lost power...and the whole clip?
 

Dan or Mike, could you confirm what happens to a clip if I happen to lose power (it happens) on the XDR whilst recording. Will the XDR repair the clip on power-up and how much of the clip am I likely to lose.

The manual states the last clip will be lost if you are recording while power is lost.

Dear Chris,

We break long recordings, Clips, into separate smaller sub-clips.

If you lose power, then you will lose the last sub-clip. If this is a short clip, then you lose the whole clip, if this is a long clip, you will lose the last sub-clip.

How are you losing power? Is the battery being drained, or is the power being interrupted?

If you shut off the camera while we are recording, we will close the clip automatically.

If you camera and Flash XDR are running off the same battery, the camera should shutdown at a set voltage, then your HD-SDI signal is lost, and the Flash XDR or nanoFlash will close the clip, while it still has power. No footage is lost in this situation. The Flash XDR goes down to 6 Volts and the nanoFlash operates down to 6.5 volts. At these voltages, most cameras will have already shut down.

If one pulls the power from the Flash XDR, while you are recording, you will lose the last sub-clip.

You can reduce your exposure by having XDR make very small files. This would be my preferred way to work if there was builtin support to aggregate the small files with a QT wrapper or re-assemble the small files on firewire output.

Enabling FireWire Interface Also Gives You Full VTR Style Emulation
 

...Hi Aaron: Yup, turning on the FireWire interface will also give you full VTR emulation for batch capture and recapture not only from many broadcast HD VTR's directly, but also from many switchers which have a firewire interface. Also, when you think of what Avid was able to accomplish with its Adrenaline box, which was capable of full raster HD video with 4:2:2 colorspace via a standard FireWire cable, it seems interesting to be able to use this interface. The only restriction was you couldn't do uncompressed HD video via the FireWire 400a Adrenalin connection, because it wasn't fast enough. With XDR you don't need to worry about bandwidth if you are capturing at only 35 Mbps (4.2.0) or at 50, 75, 100, 140 or even 160 (4:2:2). Theoretically it should be possible to get the higher color space signal video in and out of the XDR's HDV interface. Now, with the much faster CF cards available VS the relatively low data rate recording (@ 100 Mbps), it makes sense to be able to use HDV as an alternative interface for some functions.

Mark, I wasn't thinking of a realtime Firewire video. I was think of using Firewire as a file transfer method. Plugin the XDR via firewire and it shows up on my Mac as a FW hard drive. I can transfer the captured files with a drag and drop. Reassembling the small files into a big file on the fly during the transfer would be an awfully sweet feature. I don't think anything like this is planned or even possible though.