dominic, i just spent $400 to get new heads put on my xl1s... the footage i lost at the shoot can't be replaced... don't anybody try telling me that tape is reliable.

coming from an i.t. background, i can also say that tape formats come and go far too often... right now i'm sitting on a bunch of precious hi-8 footage that i don't know what to do with, it needs to be copied off somewhere before the tape itself completely falls apart... and the $5k sony 9850 hi-8 tape deck just took a nose dive.

several years ago i got a frantic call from an old co-worker who desperately needed to restore a dos-based tape... they had lost track of the computer software it was made on, but it probably wouldn't have helped anyway, because nothing runs on dos anymore... i suggested that he pay big $$ to send it to a data restoration service.

what you will be using for long-term storage of your p2/hdd hd footage are cheap hard drives, and the new dvd hd discs, which will be available in quantity within two years... the deck will plug into a pc just like the dvd burners we have now, you'll be able to use it for data storage or as a master copy of your production.

In the old days archives of any kind was static. You spooled something to a tape, and the big issue was to make sure that the data you recorded remained unchanged.

But it is not so anymore in the IT-world of today. Data in any archive is alive. Meaning that they got metadata assigned to them and they can be transformed to another format as need be. One example is plain Word documents on a storage server. Lets say you changed your wordprocessor. Then what about the older documents? How do you make sure that you can read them? When you restore an older document because you need it, then it a baad time to discover that your old documents and your new wordprocessing program are incompatible. The solution for this is to have the storage subsystem to convert all documents as a background batch process.

The same goes for video. Larger files - yes. Much larger files - indeed. But storage and processing power is getting cheeper by the minute.

So it is possible to build a videostorage system, that could convert your HD to Mpeg4/uncompressed/MPEG2/... And based on metadata convert older projects to a suitable archive format and unload it to DVDs. My old pc was doing exactly that for me. Using Cleaner and a 160 GB USB2-harddisk it worked in the backgrund converting my raw takes to highbandwith MPEG2. Right now it is a Linux-server, but that is another story.

But the morale of all this is that standard fileformats is very important, and paired with metadata it is possible to keep data alive. It might be that it is ones and zeroes we are keeping on the disk, but it is images we are storing.

Sorry I have been really busy this last week. Let me clarify this. The Firewire needs an intellignet reception like a Firestore, and they are working on something. The USB port will offload the cards, but it does not stream to the USB port, it is only file transfer. This is much different that what is the interpretation here. Sorry I didn't catch this sooner.

The iPod was a file transfer, the iPod is not fast enough for capture.

Best regards,

Jan

Jan, i originally got that news off another board...my fault for spreading it I guess, but I did think it was true at the time.

Anyhow, it's already been clarified, I don't think anyone is under this confusion anymore (although it would be nice, if you could pull it off).

Thanks.

I need tape. I have over 300 dv tapes with old concert footage. I record shows and weddings and do not just edit and distribute, I archive the concerts as well. I might need a few hundred terabytes of hard drive space, much more in HD. I can't afford a hard drive for every gig.

IMNSHO, if Panasonic cares to sell this camera to consumers or prosumers, they will need an HD capable recording tape drive. Whether it means coming out with a more robust tape that can handle the bandwidth, then so be it. Myself and others cannot go the P2 or hard drive route as it's just way too expensive and an inconvenience to be switching memory cards, whether P2 or compact flash.

Also, do we already have computers capable of editing that bandwidth? What about distribution, where is Blu Ray or whatever other recording option? At least with the JVC, I'll be able to go to DVHS, not even sure if the Sony FX1 records to DVHS.

I am not sure about this move away from tape, in fact I believe the need for tape is greater as the bandwidth of the medium increases, as far as I see, there is no alternative. With HD material streaming at such high rates 100MB/sec or whatever it is, I believe tape storage will be more crucial. If not tape storage, then some Blu Ray style optical disk recording format that isn't too expensive but more along the current price of DVDs/tapes and if not that cheap let's say around $25/1hr tape or disk. I hope Canon is listening.

Seems my skepticism was warranted after all.

This is one case where I wish I was wrong, that feature would have made the HVX200 a no-brainer.

Still will be a very nice camera (especially when P2 prices come down), but Firestore drives are usually in the $15 - $20 per GB range, where normal external drives (even very fast ones) are less than $1/GB. I would imagine Focus would want to design a 160GB drive for the high bitrate of DVCProHD (to cover "all-day" shooting, or roughly 3 hours of footage), which would probably put a Firestore designed for the HVX200 in the $2,500 range. Hope I'm wrong though.

Ben

Don't count the AG-HVX200 out yet Ben.

Jan is just talking about the HD out FW. I am sure there are going to be some people trying cards that go into the PCMCIA slot that have a ribbon or other output to a Hard Drive. I have seen it for DSLR cameras where they stick a dummy card in and the data travels out external.

Plus, there are some brand new PCMCIA HD's that can sustain easily 40mbs for the 24p 720 and I am sure more as well.

