Sony SBAC-US10

[Craig Seeman]

[Joe Tyler] “Only the Sony or Sandisk MxR cards (same card, different sticker)”

I think you mean SxS which is Sony and Sandisk.
MxR is e-films
MxM Express
Hoodman imports from MxM
They’re all made from the same manufacturer though.

[Joe Tyler] “aftermarket SXS adapters. “
I’d call them Express Card adaptors. SxS is Sony and Sandisk cards.
The adaptors are noted above.

[Clint Fleckenstein]

Dang. I hadn’t tried that until right now. I guess a USB SD card reader will have to suffice, of course they’re much cheaper than the Sony readers we have.

I got a pair of MxR adapters and Transcend 16GB cards a week or so ago and, while they certainly are cheap, they’re not suited to any sort of “run and gun” type videography. If I wanted to wait ten seconds after recording to start a new clip, I’d go back to 3/4″ Umatic SP. Maybe for long, drawn out, boring shoots…but for most of what we do, that’s just not acceptable performance.

Cf

[Craig Seeman]

[Clint Fleckenstein] “I got a pair of MxR adapters and Transcend 16GB cards a week or so ago and, while they certainly are cheap, they’re not suited to any sort of “run and gun” type videography. If I wanted to wait ten seconds after recording to start a new clip, I’d go back to 3/4″ Umatic SP. Maybe for long, drawn out, boring shoots…but for most of what we do, that’s just not acceptable performance.
“

A lot of what I do is run and gun. WIth 2 SDHC 32GB cards I don’t have to deal with waiting either. With 4 hours record time in the camera I can just let it run. You don’t have to be so trigger happy as in the days of 8GB SxS where you were afraid of running out of card space during a shoot. Is 4 hours really not enough for ENG type work? All you need to do is keep running if you think there’s any chance some sequence of (unplanned) events are going to transpire.

4 hours goes a looong way.

[Clint Fleckenstein]

It works a lot better for our team here to be able to refer to individual clips instead of timecode slices of a big chunk. Plus, since archiving is such a wildcard these days, I’d rather not have a lot of unusable video taking up disc space.

Cf

[Craig Seeman]

[Clint Fleckenstein] “It works a lot better for our team here to be able to refer to individual clips instead of timecode slices of a big chunk.”

Subclipping is easy although granted that’s an extra step.

[Clint Fleckenstein] “Plus, since archiving is such a wildcard these days, I’d rather not have a lot of unusable video taking up disc space. “

Subclipping on import works for this too.

It’s a matter of which expense and workflow is easier though. I often find leaving the camera rolling gives me handles when needed and even an unforeseen b-roll shot. Of course if Sony were to ever implement a prerecord cache that might change things. Basically even the fast start of SxS can still result in the risk of losing the head of a shot. I’d rather just keep rolling if there’s a possibility of quick back to back records.

It does bother me that JVC HM cameras have about 3 second prerecord buffer to SDHC and Sony doesn’t implement this at all.

Speculative but I wonder if JVC’s decision to use MOV for SDHC alleviating some of the buffer related issues Sony has with SDHC and all the separate metadata files. JVC requires the SxS adaptor to enable that.

Clint, if you can afford two 32GB SxS cards that would certainly give you optimal flexibility. In my experience using the smaller SxS cards present far to many constraints compared to any advantages.