nano3D wins "A Best of IBC Award"
 

Dear Friends,

The nano3D was awarded "A Best of IBC Award".

The editorial teams behind TVBEurope and The IBC Daily collaborated to choose the best new product innovations at IBC and the Convergent nano3D won “A Best of IBC Award”.

A formal announcement will be in the October issue of TVBEurope.

Our team is honored to have received this award!

Well deserved; congratulations.

Billy

Congratulations!
 

Dear Dan,
This must have made Convergent Design very proud with the recognition!!! and it should be!!!
Well done and Congratulations!
Cheers

It's a good feeling to have and use a piece of engineering art that has been appreciated by specialists.

Thanks CD!

Congrats to CD. I love my nanoFlash. Best complement I ever received was when I was reviewing some footage of a dance show during intermission, I plugged the nanoFlash into a large LCD monitor they had backstage. One of the people sitting there had this totally amazed look on her face. She said that it was the most live like recording she'd ever seen.

Keep up the great work.

-Garrett

Congratulation Dan.
The NANO should have got that last year.
Congratulation again.
rafael

Convergent Designs was The First
 

Hi Mike & Tommy & Dan:
Congratulations ! Yes, even from me, and why not ? For the last 15 years, various industry tech writers have been heralding the arrival of solid state digital recording onto what was said at the time to be small credit card sized solid state memory media. I think the first time we heard anything about such a technology was early 1995. However, the years passed and nothing was available. Then in the fall of 2000, I heard a rumour that Panasonic had a prototype digital video camera (No one said anything about it being HD either at that point) which could record audio and video onto a PCMCIA card ! Wow ! Cool ! No camera was shown year after year either !
The first time I heard rumours of such an affordable, practical, and most importantly, soon to be actually available SSDR device, was from Dan Keaton in December of 2007 - just after I purchased my Canon XL-H1. *Convergent Design was the **first to market** with a portable SSDR device, that did not cost 50K $ I would venture to point out that even without this prestigious award, Convergent Design has still secured its place in the history books as the first company to develop a practical functioning, and reasonably affordable SSDR.
What I would really like to know from Mike Schell is how the heck did he manage to convince Sony Corporation to licence CD to use their XDCAM hardware encoder in the Flash XDR, and later Nano Flash ???!!! Luck ? I mean, that chip *Must* have cost well over a million Dollars US to develop ! The Sony encoder is used inside their cameras, thus, it must be *very sensitive* technology to turn over to a third party company to use. (??) You should get an award for that as well, actually !! This is also a very big accomplishment ! I'm still trying to finish my SSDR and no company (So far ?) has offered their hardware encoding engine for use in my currently busted prototype device.

Congrats CD. Good to see a small company lead the way in an industry typically dominated by mega corporations.

Hi Mark-
Thanks for the kind words and encouragement. It took a lot of persistence to get the Sony CODEC. I will say that all our dealings with Sony have been superb and the tech support excellent. I am sure Sony spent mega-millions developing this 5th generation chip.

Good luck with your SSDR development, we, for one. know how difficult it is to build and support this product!

Cheers-

Your Award & My Busted SSDR
 

....Hi Mike: Thanks for the SSDR development encouragement. I hope to have some pictures to post soon of our new prototype SSDR. It's really funky looking ! It records across 4 x SDXC cards in a Raid 0 stripe. It records and it plays back. Uhh, it doesn't have the analogue XLR circuit yet :-( You have to plug a camera with an HD-SDI output which embeds the audio and TC signal to get audio onto the SDXC media. (This omits the use of my dear Canon XL-H1 camcorder with it, but the XL H1s should be OK). It is 10 bit. It is uncompressed. The device offers no compression codec at this time. If you need compression, then apply that when you capture or download clips into your NLE. It has a FW 1394a I/O for downloading uncompressed clips (Which doesn't take as long as I thought it would). The LTC input doesn't work ! The HD-SDI output doesn't work either ! The FW I/O does work. The HD-SDI input does work. I still consider it to be busted, because so much doesn't work. It's half baked at best. I hope to have it stable enough to dare to show it to someone after Christmas. Proto version 2.0 is smaller than the Nano, but the bread board version (1.0) was way bigger than the XDR ! I fried that one ! Internal power supply problem fixed. It's fun to mess around and make your own box ! Just to be able to say I did it and to show folks, but I lament that it will ever be a market profitable device :-( Just a cool hobby box.

Hi Mark,
Why you say "but I lament that it will ever be a market profitable device"?
It would be too expensive?
Because people interested, sure would be a lot.
The only problem with 10b Unc is how to deal with 5 folds more data that with the heavier NANO files, but Uncompressed is Uncompressed.
Rafael

It has a FW 1394a I/O for downloading uncompressed clips (Which doesn't take as long as I thought it would).

Great idea. That's the reason I won't buy a NanoFlash.

John

What exactly is your reaon - lack of uncompressed recording, or of the 1394?

Well, the former was never intended to be included (there is still a chance it will be on the XDR, though for extra charge).

As to the latter, I can assure you that using nd ExpressCard CF reader I can dump files at 90 MB/sec; I don't think FireWire could be faster (1394b getting close). Plus, my rig is not tethered to the computer...

Piotr

You Don't Remove Striped Media
 

Hi Piotr & John:
No. You must not *remove* the striped media. You keep it in the box and either.....

1. Play it out via HD-SDI in realtime for NLE capture.
2. Download clips into your NLE via FW interface. (Slower).

Before, when flash media densities were only 32 GB maximum, this option was not that practical. Now, we have 64 GB densities and soon to be 128 GB densities. With this much removable storage at hand, one can capture 1 hour plus in uncompressed full raster HD in 4:2:2 color space. This also is a plus on the duty cycles of your SSDR. With less physical insertions of the card media, there is also less of a chance for malfunctions. Your removable media can actually live permanently in the device in some production situations. This would also be true with the Flash XDR.

To record down converted video from an EX1 to a firewire deck that I own. High quality hardware conversion to SD recorded on miniDV tape.

JOhn