After some HVX Buying advice
 

I'm thinking of investing in a new camera soon, and am assesing all my available options.

I love the over/ under crank capability, but like most, the P2 cards scare me off a bit. I've been looking at the firestore, and realise it cant record dvcpro hd 'native', which is what the HVX records over cranked footage in?

Is there any other way of recording over cranked footage, say 50fps, and capturing through firewire straight into a laptop?

I've been searching about in fcp, and cant work out if it has native support for that type of dvc pro hd.

Any help would be much appricated

You have obviously read information from a very poorly informed source.

The HVX cannot stream native out of Firewire.

You can over/undercrank in any 720 mode, which FCP will handle with the Frame Rate Converter plug-in (actually apperas in the tools menu).

Firmware rev 3.0 of the FS-100, due very shortly, will remove the pulldown at ingest so that is effectively "native" mode. Remember that "native" is just the pulldown removal. You accomplish this upon ingest to FCP or with Cinema Tools or, in a few short weeks, with shooting the FS-100 in "native" mode.

Please deliver a very stern rebuke to anyone who says that the HVX only under/overcranks in "native" mode.

Ned Soltz

http://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bi..._hd/index.html

Gives you the basics of take 720/60p to 720/24p and convertering to slow motion

You can record straight from the firewire to a number of different recording devices; you're not limited to just the P2 cards. You can go to a FireStore, or a CitiDisk, or the forthcoming CinePorter, or to a DVCPRO-HD tape deck, or to a computer running EDIUS Broadcast or FCP or Avid or DV Rack 2.0 HD.

And any of these can record variable frame rates.

The cards are an option, but they're just one of many options.

Excellent, thanks for the infomation guys. I had been a bit confused after reading some badly written reviews on the net.

So, I take it that its possible then, to hook up a hvx to a mac pro laptop, and record 60 fps straight into fcp?

This is the kind of setup would be ideal for my uses. Although cumbersome carrying a laptop around, it would be good to take advantage of the equipment i already have.

Yes that is perfectly possible. Robert Lane has some nice threads here that talk about how to do that exactly.

Yes... hook up your HVX to MacBook Pro. I would strongly recommend for your external media drive that you consider going SATA. With my MBPro, I have a Wiebetech Express34 SATA card which I run into their box (which also has eSata, FW400 and FW800) with a Seagate 750 SATA drive. SATA is much faster than firewire and will ensure that with the combination of the HVX, MPRo and FCP you will never drop frames.

Ned Soltz

yeah i agree with ned, i just picked up an esata card for my macbook pro, aswell as a 1TB esata drive(2 500gb in one case)... im using it for interviews with my hvx... its blazing fast and had no problems thus far... i like fw800, but i think esata is the future... i picked up my card and 1TB drive from promax in irvine,ca... they are really helpful, check the website promax.com...

jeff

Thanks guys, It all sounds good. Id like to go sata, but i dont think my buget would cover it.

I realise i wouldnt be able to have camera pluged in via firewire, then an external HD pluged in with firewire 800- as the macpro only has one firewire bus, so id be sharing the bandwidth. But what about using a USB 2 external HD? Surely the data rates should be fast enough?
For the short term, id probably capture to the internal and backup every to an external at the end of a shoot. (bad for the laptop really, i know but im a bit abusive of technology!)

all thats left for me to do is play with a demo HVX, and make sure its the right camera for me

I've edited with both FireWire drives and USB 2 drives and the performance is better on FireWire drives. FireWire handles this type of data traffic better.

I doubt the internal would be fast enough with running the OS, FCP and writing the data stream, I would try the usb2 drive before you go to a shoot with it. I have one usb2 drive i had to buy in a pinch, and after formating it to the mac format (os extended or somthing like that) it was fast enough to handle 8bit uncompressed SD> similar bitrate to the dvcpro hd
HOWEVER... I have heard a lot of bad things about using usb2, dropped frames, etc... and from my limited knowledge of computer tech, I *think* it eats up processor speed too.

test it before you commit!

Phil

- this does all make sense. Now i think about it, i remeber someone telling me that usb has to use processing power to prioritise the data, whereas firewire uses hardware, or something like that.

Hadnt thought about the internal running out of speed. Sounds dumb, but i hadnt even thought about fcp and the os needing a fair bit of hard drive usage!

i'll need to have a good think before i part with any money.

i can see now why the firestore is a popular alternative to using P2 cards.

How do people rate the firestore overall?

Well, it is worth a test at least to see if the system can handle it.

See if it will work until you can get the elusive "ideal" setup

Phil

USB does not work for Mac as an editing medium. It is fine for PC. So, don't even think about going there. Besides, SATA is so much faster than firewire, so I would bypass firewire completely.

Ned

i haved used powered usb2 drives when editing with my mac. It does work but I get much faster results with the firewire. Way more reliable