So stick in there, the HVX will have many options.

You could always wait for Canon. I think 2009 for their HDV cam. Just a Joke Canon.....:-)


Here are some ARTICLES in case you haven't read them on the HVX and HD100u!

(1) : Read by 1,013 people in little under 64 hours.
DO AG-HVX200'S DREAM OF OPTICAL ENLIGHTENMENT
WELL , MAYBE NOT YET. BUT.............

http://www.pbase.com/aghvx200/do_hvx...ream_of_lenses

(2)
JVC GY-HD100u and It's Second Coming
Will JVC realize they have a chance for the gold medal or just settle for the bronze.

http://www.pbase.com/aghvx200/pappasarts_entertainment_

http://www.hdvinfo.net/articles/jvcprohd/pappas5.php


Michael pappas
http://www.Pbase.com/Arrfilms

Good to have the clarification, but possibly unfortunate news. Firestore MUST make whatever solution they have, use interchangeable drives. Otherwise we get into the problem of handing stuff off after a shoot. As people have tried to convince us all, handing over a hard drive is probably the way to go now with P2, but if we have to hand over an expensive Firestore, then it becomes a problem. Of course, we can copy via USB as Jan has mentioned which is nice, but the speeds on USB2 aren't that good and if we have to DUB after the shoot, then it's more downtime. One solution would be if the camera allowed dubbing off AND recording to P2 at the same time. So you could dump one P2 card while the other was being recorded to. Of course, this would have to be faster than realtime, or you're in trouble when the other one runs out.

Jan, do you know if this will be a feature?


Aaron

Keep in mind what's being said here -- you *can* use off-the-shelf hard disks, as cheap as they get. You just can't stream directly to them.

The FireStore product will be designed for those who need to capture long takes continuously, instantly. It has the ability to capture the firewire stream and write it directly to disk. It will be a specially designed unit that supports the high data transfer rate, manages files, names them, etc.

But the camera itself can transfer the contents of a P2 card onto any cheap USB2 hard disk (including the ipod). So you shoot to the card for a while, and then between takes you plug in your USB drive and offload it. Using that method you could store about 8 hours of 720/24p footage for under $200. You could use your ipod to store DVCPRO-HD data. You could edit directly from the ipod or from the cheap USB2 hard disk. You could deliver that hard disk to the producer at the end of the shoot, rather than handing over a box of undigitized tapes.

So you can do both. You just won't be able to capture directly to the cheap drive -- unless someone develops an intermediary solution; something like a FireStore that doesn't include a built-in drive but rather writes to external USB drives.

there are current alternatives that may help... right now, for instance, you could transcode everything you shot into cineform, or canopus hq vbr, and save a huge chunk of storage space... and i bet that your footage would still look better than if it was shot in raw hdv.

when blue ray hd dvd hits, it'll hold 25 gigs per layer, and the spec goes up to 200 gig disks... 100 mb/sec = 6 gigs/minute(?), i guess that it won't help much for long-form work :-(

aaron, the usb 2.0 bitrate spec is faster than the 1394 firewire bitrate spec.

Hi Dan, yeah I know they are faster than Firewire, what I really meant was that dubbing altogether will take time. I guess it's not tooooo bad at the moment. If you have 2 8GB cards, and can, say get the footage off at about 300Mbps (After drive speed is taken into account - I have not seen super speeds with external USB/Firewire drives),it will take you around 4 minutes to dub off. This isn't a huge amount of time I guess, but with tapes we just hit a button and out of pops, and hand it off. Also if we were HDD recording straight out of the unit then there is no dub time. But what really matters is that the issue of dub time will get worse when the card sizes increase. For instance, when we have 128GB cards, we have 16x the storage and so that dub time goes from 4 minutes to about an hour - even if the cards were 32 or 64 GB we're getting a little worrisome. We would then have to look at another workflow - and that's where I'm hoping the Firestore solution has interchangeable drives.

I'm fine, cause the sort of work I do I can spare the time, but I'm concerned that in the "real" world this might become an issue.

It's weird that Panasonic will include firmware and hardware to support straight copying to USB2.0 but not just give us straight recording to a Firewire drive.

Anyway, I'm still getting one :)
Aaron

It's a lot less than that ... it's under 1 gigabyte per minute. So a 25-gig disk will store somewhere under half an hour of footage.

yeah, that sounds more reasonable! so much for my math skills, lol... a couple of single-layer hd disks for an hour of footage shouldn't be a problem.

think about the time involved with capturing a tape to the hard drive, and you'll see that solid state memory is actually a big advantage... it should be faster than real-time tape capture.

i'm with ya on the lack of a firestore-type of capture solution, but jan did say that they are working on it.

get a couple cards. upload one while you shoot with the other.

really confused about all of this
 

Hi Folks;

Read the whole seven pages of post about other options for the HVX but am still confused:/ And I know this is an older thread but it just caught my attention.

I followed the two links about other solutions to the P2 cards and got really excited because of the prices but then ...

