Portable HD-SDI Recording Options
 

Okay,

So lots of us want to be able to record HD-SDI out of the Canon without having to be confined to a studio with a high-end deck, or a BlackMagic card sitting in a 20lb tower PC.

We agree that recording a fully uncompressed HD-SDI signal on something portable is not practical due to needing an array of some sort.

We also agree that some compression is needed, but a compression that is much higher than what HDV is putting on tape, but less than 1.45Gbps to a RAID array.

So let's put our thinking caps on. What are some ideas - is it a modifed FireStore that has a tricked out compressor in it, or maybe a laptop configured with a HD-SDI port with Final Cut Pro recording the stream in a DVCPRO50 format? Something you could put in a backpack, or could sling over your shoulder like the external VHS recorders back in the 80's?

I suspect that Canon or someone has to be planning the release of something like this that can be transported easily and record higher than HDV levels through that tempting little SDI port. So as someone else on the board stated "I shoot in the woods, not a studio" can go out an caputre nearly-untouched footage.

In the meantime, I bet we can come up with a clever MacGyver way to take SDI on the road.

-Brad

here's my solution, yours may very. Go out and buy like 20 4 gig ipod nano's then buy a black magic card and work out a processor. tThrow all of thsoe things together and write a program so that you can distribute the information across the nano's and viola, you've got 80gig's of storage. which should last like what? 4 minutes of raw or something? power off of a couple of dionic batteries...

maybe Avid will come out with Mojo-2 with Sdi inputs that encodes in their DnXhd codec that can already be editted in most Avid NLE programs



-Rand

Here's my suggestion

http://videosystems.com/e-newsletter...tenders092205/

Grass Valley Infinity Recording System
 

hey guys thought I might chime in about what I have found so far for an HD-SDI solution. The Grass Valley Infinity Recording system. Looks to be pretty a pretty sweet little system for sub $10k, but of course you will still need a nig big Array to dump footage to.

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/a...e.jsp?id=34587

http://www.thomsongrassvalley.com/ne..._Industry.html

It shoudl be available the 1st quarter of 2006.

I am interested in purchasing one of these for myself. If any of you are interested in this product please contact me at EVS. And I can work to see if we can maybe get these when they come out on a big order.

For raids I like this :

http://www.peripheralstorage.com/raid/fc_sata2.htm

up to 4Gbps and 16 Bay.

I also have yet to see if i like the DRaid but hopefully I can test it out soon.



James

Expensive, but interesting
 

This device is 5 lbs, and can hold up to 16GB it seems, and offload stuff via ethernet.

They use it with Varicam for steadycam work, and greenscreen stuff...

Kind of expensive, but hey price is no object, right? =) Shoot some stuff to the unit, hand it off to your PA to download on the laptop drive, while you're shooting footage to another one?

Or beam it wirelessly off the unit over a Super MultiGigabit Extreme-Geee Ethernet Card to your laptop in your backpack? =)

http://millimeter.com/mag/BaytechCin...422/index.html

http://production.digitalmedianet.co...jsp?id=27354-0

http://www.digitalvideo.de/dvc/htm/e...M_30.05.05.pdf


-Brad

CineRAM
 

So I have done some research on the CineRAM, the 8GB entry level version starts at $18,645.00 not sure about the 16Gb version. I'm speaking with some poeple , but the Baytech Cinema Site is down and the contact number I found is no longer in service so that isn't a good sign.

James

Cool, maybe I'll get one of those and then get an XLH1 as an accessory for it.
:)

CineRAM Availability
 

Yeah I was having a hard time trying to find current info on it too.. I got the impression that the company that made it had gone bye-bye or something. The press release for it was like a year ago.. something isn't adding up current day, I'll dig for some more info as well.

-Brad

8GB? Does it employ some sort of compression? 8GB would only get you about 45 seconds of recording time if it's recording uncompressed HD-SDI from an XL H1.

In one of those links it said it was available at Abel Cine Tech, but a search of Abel's site doesn't show anything for CineRam...

Baytech Cinema
 

So I got the official word Baytech Cinema is out of Business. Bummer

:(
James

I wonder if they have any old product that they want to unload...

Baytech Gone
 

Man that is unfortunate that they have gone out of business, I was afraid that might be the case. Yeah it would be cool if they had a warehouse full of these things for cheap.

Barry - you are right, at 185MB/sec it would eat it up in about 45 seconds.. as far as I could tell it was uncompressed - so yeah that is kinda short.. I read somewhere about 16GB.. but even then.. a minute and a half? Not very good either.. oh well doesn't look like we have to worry much about this avenue since they are no longer around.

