XDCAM EX answers...

[Serena Steuart]

Originally Posted by David Heath

I understood 2.5Gbs to be the speed of the bus, the cards being rated at a max 800Mbs?

Even then, I don't think you can give a simple one off answer for download speed, since I'd expect it to depend far more on the equipment being downloaded to etc than the cards themselves. 800Mbs would correspond to roughly 24x real time for 35Mbs material as a theoretical maximum.

In another thread Alaistair Chapman reports 4-5 minutes for an hours worth of material, so 12x-15x (400-500Mbs) is what he was getting in practice. But a lower specced laptop is likely to be slower.

The write speed for the cards is quoted as 800 Mb/s, the data transfer speed as 2.5Gb/s. However I agree that the transfer speed I suggested is unlikely to be achieved.

[Craig Seeman]

Sony was exhibiting EX1 (2 of them) at HD World in NYC today. Sony rep said that he had tested xfer speed previous day using a recent Sony Vaio laptop with 25mbps source (not 35mbps) and he found the speed to be approximately 3x real time. I had heard that before previously.

So now I'm confused between Alastair's experience and that told to me by the Sony rep.

Originally Posted by Serena Steuart

The write speed for the cards is quoted as 800 Mb/s, the data transfer speed as 2.5Gb/s. However I agree that the transfer speed I suggested is unlikely to be achieved.

[Craig Seeman]

Sony Rep said he knows of no device yet to use their proprietary remote control port for lens.

So far only Sony SxS Pro (and Sandisk) cards will work with camera other SxS cards (apparently they tested) do not meet their minimum read/write specs.

Their Final Cut Pro plugin will unwrap the MP4 to MXF (so rep says).

There's no way to jam sync (momentary jam) between EX1 cameras (HVX200 can do this by firewire).

He showed me that there was a variable pad on the mic input (compared to PD-170 which has a build in -10db pad).

He said there was an issue with the responsiveness of some buttons in the preproduction model which would be fixed in the final release.

He said that he believes Sony has NOT yet made a decision regarding whether they were including 0, 1 or 2 SxS 8GB cards with the camera.

BTW he said Sony had been looking at various forums and found there was some misunderstanding and misinterpretation but unfortunately they don't have time to correct that and it was creating some apparent frustration.

I personally get the impression that Sony reps are still unsure of some of the information.

[Jiri Bakala]

Originally Posted by Craig Seeman

I personally get the impression that Sony reps are still unsure of some of the information.

...which is quite typical. I bet you anything that half of the people on this board know the camera better from the published info than your average Sony rep.

[David Heath]

Originally Posted by Serena Steuart

The write speed for the cards is quoted as 800 Mb/s, the data transfer speed as 2.5Gb/s. However I agree that the transfer speed I suggested is unlikely to be achieved.

I'm using as reference the Sandisk release itself - http://www.sandisk.com/Corporate/Pre...e.aspx?ID=3770 .

Just below the picture of a card is a paragraph talking about "High-speed data transfer of large video files", and that states that: " PCI Express™ has a maximum data transfer speed of 2.5 gigabits per second, twice as fast as PC Card™-based storage media. and "The target transfer speed of SxS™ memory cards is 800 megabits per second2."

I've not seen a WRITE speed specifically quoted anywhere, and the Sandisk link above seems quite clear that 800Mbs is the max card transfer speed (so the max READ speed), whilst the 2.5Gbs is the BUS speed.

Craig - regarding your 3x speed comment, it tends to show that the transfer speed depends on the weakest link in the chain, which is unlikely to be the card. What was the material being transferred to? If an optical disk, that is likely to be far slower than a hard disk. 3x sounds very slow for a card being read directly from a laptop slot to a hard disk.

[Alister Chapman]

The official sony line is 6 to 10x.

[Craig Seeman]

Some rough math. 800 Mega BITS a second is about 100 Mega BYTES second (actually 95.367 according to conversion chart below).
http://www.speedguide.net/conversion.php

http://bssc.sel.sony.com/Broadcastan..._specsheet.pdf
Note this on page 2
800Mbps** (=100MB/s)

That's 1GB every 10 seconds. (100MB/s takes 10 seconds to be 1000MB/s is 1GB/s)
16 GB card holds about 50 minutes at 35Mbps.
Note this on on bottom page 2
†Actual user capacity for 8GB is 7.4GB, and actual user capacity for 16GB is 14.9GB.
14.9GB would take about 150 seconds to transfer.
That's 2 minutes 30 seconds for 50 minutes of video.
That's just under 20x real time (rough given some rounding).

Sony XDCAM media has transfer rate of 2.4x
http://bssc.sel.sony.com/Broadcastan...am_media.shtml
It mentions 86Mbps with one optical head and 172Mbps with two.

[Thomas Smet]

Originally Posted by Craig Seeman

Some rough math. 800 Mega BITS a second is about 100 Mega BYTES second (actually 95.367 according to conversion chart below).
http://www.speedguide.net/conversion.php

http://bssc.sel.sony.com/Broadcastan..._specsheet.pdf
Note this on page 2
800Mbps** (=100MB/s)

That's 1GB every 10 seconds. (100MB/s takes 10 seconds to be 1000MB/s is 1GB/s)
16 GB card holds about 50 minutes at 35Mbps.
Note this on on bottom page 2
†Actual user capacity for 8GB is 7.4GB, and actual user capacity for 16GB is 14.9GB.
14.9GB would take about 150 seconds to transfer.
That's 2 minutes 30 seconds for 50 minutes of video.
That's just under 20x real time (rough given some rounding).

