Any experience with long LIVE events with EX1 or EX3?

[Boris Missirkov]

To refresh the topic a bit: I have a client who needs continuous 24-hour recording of an event. There will be one EX3 locked on tripod, 2 8Gb SxS cards, no breaks allowed. Period.

I see that most of the people here have had no problem swapping cards during recording, but does anyone have any experience with such a long shoot?

Any possible issues in ingesting a 24-hours-long single shot?

Thanks a lot in advance,

Boris

[Garrett Low]

Boris,

I have never done 24 hours with my EX3 but I did do a 10+ hour continuous shoot swapping out cards at times when a little bit of movement wouldn't be noticed. I left the door to the card slots open so that it I could get to them with the least amount of touching on the camera. No problems pulling the files together.

One long boring conference though.

-Garrett

[Olof Ekbergh]

Originally Posted by Boris Missirkov

To refresh the topic a bit: I have a client who needs continuous 24-hour recording of an event. There will be one EX3 locked on tripod, 2 8Gb SxS cards, no breaks allowed. Period.

I see that most of the people here have had no problem swapping cards during recording, but does anyone have any experience with such a long shoot?

Any possible issues in ingesting a 24-hours-long single shot?

Thanks a lot in advance,

Boris

I use a NanoFlash often on long days of interview setups where we sometimes record for up to 8hrs at a time. We do break for lunch though.

The NF is great in conjunction with the SxS cards as you can use up to 2 128GB CFcards almost 7 hrs (at 35mb/s) w/o swapping cards or touching anything. And then you can switch to SxS recording when swapping CF cards. Then back to NF never touching the camera. Leave TC to TOD. And it is easy to reassemble. The NF records the EXcodec .movs so file handling is very easy.

I use remote rec button and the NF can be anywhere like sitting on a table. It makes the swaps really low stress.

I often record both to the NF and on SxS just to be safe, if I am only using one camera. Though I have never had a problem with CF cards or SxS cards in thousands of hrs.

I have never had a problem with over heating of EXcams even in all day recording sessions outside in 100F temps.

[Keith Moreau]

I once had a shoot similar to that with 2 of the 8GB SxS cards back before the SDHC adapters were out. I had a MacBook pro with PC Card slot and downloaded them every 1/2 hour. I did it but it was tedious. I would suggest at least getting a couple of the MxR or MxM SDHC to SxS adapters and putting a couple of 32GB in them, which is what I do now. The swapping will then happen every 2 hours rather than every 1/2 hour.

-Keith

[Boris Missirkov]

Thanks a lot for the input, guys!

Actually, we've got 16Gb cards with our camera, not 8 Gb (my mistake), so swapping will be necessary once an hour, not every half an hour. It's about recording a 24-hour art performance in an improvised studio setting, so taking care of the camera at regular intervals will not be a problem (but renting additional equipment is).

My main concern is the length of the final clip. Having a single 24-hour clip is a conceptual condition of the artist, but I'm wondering how Clip Browser and Final Cut will handle it. (Of course, the best way to know is to make a test in real-life conditions, but I'm not really inclined to spend an entire day and night swapping cards one additional time :) If you know of any possible issues, I will try to convince the artist to stop the recording for a second, say, every 6 hours.

[Marcus Durham]

For conferences consider the MxM hard disk solution. I run mine with an 80gb SSD. You get approx 280 minutes on a standard EX1 (EX1R's can support larger disks).

The wonderful thing is you don't have to faff around with cards or worry that the slot switching will work. If you have E-SATA in your machine the transfer is fast as well.

I couldn't go back to fumbling around with cards at the back of a dark conference hall or messing around afterwards joining the clips up. Just seems so backwards.

For the 24 hour shoot you may have to do the card swap solution. Although frankly it makes me wince just thinking of it. I'd be more inclined to take the SDI output and record to a separate device with battery backup which can be trusted with huge files. Then you won't even need to touch the camera.

[Gints Klimanis]

My EX1 shot (I was not the camera operator) a nearly four event with two 32 GByte Sandisk SDHCs in full quality mode. I bought a pair of the 32GBs during the BH Photo blowout earlier this year. Now, a 32GB Sandisk Extreme Pro with a 90 MByte/second read/write speed goes for about $130 .

I've had problems (Media Restore issue, but no footage lost) with the old Sandisk Extreme III 15 MB/sec cards in my EX1, so I leaned on my Transcend Class 6 16GB Green stripes more often. When I compared the 15 MB/second version with my newer 45 MByte/second Sandisks, I did not notice a difference in the time the green writing light turned off.

I wouldn't shoot in HDV anymore. Just buy another good SDHC card, but I like Marcus's suggestion of the MxM hard disk recorder. I should have purchased that in retrospect.

Marcus, does the EX1 green recording light turn off faster than for SDHC?

