Sony SxS Cards VS. SxS-SDHC Adaptors

[Jim Stamos]

I have an ex1r and have used sxs religiously for years.
3 weeks ago i had a huge dance recital that lasted from 8:30am to 6:30pm.i had no time to transfer footage between shows so i had to take my chances with the sony adapter/sandisc class 10 extremes.otherwise id pay a fortune for more sxs cards.
im glad to say i had zero problems. i was always hesitant to use them in the past but in this case i had no choice or blow out a ton on more sxs cards. i had close to 17 hours of footage on 2 cameras. ive already edited them and produced 550 dvds for the client.
I would say you can trust them

[Jim Stamos]

Tom
its alot cheaper than buying sxs cards. worth getting the sony for their cameras. i would not buy the hoodman adaptor. had my shooter using one for a shoot and it failed on him. had to take one of my sony adaptors to him, no issue at all. im not taking that chance to save a few bucks.
134.00 is nothing considering what we charge to shoot, youll make that back on one job

[Clint Fleckenstein]

I inferred from your post that you rolled long clips on the-all day event, and that was probably a good, safe bet. It’s important to note that you may be more likely to experience problems with one of those adapters if you do a lot of starting and stopping.

It’s critical that you let the card finish writing before starting a new recording, and because of the reduced speed (presumably since the adapters are an internal USB interface) they don’t finish writing nearly as quickly as the real thing.

This is presuming that you have good, fast cards that don’t slowly fill up a buffer somewhere over several hours of constant recording. That’d get ugly.

This, if I remember correctly, is why overcranking is not recommended with an adapter. I changed jobs and was out of the XDCAM EX community for a while, but I was finally able to rectify that with a trio of PMW200’s. 🙂

Cf

[Jim Stamos]

yea these were 1 1/2 hours recitals, so no stopping but i have shot weddings as well and at receptions i have hundreds of clips starting and stopping no issues.

[Tom Laughlin]

Has anyone been able to confirm the wrote speeds of sd cards and how wrote speeds are changed when using adapters?

What I’m referring to is kind of like when back in the day, people were using cheaper non-Panasonic DV tapes to use with their DVX-100s. Few got tapes gummed up, most people used other brands and didn’t care and saved money… So it’s kind of like that…

I just want to know what exactly it is, technically and internally, that makes the SxS cards better or superior to Adaptors? I’d also like to know what is the mechanical difference between one adaptor than another? Quality? Is there one adaptor than performs faster than another? Is it like a Sony DVD versus a jvc DVD? Is it all the same but stamped with a different brand?

SxS cards from Sony, who actually manufactures them, before sony brands them?

Sandisk makes official SxS media compatible with Sony, how does that work? Do they both have their SxS cards made at the same factory? Is the like name brand versus “Western Family” or “Great Value”?

Sd cards create digital data, and SxS creates digital data.
Sd cards create BPAV folders, and SxS cards create BPAV folders… What are the distinctions and other than sony controlling the product and how it’s made, is there some special blend of spices here that I’m not detecting? Any media card of any kind can fail. Failure rates aren’t the question, it’s the sd vs SxS media file creation and optimization process I’m wanting to know more about. If I eject an SxS card out before it finishes writing to the card, of course I’m going to have issues. That seems pretty obvious. Is it a sony loyalist and security blanket thing, or is it something else?

Any additional thoughts?

Thanks,

Tom Laughlin
Producer/Editor
Digital Chop House
Salt Lake City, Utah
http://www.digitalchophouse.com

[Thomas Sherry]

When it comes to SD, are 64 gig cards less reliable than 32 gig?