[Lars Wikstrom]

Like they mentioned it is a firewire drive. No pricey card to buy.

-Lars

[Lars Wikstrom]

Retrospect is a good cataloging program but Haxials is better and faster. Right now when I open it up it quickly loads a couple hundred CD,DVD, Tape, hard drives and more images that I can click on and view what is on the disc before I even put the disc in the computer. Also the find feature is really fast. Retrospect creates a catalog for the tape or what you use to back up to. I have not played with any find feature to locate things across many catalogs. But, if you are going from DVD back up to tape Retrospect won’t be much help searching your old media for files.

I have posted about this drive before when it has come up. I have had it 5 months now and used it for about 10 tapes and it works great. It’s best to do it when you go to bed or leave the office at night. Next Morning it is done. Before I toss out the media I open retrospect and bring in a few files to be sure.

-Lars

[Lars Wikstrom]

I have it and I love it! if you can get it for that price don;t wait. I got mine at Christmas time for $950

A couple things to note about the drive. It only backs up at about 600 megs per minute. So depending how much you back up it can take 5 to 6 hours to back up and verify the data.

Also you will only get have the data that you are thinking. When using the large tape that says 160/320 that means 160 gigs normal and 320 gigs compressed. Since your video footage is already compressed you will only get 160 gigs onto one of those tapes. I found that out when I called their support line to figure it out why I was running out of tape. Also leave about 5 to 7 gigs so only back up 154 gigs on the 160 tape. I have run out before with only 2 gigs to go and it asks you to put in a second tape, that sucked.

But here is a very cool thing using retrospect. You can back up everything and then just pull off what you need from the tape after it is backed up! I was told that I might have to dump the whole 160 gigs back to the computer to access a simple text file.

It comes with a cleaning tape and it tells you when it needs cleaning every 12 hours of use or so.

If you are like me and switching from DVD-R back ups to this you will love it. Buy a second drive and make it the same size as your tapes and when it is full, write a tape and erase the hard drive.

I use this for cataloging the DVDs and tapes.

https://www.haxial.com/products/diskcatalog/

Before I empty the drive I drag the folder or disc onto this program and it catalogs it in about 2 to 3 seconds creating a visual file structure for you to go back and find programs. I hate word only data bases.

You’ll love the drive! But be sure to order more tapes before you need them because not many people sell them and they can take some time to get to you.

-Lars

[Lars Wikstrom]

Thanks that did the trick. I searched the forum but I guess I did not go back far enough.

Thanks!

-Lars

[Lars Wikstrom]

We ended up reshooting that 4 gig card. I did place it back in the camera to try to play back the clips but they were all white.

I do know about the different formats and only being able to watch them when your camera is set to that format, thanks.

This has never happened in the 2 years I have had the camera. I pulled the card out when it started to blink FULL and when I put it back in the camera it then said 2 minutes remaining.

I’ll just chock that up as a camera malfunction and hope it never happens again.

Thanks,

-Lars

[Lars Wikstrom]

I agree, for some people it will be great. Every one uses different work flows that best suits the style of recording. I was just speaking from my experience and my work flow. I purposely keep my system to 1 terabyte raid with a 1 terabyte FireWire back up drive that Retrospect backs up to automatically every morning at 4am. I keep a 160 gig partition for finished projects and when that fills up I write and Exabyte tape back up.

Do you give the clients the hard drive when finished or do you keep it?

-Lars

[Lars Wikstrom]

I got to say that I don’t think I would buy a 64 gig card. People who are waiting for the Blue-Ray drives to use as back up will not hold 64 gigs.

I bought an exbyte tape drive just because the P2 footage was building in my computer. For me using more smaller cards is a better work flow then and back up system then a few large ones.
I could not image someone trying to segment a 64 gig file to back up on 4.2 gig dvd-r’s.

You would have to keep your quicktimes and toss out the master fotoage.

-Lars

[Lars Wikstrom]

I wouldn’t know where to store 64 gigs. They might reach a point where it is over kill for some people. I am very happy with 16.

-Lars

[Lars Wikstrom]

Well if you got a 32 gig card and recorded DV25 to the card for your live events you could get around 2 hours I would think. I know 4 gigs gets you 16 minutes.

I like the camera because there are so many different formats to shoot with. DV 25/50/100 1080i/720p. You can select what is right format for your project. I don’t know why people shoot HDV? Tape drop outs 4:1:1 and GOP compression. not to mention that HDV is the same bandwidth as mini-dv but it is way more compressed. I don’t get it.

-Lars

[Lars Wikstrom]

Sorry, I miss understood the question.

The process that I use with SynthEyes is to first get my HVX200 footage in to Shake and resize it to 1280 x 720 (which is what I shoot at). Then I apply the lens node to undistorted the image. I shot my garage door that had a bunch of lines on it so I know how much to undistorted the image to make it flat.

Render that out as a self-contained QT movie for SynthEyes. The back plate comes in as a default 24.892mm x 14.002mm.

Since 3d programs, that I know of, don’t render with lens distortion I undistorted it first and then add it back in when I do my final composite.

-Lars