[Marcus Durham]

Originally Posted by Gints Klimanis

Marcus, does the EX1 green recording light turn off faster than for SDHC?

Depends on the SDHC in question. The old Transcend's I used to use (which were the cause of many problems) could take as long as 5 seconds to clear in the adaptors I used to use. But a modern ATP or Sandisk Class 10 in a MXM adaptor takes a couple of seconds.

From memory the hard disk recorder takes a couple of seconds. The limiting factor is the USB bus, not the media (remember I'm recording to SSD which is very fast indeed).

The downside with the hard disk unit is that it's really only of use when the camera is on sticks. While you can use it handheld, it really does tend to get in the way. But for long form recording at conferences or presentations it really is a godsend.

[Gints Klimanis]

Marcus, it would be good to know if you are able to measure a difference between the SSD and SDHC.

I agree the USB bus is the limit, but some flash cards data writing is delayed by up to 1/3 second, usually as they fill up or age. I'm also wondering if using a higher capacity SSD will eliminate such delays as they contain much larger write buffers than current flash cards.

"The downside with the hard disk unit is that it's really only of use when the camera is on sticks."

Since I'm using a Nanoflash with the Sony EX1 on a shoulder mount quite often, the additional wire for the SSD is not such a big deal.

[Olof Ekbergh]

Just one question, maybe silly.

But who is going to watch anything 24 hrs long?

I do use M100 to edit long form projects, with no problems. But the longest piece I ever made was just short of 2 hrs. No problem handling hundreds of hours of footage and lots of different versions and hundreds of cuts in a program with as many as 7 layers of video and 12 or more audio channels. I use lots of compound clips. M100 is really great for long form.

I have done this with FCP7 as well and it was not nearly as smooth. But it works OK. Just slow, lots of rendering as M100 has no rendering needs at all while editing, only on output to a file. It plays out to tape perfectly w/o rendering.

I think FCPX will get there in a while. It is not there yet but it seems real promising. Once the Pro monitoring solution is solved I think it will be fast and capable.

There is also Avid. It works great for these types of projects. I just prefer M100 at this time because I have used it for 1 1/2 decades and know it really well. I am still allergic to Premier because of all the old problems with audio sync, I know this may be fixed now but it has bitten me badly in the past.

Another comment is why just record on one camera. I almost always shoot with 2 or 3 especially when it is a long interview or event/lecture, it makes the cuts much easier in editing and can save your a** when technical problems arise.

[Gints Klimanis]

olof wrote "But who is going to watch anything 24 hrs long?"

It's an issue of capture. Have you ever had any gigs that involved a two week stay in a foreign country ? I remember a desperate "chimping" (deletion process) of DSLR photos during my two week stay in Kashmir during the 2006 earthquake relief effort. I brought a dozen DV tapes, and given the limited supply, I shot less video with the thought that I would really need the remaining 1/3 tapes for something great.

Don't overlook that flash media and SSDs operate more reliably when they are not fully-written. Even an iPod has scarily-slow write performance when there is only 10% space left.

When recording space is not limited, you are not constrained by the capacity of the recording media.

[Dave Sperling]

Originally Posted by Olof Ekbergh

Just one question, maybe silly.

But who is going to watch anything 24 hrs long?

Hi Olof,
I was recently in Boston and there was a wonderful 24 hour piece being shown at the art museum there (don't remember which museum, but it was on Huntington Ave. right next to the NEU campus) called 'The Clock'

I stuck my head in to take a look, and ended up staying about twice as long as I thought I would. The great thing is that if I go back I'll probably see a different part of it! The idea wasn't to spend 24 hours there, but the concept required a full 24 hr cycle.

It was a concept piece showing the use of time in various movies, but I thought it ws really well done, and well worth looking at.

MEANWHILE --
On the technical side ---
I have some doubts about the idea of constantly recycling the same cards and having a single camera there -- because I only trust cards that have been deleted or formatted in the camera, not in a computer, and particularly not in a mac where the computer may try to create a 'trashes' folder with your deleted data, thus reducing the amount of time available on the card. If you plan to use a workflow like this, you'd better do a test of it that goes on for at least 12 hours...
If you have enough cards available to just keep recording them one after the next, that should work best. Your main issues are then:
- Camera jiggle removing and inserting cards - make sure you hav a good tripod and are mounted firmly.
- Power - Run on AC with a battery backup if power is available. Otherwise, use one of the dual battery anton bauer adapters and a couple of brick batteries (with adapters to get to the EX), Bricks can be swapped individually without bringing down the system. We used a system like this for a 72 hr time lapse with the EX3.

On the post side --
How is this being shown? - Are they showing it off a hard drive playback system? Will that system allow for playing a series of files without breaks in between? Conversely will the playback system choke on a file that is large enough to cover the full 24 hours? I'm guessing that a single 24hr file in BluRay format would be <200GB.

Just my musings...
Best of luck with it!