Barry Green
Forum Replies Created
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[Blub] “The drives are so small two of them could fit into a P2 sized format, 16gigs for around $200, WOW”
They could fit, yes, but they’d be way, way too slow. These tiny drives don’t have the transfer rate necessary. The smaller hard drives don’t have the rotational speed to get high transfer rates. Even the big 1.8″ drives are too slow to support a 100-megabit data stream. You really need to go all the way up to 2.5″ before it’s something that could be considered. The 1″ drives don’t have a chance.
Now, if you RAIDed four of them together somehow, maybe then it’d be competitive… but that wouldn’t fit in a card. Maybe someone will come up with some sort of double-decker device that raids four together into one “double” P2 card (a single product that takes up both slots)… then you’d have 32gb, probably enough speed, and probably a price that’s half of what an 8gb solid-state card costs.
Now that would be interesting…
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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) -
I’ve sent messages to them asking them to build exactly that product. Here’s hoping that they do.
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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) -
I’d go ahead and use Squeeze rather than try to stretch 4:3 in post…
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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) -
[Superfly] “My biggest concern is Archiving. How do we do it and how much will it cost? What is the shelf life of a hard drive (you will need 2 because they can’t be trusted).”
I don’t think hard drives sitting on a shelf would be the best choice for archiving. I’m thinking that short-term you can archive a 4gb P2 card onto a 50-cent DVD-R, and an 8gb card can be archived onto a dual-layer DVD. For larger capacity, DLT drives may make sense. Eventually I think we’re all waiting for high-capacity cheap blu-ray or HD-DVD burners. And, don’t forget you can always archive on DVCPRO-HD tape if you want to, although that’s the lamest way to go (because you lose all the metadata, and HD tape isn’t cheap). And there’s a promising new holographic blue laser storage technology that Toshiba just dumped a bunch of money into, which promises 200gb or more on a $1 sheet of film…[Superfly] “Will the old stealth controller still work? Camera looks like a DVX-100 front end with a new back end on it.”
Yes your old stealth controller will work. There’s an additional remote focus port, so newly-designed controllers will work for both zoom and focus (and iris), but it retains backward compatibility with the old zoom controllers. And batteries too.
[Superfly] “By the time I need to shoot HD, hard drives will be insanely cheap, no need for P2 unless you want it. In theory this could be a good work horse camera for 5-10 years like PD-150 was.”
Correct. It has a DV tape drive so it can be used immediately for DV purposes (but it’s a killer DV camera with 16:9 and the ability to do variable frame rates, etc). Then there’s P2 cards, and firewire streaming (which lets you record to a DVCPRO-HD-compatible FireStore, to DVCPRO-HD tape, or to a computer right away without ever needing to buy a P2 card). And cards should come down rapidly in price, the same way SD and CompactFlash cards have.
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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) -
I wrote an entire chapter on the anamorphic adapter in The DVX Book. It definitely requires more effort from the cameraperson to extract the best results.
Summing up the issues is tough (the chapter is 34 pages long — how do you summarize that?) but basically, the adapter requires deep depth of field to work. If you’re shooting at full wide angle, with a deep f-stop (f/11 or f/14) you don’t have to be 9 feet away, you can get it in focus right down to the surface of the lens. But if you’re at full telephoto, even at f/16, you may need to be 9 feet away to get that shot in focus.
And autofocus won’t work properly. You have to manually focus, and you have to keep your zoom setting, iris, and focus distance all in proper relationship to each other. If you do, you can get superb results. If you don’t, you can get results that are less than optimal, and even get results substantially worse than squeeze mode as well.
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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 SaenzDeViteri] “does 1080/24p have the same rate as 1080/30p?”
Yes, all the 1080 modes occupy the exact same amount of storage. 1080/24p = 100 megabits, 1080/30p = 100 megabits, 1080/60i = 100 megabits.
The reason is that 1080/24p is recorded using 2:3 or 2:3:3:2 pulldown, just like how 24p is recorded on DV. So it takes the full 60i data rate to store 30p or 24p.
In an ideal world, maybe they should have made it store only the active frames, but that would probably involve some changes to the codec (the codec is designed to store a 60i stream). Implementing it using pulldown lets them use the existing codec, maintain compatibility with the VariCam and other DVCPRO-HD gear, and get 24p as well (something no other DVCPRO-HD product can yet do).
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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) -
[David Battistella] “Here is a question. Let’s say I am shooting DV and I want some varicam style sloomo to blend into my production. Can I record those shots on the P2 cards with variable frame rates”
Yes, you can do exactly that, and then tell the camera to downconvert onto the tape. In effect you’ll get variable frame rates even in DV…
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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) -
All 1080 modes use 100 megabit/sec data rates.
The 720p modes use (‘R’/60)x100 megabits, where ‘R’ = the frame rate. So 30P = (30/60)*100 = 50 megabits per second.
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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) -
In the first menu, “scene file settings”.
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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) -
For “how fast”, look at the minimum system requirements for FCP-HD or Avid Express Pro HD. Both systems currently support DVCPRO-HD.
Regarding hard disks, most any external hard disk, 3.5″ size, should be easily able to handle the 12.5 megabyte/second transfer rate. Little laptop drives like 2.5″ should probably be able to handle it as well, but the tiny 1.8″ drives usually can’t.
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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)