Keep searching folks..

-Brad

My dream mobile back for the XL H1 would have the following:

. HD-SDI In => DVCPRO HD/50/25 => tapeless recording
. DV/HDV In => tapeless recording
. DVCPRO tapeless recording => HD-SDI Out
. DV/HDV tapeless recording => DV/HDV Out
. swappable off-the-shelf storage (Iomega REV or hard disk drive (HDD))
. battery powerable
. compact, light & weather-resistant
. ~$3K-$5K

The compressed HD-SDI format needs to be a stardard for compatibility with NLEs. Reason I list DVCPRO is that I have Final Cut and Final Cut supports it. If a major player (Canon, etc.) came out with a similar format (tapeless HDV?) and was able to get the major NLEs to support it, that'd work also.

DVCPRO HD's data rate of 100Mbps means you could store
. just over 45 minutes on an Iomega Rev disk
. just over 50 minutes on a 40GB HDD.

Need swappable media to be able to support data volumes between offloads to RAID economically.

Battery power should be compatible with XL H1 battery requirements so you could power both with a brick.

Is this system technically feasible. Is the price feasible? Will someone build it? (Please!?! :) )

Questions:
Can DVCPRO HD handle 1080/30f? Does it need to if the NLE can?
Could Final Cut natively handle 1080/30f DVCPRO HD? I'm a version out but I only see import options of DVCPRO HD 1080i60, 720p60, 720p30, & 720p24.

what about the kinetta magazine? Apparently it stores 110mins of 24fps raw uncompressed 10bit 1080p HD using laptop HDDs... could it be adapted for use with the H1? there wasn't much info on the kinetta website that I could find, but it looks like it just plugs into the kinetta head. In anycase, it's an encouraging proof of concept.

EDIT: ok, it looks like you would just need an HD-SDI to fibre-optic converter to use the kinetta magazine. no idea where you'd find one of those though...

James Rhodes
HD Flash DVR less expensive than CineRAM. James, check this tread:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=52964

i posted this question on direct to disk forum and no1 seems to know.

has anyone made a record to 3.5" hard drive yet? they have SATA2, 500GB drives =). think about that. just 1 drive can give you 456.25GB or roughly 7 and 1/2 hours of hi-def (based on 1GB=1minute). dunno how that converts into uncompressed 1080i. how much does 1080i take up via SDI?

it seems that it's only logical. those firestore solutions only does 80GB.

uncompressed 1080i HS-SDI = 1920x1080x30(frames)x2(bytes= for 8-bit 4:2:2) = 120MBytes/s, about 3 and 4 times the speed a single drive can sustain. 10-bit uncompressed from HD-SDI is 150MBytes/s. It is for this higher data rates CineForm is working with Wafian to build HDSDI compression solutions -- allowing a 500GB drive to store 7 hours of 10-bit data.

but a single hard drive can't sustain 150MB/s. only raid0 and a few hard drives will get you that. you're right... this is why no1's made one yet =). very interesting...

thx for clearing that up.

Which brings us back to the question of whether a single 3.5" drive could be configured in a battery-powered device to capture to a compressed format like Prospect HD. If I understand correctly, 10-bit Prospect HD requires less than 20 MB/sec sustained throughput, so theoretically well within the capability of today's fast hard drives. I have an external USB2 hard drive with a standard 2.5" laptop drive in it, and that even scores close to 20 MB/sec on one performance test while running off the power in the USB cable. How hard could it be to build something based on a 3.5" drive which can sustain 20 Mb/sec reliably?

how does prospect HD look in quality vs. HDV? i mean if it's roughly the same, HDV takes care of most of those application. the focal point of HD SDI would be uncompressed cap, right?

Prospect HD is a higher quality format than HDV in several ways, but at a data rate much more manageable than uncompressed HD. Avid has a similar codec for similar reasons: uncompressed HD is simply too much data to manage effectively for most projects, but HDV is too compressed to be considered robust enough for demanding video work. With HD-SDI you can capture to a variety of formats all the way up to uncompressed HD, plus on the XL-H1 you can opt to record to HDV if you don't need anything more than that.

meaning less compression artifacts? blocky pixels?

Well it's a 10bit codec for starters, so better than 8bit DVCProHD and because it's frame based you can edit more simply than HDV native )it's much higher data rate than HDV native). There's a thread in HD100 forum where David Newman CEO of Cineform has chimed in.

Looking at their website tests etc it looks a very viable option to uncompressed.