Question about USB backup for Jan

[Ron Shook]

Oh, Barry,

[Barry Green] “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.”

Dash me hopes, will ye! I’m afraid a deal breaker for me. Since the Firestore will presumably work, it’s not that the camera cannot directly record live footage onto external hard disks, but that Panasonic has determined that they won’t let us do it unless it’s their proprietary solutions and if their proprietary solutions aren’t solutions that’ll work or are too expensive for our production workflow, tough luck. I guess I can understand this, if they are deliberately limiting the range of this camcorder. I guess it would be just too good and decimate other manufacturers too much.

Oh, well!

Ron Shook

[Harry]

How long per gig/per minute do you guys reckon it would take to do the camera to drive firewire transfer/backups?

I put in my order and deposit a week ago, by the way. I’m told that I am number 16 on the Birns and Sawyer Hollywood waiting list.

Best

Harry

[Steve Freebairn]

I’m sorry that I didn’t catch that in the earlier posts. That is excellent news. Who cares about those cheap little adapters I linked to then. Thanks for sharing that info. What frame rates are going to be available. Any idea if After Effects will be able to open the video streams of the HVX200?

[Toke]

[Barry Green] “(including revealing what some of the variable frame rates will be, etc)”

Can you tell us what the frame rates will be?

btw. Canon’s XL H1’s hd-sdi-output makes me wonder would it be possible for eg. Decklink to build hd-sdi-pc-card, which would have some nice realtime compression chip and therefore you could record to fw800-disk with laptop with even higher bitrates than 100Mbps?

[Harry]

10/11/05

Hey Ron,

You WILL be able to record the data streaming from the Firewire output of the camera by hooking it up to Final Cut Pro or another NLE and a laptop or computer firewire port. I checked this some weeks ago with Jan. And, yes, there are battery driven external firewire drives available. It will be a bit of a bore having to put the NLE into record etc but you sound like the kind of enterprising feller who would tackle this for long form projects. You will NOT need P2 cards for this operation and the computer will ingest it direct via Firewire.

So there. And, I repeat, I had an exchange of emails with Jan about this. I quote:

(Harry to Jan)> ” … But the p2 recording process is expensive and kinda
unsuitable for shooting feature films because of the
limited time/space on the cards, the need to offload
from the camera every few takes and, of course, cost.
I’d like to record straight out of the firewire port
“live” onto a laptop Mac running, say Final Cut Pro.

(Jan C.) Hi Harry. This will work. Just know that the stop/start button is on the Capture
Now window.

(Harry) >We will be shooting 1080 24P.

(Jan) You will be ingesting at 1080/60i with a 2:3:3:2 pull down removal.

(Harry) >Is this feasible, or am I mad?

(Jan) This will work.

(Harry)>Is the firewire output from the camera active and fast
enough?
(Jan) Of course.

And in a later email Jan says “…Should be able to play out or transfer to a FCP 5.0, Avid Express Pro ”

Best

Harry.

[Barry Green]

[toke lahti] “Can you tell us what the frame rates will be?”

I don’t know what all of them will be, but I can confirm some. They said supported frame rates will include 1, 12, 18, 22, 24, 30, 36, 48, and 60. There will probably be more, but those are the ones that Jan confirmed for us as definitely being present.

—————–
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[Barry Green]

[Harry] “ow long per gig/per minute do you guys reckon it would take to do the camera to drive firewire transfer/backups?”

Depends on how fast your drive is. Theoretically the transfer from the camera could be at the rate of 400 megabits per second, which would be 4x realtime (i.e., 15 seconds to transfer one minute of footage); however, you’d be hard pressed to find a hard disk with a minimum sustained write speed of 50 megabytes per second!

—————–
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)

[Harry]

Barry,

Thanks for the info. I’ll hope for real-time and perhaps I’ll be pleasantly surprised, then.

Best

Harry

Harry Bromley-Davenport

[Toke]

Thanks Barry,
anybody got any info about PAL-model’s framerates?

[Jan Crittenden livingston]

Hi,

Barry is correct about the camera being able to Host a Firewire Drive. Keep in mind that the Drive doesn’t need to be any larger than 120 GB. The camera will segregate the Drive just as the P2 Store would do, it will see in in 8 GB chunks or 15 small drives. It will see it like a Big P2 Store. The good news is that these drives are prety cheap.

Best,

Jan

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