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

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

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 Mike & Tommy & Dan:
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.

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-

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-....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

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 and ExpressCard CF reader I can dump files at 90 MB/sec; I don't think FireWire could be faster :)

PiotrHi 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

Hmm...

minDV tape aside (we're talking tapeless here), we can simultaneously record HD on the EX1, and the highest quality 50 Mbps 4:2:2 IMX SD on the nanoFlash...

Now, how about that?

:)

Piotr

Isn't IMX Mpeg? How are you editing that?

John

Isn't IMX Mpeg? How are you editing that?

John

John, while I'm aware the "anti-MPEG" school exists, the EX1 as well as the nanoFlash is all about MPEG, so what's odd about IMX that you're seeing?

I can edit it just as easily as the HD mxf's, using Sony Vegas Pro...

Piotr

I am not familiar with using IMX files. Are you saying that Vegas will import them as IMX, and they may then be edited like DV AVI on the Vegas Timeline and subsequently rendered to Mpeg 2 for DVD?

Is that correct?

What I am looking for is hardware down conversion to SD from the EX1, and then the ability to import the SD video into Vegas just like I can do with DV.

John

Yes - the IMX can be dropped on Vegas timeline with no probs. It edits fine, and of course renders out to whatever format you need.

But since we are in a nanoFlash thread: it also can record in an MPEG-2 mode (both SD and HD), ready to go straight onto DVD/BD. You could use this if you're scared by IMX (but of course, you'll be loosing higher bitrate and 4:2:2).

So, if you need good hardware conversion, you can record HD on the EX1 while outputting SD to the nanoFlash. Alternatively, you can record HD on both, and then later on simply play the files back from the camera while recording SD to the nanoFlash. Of course, in both cases you need to set your EX1's SDI appropriately.

Piotr

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. permanently in the device in some production situations. This would also be true with the Flash XDR.
Hi Mark,
What do you mean, to put 1 hour 10b 422 Uncompressed stuff in 128GBs?
Rafael

The IMX is far much better than DV (422, Intraframe) and as easy to edit.
I think all the NLEs/platforms support it.
Rafael

Thanks Piotr,

Are you using an HD monitor with it while recording SD on the Nano? How are you hooking it up?

Thanks,

John

Thanks Piotr,

Are you using an HD monitor with it while recording SD on the Nano? How are you hooking it up?

Thanks,

John

Good question, John - my Marshall monitor is hooked to the nanoFlash HDMI-out, and that of course doesn't output SD... My Marshall doesn't have an SDI input.

So, the only solution is monitor straight from the camera, using Component or Composite. Doesn't look nice and is difficult to focus, but I do it so rarely that I can live with it.

But I guess we're getting slightly off-topic in this thread :)


Piotr