Mark Baird
Forum Replies Created
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An additional interesting experience to report. Today I was testing out a “resurrected” field pack and I had to hit “file/refresh media directorys” and “file/load media databases” after mounting the Field pack and starting MC. Not sure if there is an analogue if you are using a hard drive but I thought I would mention it. Before I did that, MC acted like there was a problem with clips.bin.
Also, If anyone is having problems with 160 GIG field packs with spinning disks dying on you, we are working on a fix. (we have had six out of our 12 spinning disk field packs die in the last 12 months. (or if you just want a cheep way to a solid state field pack.) You can open up the pack and remove the 160 gig drive in it and replace that drive with a 128 gig or a 256 gig SSD. I use “crucial’ brand drives and we are seeing very good results in early stages of testing. So if I was wanting a solid state field pack that could record 3 hours and 48 minutes of footage. I’d be very tempted to buy a 160 gig spinning disk based field pack and a 256 gig crucial drive and just open the pack and put in the new SSD. You get out cheaper then if you buy a SSD based field pack and you have a spare 160 Hitachi drive for your laptop.
This is working well for me, but as always YMMV.
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yes the conversion happens. Both outputs are live no matter which input you are using.
RE the codec. The beauty of this thing is it’s simplicity. I assume it is so cheap because they didn’t have to add a bunch of codecs to it. They didn’t try to make it a swiss army knife. It’s a single purpose blade. Perfect for certain things. (Blue Screen shots, things you need to track, effects work.) I bought two SSDs at 256 gig each. Yes that’s 50 minutes. I don’t expect to ever need more. At least not until the price drops significantly. In indi film I really don’t need more recording time then this. I can shuffle the files off to spinning disks faster then I fill up the drives. But yeah. If you shoot lots more footage per day, this isn’t for you.
But if they are going to pick another codec I hope it isn’t a closed one like pro res. Needs to be an open codec.
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Thanks for the heads up. I downloaded and did the update and while it may have fixed the problem for that one particular camera. I’m still seeing a green image.
I’m going to take the shuttle into work with me and hook it up to an AVID Nitris so that I can futz with the HDMI out settings and see what I can sus out. I suspect the Hyperdeck is just fine with an RGB signal but has trouble with YCbCr. Maybe, maybe not, but that is a hunch I get from what I see.
I’ll report back what I find.
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Until we know from Black Magic the reason some HDMI sources are showing up as green on the shuttle then I don’t think its as simple as saying “the camera has an HDMI out, the shuttle has HDMI in, should work”. I am very hesitant to buy any HDMI camera to pair with the shuttle unless I can test it personalty to verify that I am not going to get a green picture.
And also to verify I am not going to get finder info in the picture as you point out.
I did not expect to find it this difficult to pair the shuttle with a camera or I might have had second thought about buying it in the first place. I really hope BMD comes up with a software fix for the shuttle soon.
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Okay, this is the thing about fieldpack data once it has been copied to another hard drive. When you are trying to import it into your system, the three folders from the field pack have to be in the root directory of the drive.
So if you did what 99.9% of us do and you made a directory on your hard drive called “my shoot on xxxx” and then copied the field pack into it, it won’t work. try moving the three folders from inside that directory back out to the root of the drive and try it that way.
I should note here that I have never done this on a mac. All my experience comes from the PC side but I know on the PC. those three folders must be in the root for it to work.
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according to the title he is talking about a hyper-deck shuttle. Those are HFS+ only.
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on a PC I use a 14 dollar Diablotek interface and TransMac software and the disks formatted with no problem (used a trial of TransMac). I expect to use a Ubuntu laptop to transfer the files from the ssd to NTFS formatted usb drives. The ubuntu machine can read the HFS+ file system and NTFS. I just couldn’t figure out a way to format the disk in Ubuntu. Quite possibly I could have done it on Ubuntu if I had spent more then 5 minutes trying.
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Look at the Hyperdeck Studio, which allows you to swap in new drives while the other drive is recording. This might allow your 3 hour record times.
The price of the drives will drop. There is a HUGE market for them in the oil and gas industry and that will drive mass production, prices will fall, etc. That said the question is when. Who knows?
As for data rates, it depends on format (1080 vs 720) and frame rate. I have seen estimates of about 25 minutes per 256 gig. (1080 at 30).
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Sweet!!! How do you like that camera?
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On eyeon fusion: Reads the file created in the hyperdeck shuttle with no problem but the resulting image is green. Looking at the channels the green channel is up full and there is nothing in the blue and mostly nothing in the red. This could be a color space mix up (IE fusion trying to make rgb out of a different component format. I’ll have to look into this further.
Avid 5.0 imports the footage. The audio is fine but the screen is white, which generally means it doesn’t have the correct codec but it could be a problem with the alpha channel. I’ll have to check this out also. (and pay some attention to my import settings.)
more later.
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