Fastest Transfer, Ethernet or Firewire?
 

It's my understanding there are two ways to get the footage out, ethernet and firewire.

is one faster than the other? or are they the same and just another option?

What do you mean "get the footage out"?

Fastest networking solution on the planet is Gigabit ethernet. If you're trying to just get footage to a hard drive, SATA III is the fastest for the buck, followed by SATAIII RAID, SCSI RAID, fiber channel RAID, in order of increasing cost.

If you are shooting 60i, Flip4Mac has a great Gig-E transfer solution that is MUCH faster than the FAM Firewire route. It doesn't work with 24P which is why I haven't purchased it but it will support that in the future so that's when I'll jump in.

But the bottleneck is the speed of the drive in the deck or camera which maxes out at about 70Mb/s, not the connection.

I mean mounting the xdcam disk on your desktop and selecting the folders and copying them over.

surely of the ethernet or firewire, one is faster than the other for xdcam file transfers.

Actually there are several faster solutions - including 10Ge copper and very fast 4G fibre solutions. However the deck doesn't have these options so its not important.

Alister pointed out that the drive only reads at 70Mb/s - if that is accurate (and it seems about right for BD - actually quicker than I thought) then F/W would be the same speed as gigE.

I believe the speed of the F-70 is supposed to be about double due to a dual head pick-up vs. the camera. It's one of the incentives for spending $15k USD for one.

One advantage to the ethernet approach is that the drive will have its own IP address and with VPN, could be accessed for footage upload from anywhere on the planet.

-gb-

The issue with the transfer via Ethernet is the Flip4Mac writes the files to HDV format, differently than the Fam transfer. The transfer I thought was not that much faster. I tested a beta version so they might of had some changes since then.

I copied a 40 minute recording over firewire from an F70 using FAM on a mac g5 quad and it took about 35 minutes. (using the older xfer software)

I have heard that the new software is nearly twice as fast so that same xfer would be about 15-20 minutes on the new software. I hope thats true.

I just downloaded the Latest Flip4mac trial. Imported some footage shot @ 24p and it imported fine to FCP but it was tagged as 60i footage, plays fine.

I tested this applcation a year ago gave feedback. I was surprised that the 24 p is not supported as well as the 16x9 preview window is not displaying the previews in the correct aspect ratio it is cropped @ the top. Looks like it stills needs some work. Meanwhile FAM is fine from the deck, it beats working with tape, those days seem like ancient history.

Contacted Support @ Flip4MAC and I am uploading a 24fps mxf file for them per their request.