onto the drive.

You don’t need a laptop or a firestore or any of that stuff. If you shoot onto P2 cards, and then plug in a firewire drive, you can offload the P2 card contents onto the firewire drive. No extra equipment necessary.

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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)

[Brian FitzGerald]

[Steve Freebairn] “Ok, this is yet another possibility, https://store.yahoo.com/cooldrives/usbotgshcou2.html “

Although I cannot answer the questions posed so far in this thread I can vouch somewhat for “Cool Drives”.
Although I don’t own the two devices Steve F has shown us above, I own two of their Firewire 800 enclosures that have functioned perfectly for the last two or so years.
In general, I have been using enclosures and “building” my own Firewire drives for years (before that SCSI drives…) and it has saved me a lot of money.
I’m am eagerly looking forward to a response to this thread’s questions from Jan, too.

As a side note, I am committed to buying the 200. Do we have a solid release date yet?

Brian FitzGerald
FitzVideo.com

[Steve Freebairn]

Is that for sure? If it is that is wonderful. So, does that mean the camera can be plugged into a lacie drive that is 1.6 tb and backed up on that?

[Ron Shook]

Brian,

[Brian FitzGerald] “I am committed to buying the 200.”

I’m leaning that way myself, if the optics prove to be better than the Sony HDVs and JVC basic lens, and at least on a par with the base lens that the Canon HDV supplies. Using DVCProHD and DVCPro50SD is so superior to HDV and DV25 that the HVC-200 is ultimately seductive. But the far bigger IF is finding a workflow that is reasonable for long form shooting that can deliver IT media of whatever stripe to clients that is readily transportable, has enough capacity, can enter their systems as is or with a low cost periferal, and is inexpensive. P2 cards for this usage would have to be 4 times the capacity and 1/20th the cost of the current 8 gig/$2k cost and that ain’t gonna happen for 2-3 years, if then.

The Firestore doesn’t cut it either. It has nice capacity but the cost and media transportability are off the scale for what I need. Now, if the Firestore had a caddied removeable drive system where the caddies would function as firewire or USB drives on a computer, or a REV drive cartridge mechanism or the like, particularly with a built in memory cache system or the use of a P2 card as a memory cache system, so that you could change drives or cartridges while maintaining continuous recording, then I’d be in Heaven. I doubt whether Panasonic could build these camcorders fast enough to meet demand, and HDV would be the BetaMax of cost effective HD on the professional stage, relegated to the consumer world so fast it would make your head swim.

Now I don’t think that I would be comfortable using any hard drive technology as the sole media offering in and of itself before I leave the scene of the production crime, so I’d feel it necessary to back up that media to another hard drive or optical when they are fast enough, but it would make the camcorder workable until the P2s have high enough capacity and low enough cost to do the job, and then I could use the above technology to have near automatic backup.

Ron Shook

[Brian Deviteri]

Barry,

I think you may be mistaken on this one… from my understanding, you will NOT be able to perform this function without either a laptop, Firestore device, or a Panasonic field recording drive. If you have a source that says otherwise, please let me know, I’d love to see it for myself and that would eliminate a lot of my hesitation and concern with jumping into the HVX200.

Brian

[Barry Green]

I’m definitely not mistaken, my source is an interview with Jan Crittenden at ResFest L.A., where Jarred Land and I had a chance to interview her at length and confirm several issues about the camera (including revealing what some of the variable frame rates will be, etc). One “revelation” that occurred in that interview is to confirm that direct camera control of external drives (for offloading data from P2 cards, not for streaming) is being implemented through 1394/firewire. We had believed for months that the camera would use the firewire port for streaming (AV/C device control), and the USB2 port for offloading (SBP2 protocol). It turns out that in the final version, both AV/C and SBP2 are being implemented through firewire/1394. The USB2 port is now used pretty much only for connecting the camera to a PC (and in doing so, the camera shows up on the desktop as an external hard disk).

So — to reiterate: if you record footage on the P2 cards, you can plug in an off-the-shelf firewire hard disk and the camera itself can offload the data from the P2 cards to the external drive. THe camera cannot directly record live footage onto the external hard disk; it needs to be recorded onto P2 cards first. But once it’s recorded, the camera can control an external hard drive to offload the data from the cards to the drive.

There were other tidbits revealed; one of the most interesting was that the $9995 two-8gb P2 bundle may not be the only bundle offered. We didn’t get 100% confirmation, but they’re considering offering a bundle that includes two 4gb cards along with the already-announced configurations (no cards: $5995, cam+two 8gb: $9995). This new bundle may carry an MSRP around $7490, but Jan would not confirm pricing, nor would she officially announce such a bundle yet. But I can tell you it’s under strong consideration.

—————–
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)