Sony XDCAM media has transfer rate of 2.4x
http://bssc.sel.sony.com/Broadcastan...am_media.shtml
It mentions 86Mbps with one optical head and 172Mbps with two.

Those speeds are never going to happen.
1. Not device ever runs at the speed it can run in "theory" How many single hard drives do you know that run as 300 MB/S?
2. A laptop drive is going to become a huge bottleneck. This will be even more true if it is the same drive as your system drive. The more full or fragmented that single drive is the slower it will be. In order to get the best transfer speeds you will have to transfer directly to a 2 drive raid-0 product like a G-raid product. This will mean your laptop will need a FW 800 port. Even then you will never see 800 mbits/s even in a perfect world.

[Craig Seeman]

I understand Alister Chapman report 4 to 5 minute transfer time in another thread on this forum.

Alister is that the case?

Originally Posted by Thomas Smet

Those speeds are never going to happen.
1. Not device ever runs at the speed it can run in "theory" How many single hard drives do you know that run as 300 MB/S?
2. A laptop drive is going to become a huge bottleneck. This will be even more true if it is the same drive as your system drive. The more full or fragmented that single drive is the slower it will be. In order to get the best transfer speeds you will have to transfer directly to a 2 drive raid-0 product like a G-raid product. This will mean your laptop will need a FW 800 port. Even then you will never see 800 mbits/s even in a perfect world.

[Serena Steuart]

Card data was given in this review
http://dvuser.co.uk/content.php?CID=171

[Evan Donn]

Originally Posted by Thomas Smet

A laptop drive is going to become a huge bottleneck. This will be even more true if it is the same drive as your system drive.

The laptop drive is likely the limiting factor, but I don't think it'll really be a 'huge bottleneck'. Modern laptop drives are pretty fast - sustained read/writes in the 50-60MB/s range (http://www.barefeats.com/rosa06.html). That gives us a transfer time of 20 seconds per gig - so maybe three minutes tops for an 8Gb card and six minutes for a 16Gb. If you can't take a 10 minute break per hour of footage shot you should still be fine if you can swap between two cards.

If you want to avoid using the internal drive you can pick up the 250Gb WD Scorpio for ~$200 and a triple-interface WiebeTech ToughTech Mini enclosure for ~$100, use fw800 and have a small, portable, bus-powered drive that'll hold at least 10-12 hours of footage before the transfer rate starts to slow down. In fact, at that price/size you could get two so you have short term backups in the field - maybe even do a portable RAID1.

[Alister Chapman]

We transfered some 2 minute long clips to a workstation PC via the USB reader at IBC and timed the transfer. It took between 10 and 15 seconds. I have been using an EX over the last couple of days and the transfer is extremely fast, with short clips it happens so fast you start to wonder if the transfer has actually worked.

[David Parks]

Originally Posted by Alister Chapman

We transfered some 2 minute long clips to a workstation PC via the USB reader at IBC and timed the transfer. It took between 10 and 15 seconds. I have been using an EX over the last couple of days and the transfer is extremely fast, with short clips it happens so fast you start to wonder if the transfer has actually worked.

I bet it is faster than changing out a film magazine, which is a process you don't want your AC or second AC rushing through. Nothing worse than fogged film, it happened to me once. And of course you have multiple cards and it won't slow down your shoot. And this transfer sounds fast as hell so it will be no big deal to do a card download between setups.

Which brings up a point. The role of AC almost becomes one of a "data wrangler" as one of his/her tasks. I guess you guys probably already know that.

BTW, Engadget showed a 125 Gig SD card proto on their site.

Cheers.

[Jiri Bakala]

So if the transfer to a HD is so fast, what do ou do if you are shooting for a client and need them to walk away from the shoot with the footage? How fast is the transfer to the XDCAM disk and do you have to go through a computer?

[Craig Seeman]

The ideal would be a "field" XDCAM recorder that would work sans computer. Pop the card in and copy to disc.

I believe Sony's XDCAM writers state 2.4x realtime speeds.

Depending on how much data (how many discs you need) one might burn DVDs (or dual layer DVDs) from a laptop. One might extend that thinking to a Blu-Ray burner in the field. I understand there are Blu-Ray burners that can be installed in a laptop for about $1000.

Another (probably more expensive) solution would be to copy the data to slower cheaper cards and sell those to the client.

There's also data copied to a firewire drive attached to the laptop.

The choices may also depend on what's available to the client. While all this seems more (sometimes much more) expensive than tape (except maybe DVDs) the advantage is that you're handing DATA to the client. Some clients still can't playback miniDV (they don't have consumer camera at home!) and other clients are faced with "heck" if you hand them an HDV tape.

In the possible XDCAM HD scenarios it's possible to hand a client data on card/disc, etc.. It would be nice if Sony made the codec freely available if needed for playback.

BTW, except for clients with "pro" connections, handing them an XDCAM disc might not be most convenient for them. I actually saw a Craigslist post yesterday from someone who had something shot on a 350 and was handed an XDCAM disc. They were looking for someone with the ability to transfer the disc to something they could use.

Originally Posted by Jiri Bakala

So if the transfer to a HD is so fast, what do ou do if you are shooting for a client and need them to walk away from the shoot with the footage? How fast is the transfer to the XDCAM disk and do you have to go through a computer?