What I am unclear on is this: can a seperate hd record directly from the firewire port or not? One of the links I followed said the HD was firewire powered, well, I've got a firewire port. So...?

I am a current Panny user (DVC-80) who wants to go tapeless NOW. The HVX, if it has all of these alternate forms of capture besides the P2 actually happen, really interests me.

But I think it was Barry who said they are for file transfers not capture, why is that? One of the links for the Lacie drive (I believe) said I can capture avi files. Being a Sony Vegas user, that's what I need. But then does that mean the HD won't capture the files even though it can store them?

Can anyone tell me what exactly is being output via my firewire connection? What is "raw footage"? Logic says since it is a digital format it must be output in a way that can be digitally understood. And since different NLE use different file systems, it isn't logical that every camera outputs them all. So, it must output a base format that would be readable for FCP, Vegas, Avid, Pinnacle, etc.

Obviously I am really confused. Has anyone actually hooked up a firewire powered HD to their existing camera and tried capturing this way?

Firestore's are nice and, if that is the only solution to going tapeless now then so be it, but if there are other alternatives for people on a tighter budget, I am all for it.

Third party HDs may be less robust but I would baby it just as I baby my DVC-80 so that isn't such an issue with me. Price is my issue. And I am chomping at the bit to go tapeless at some of the prices I have seen for mobile HD.

Anybody have any answers for my rambling question?

There are two types of protocols that a firewire connection can use: AVC, or SBP2. AVC is the protocol used during streaming. That's when a camera or deck sends its compressed DV or DVCPRO50 or HDV or DVCPRO-HD data over the firewire, with no idea whether there's anything attached on the other end. If there *is* something attached, it's up to that device to know how to record what it's seeing. AVC also provides for transmitting transport commands, such as "stop", "play", "record", etc.

SBP2, on the other hand, is a file transfer protocol. That's what your computer and hard disk use to talk to each other, when you're using a firewire hard disk.

The two are not the same, and can't be used in the same way. You can use one or the other, but not both.

So no, you can't plug in an SBP2-compatible hard disk (meaning, any external firewire drive) and record to it from any camera. That just doesn't exist. No DV camera, or HDV camera, or DVCPRO-HD camera, can do that.

What the HVX offers is the first camera that CAN use SBP2 protocol, and can transfer files and control a drive. But it can't do that when recording video! It does that in playback mode. So if you've recorded something on a P2 card, you can switch to playback mode and plug in an off-the-shelf hard disk, and copy the P2 card contents over to the hard disk (and, perhaps, copy from the hard disk to the card? Haven't thought about that one yet).

This is far more control than any other firewire camera has ever had. It's still a step short of what we were all hoping, which was direct streaming control of off-the-shelf hard disks, but that just can't happen yet. For streaming, the camera outputs AVC protocol. And AVC protocol requires that the device on the other end have "intelligence", so it knows what to do with the data that's being sent its way. Which means, you need a Firestore type of drive, which actually intercepts the AVC commands and then uses its internal computer to convert the data into a file system that it writes to the drive.

It is entirely possible that some clever engineer will make a firewire-less firewire drive type of thing. A piece of hardware that understands AVC protocol, captures the firewire streaming data, and then converts it to SBP2 for writing to a USB2 or firewire drive. But any such products have yet to be announced, that I know of. A laptop computer can serve the purpose, but is obviously a bit bulky!

The HVX outputs AVC, which means that any computer that understands DVCPRO-HD data will be able to capture the firewire feed directly. The proposed forthcoming HD Rack, for example, or Avid Express HD, or FCP-HD, or Canopus Edius, or any other editing program that understands DVCPRO-HD should be able to capture the stream off the firewire port. The AVC stream can also be captured by an AJ-HD1200A DVCPRO-HD tape deck, for direct recording to tape. And it's there and available for enterprising hardware developers to develop new solutions as well.

The SBP2 protocol gives the camera the ability to control firewire (or USB2) drives, and copy files to them. You can shoot on P2 cards, dump the footage to a cheap $60 external hard disk, and hand that hard disk over to the client at the end of the shoot day -- no need for a laptop computer, no need to buy tape, you give 'em a pre-digitized hard disk that they can plug into their computer and edit immediately (and it's less expensive than high-def tape!)

It would be nice if you could record directly to the hard disk, rather than having to record to the P2 card first, but that doesn't appear to be the way it'll turn out. However, final specifications are always subject to change, and Panasonic is quite aware that we'd love that feature, so if it's possible, they'll do it. If it's not possible, or not reliable (after all, they have no control over what type of slow/cheap hard disk the user may plug in!) then they won't do it.

People think that manufacturers don't listen to customers. They do but main objective is not satisfy customer but optimize profits, which makes sense, since competition is doing same thing. Another thing is keep product development in secrecy so your competition not find out what you're up to. NDA don't protect this secrecy. There is too much industrial espionage going on.

There was affair in Israel recently where large companies were planting trojan horses in competitior's systems. Some security company did this for fee, then creator of the system fled to London with bunch other people.

Radek