Ok, so the HVX can't stream directly to a firewire drive unless it goes through a laptop or intellignet drive (FS-100).

That's fine... BUT, can the HVX transfer clips directly to a hard drive after recording WITHOUT a laptop, thus acting kind of like the P2 Store? I love the idea of the P2 Store, but I find it a bit hard to justify spending $1800 on a 60gb hard drive. If it was 250 or 500 gb, well... count me in.

Yes it can. After you're done shooting, you can transfer the contents of your P2 cards over to a firewire or USB2 HDD that is directly connected.

The P2 store is a great idea - you can have someone offloading cards while you continue shooting and cycling cards. But $1800 is way too much. For that price, they should give you a "free" 8GB P2 card with it.

Excellent!

I am almost positive that you can only transfer to a "firewire" hard drive from the P2 in the camera. I thought Jan confirmed that the USB port is only for connecting to a PC so the HVX can be mounted by the PC as a drive. I do not believe that the HVX has the logic board on it to control a USB hard drive.

Can anyone verify this?

Yes, you can transfer files to a USB2 *or* Firewire HDD.

Look through the following thread:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...USB+hard+drive

I think we double checked our wording and restated it. Host mode would transfer over 1394 to the iPod, but the camera cannot stream to it.

Best,

Jan

What about USB2? Can it transfer to a USB2 drive in host mode without a PC?
Since the new Ipods are USB2 only they would not work if 1394 is the only protocol that the HVX can transfer across. Old Ipods would. Can you clarify some of this please Jan....Barry.....anyone who knows for sure. I currently have a small portable USB2 drive and was about to undertake the task of finding a new 1394 drive. But if USB2 works for offloading P2 data then I am set for now.

Thanks

Sorry Marty, it only does Host over 1394.

Best,

Jan

According to Barry and others at NAB, USB2 is supported as well. I could swear that Jan confirmed all this a while back. But I guess we'll see if we get further clarification.

As for recording to an ipod, why would you really want to do this? I can put a 7200rpm 100GB 2.5" HDD into an external enclosure with USB2 and Firewire interfaces that can be powered by battery or via the USB/Firewire bus. And it's basically the same size as the 2.5" HDD based ipods and cheaper. Then again, if you already own the ipod and want to use it for extra storage, more power to you. :)

Just to clarify my position. I never planned on using an IPOD at all. I do have a USB2 portable drive that I could use but for months now I have been under the impression that it would not be supported in HOST mode. But recently (in this thread) it was stated that you could use USB2 or 1394 to offload P2 data. So I needed to verify and according to Jan's response it is indeed only 1394.

Again, my references to IPODs was only as a response to people talking about it. references were made about it saying the new IPODs would not work because they are only USB and have no firewire...which only reinforced the 1394 only option.

Beyond all of this, the only attractive thing about an ipod is it's size and battery. I have been looking for a battery operated 2.5 inch 1394 enclosure. If anyone can recommend one that would be great.

Thanks!

thanks Jan - it's always nice to have you check in and straighten things . Kurth

I'm interested as well. Anyone?

Let me make sure I understand -

If I bring my laptop with me, I can stream DVCProHD directly to it via firewire?

Yes, provided you have a video capture application that works with DVCPRO-HD. Using this configuration you wouldn't need any P2 cards at all.

Latest experiments:

When you plug in a drive to the HVX, the first thing it needs to do is format the drive. This is an instantaneous process which basically results in deleting all partitions and rendering the drive as one large unallocated pool. Because of this, YOU DO NOT WANT TO USE AN IPOD. Use the ipod as an ipod, all is well and good. But you don't want to use an ipod as an external firewire drive for offloading P2 cards. If you format the iPod as a drive to be used by the HVX, it will wipe out everything you have stored on your iPod (including the operating system).

So basically, use a dedicated hard disk allocated specifically for the task. When you tell it to copy a card over, it creates a new partition on the hard disk equivalent to the size of the card, and then automatically copies the card contents over. Each card gets its own partition. And, it can perform a "copy-with-verify" so that after it's done, it reads the contents back and compares them against the P2 card's files, to make sure that the copy worked properly.

Finding a battery-powered firewire enclosure has proved difficult, which is why people keep coming back to the ipod idea. But there's an alternative that's extraordinarily cheaper: you can use a USB On-The-Go drive. I got a cheap little $35 enclosure from MWave which is USB2 On-The-Go, plus has a built-in 1.6-hour lithium-ion battery. Put a laptop drive in it and you'll have a portable, battery-powered P2 offloading system for under $100.

The camera cannot act as a host to a USB device, it can only act as a host to a firewire device. But the USB On-The-Go drives can act as host. So plug the drive into the camera, and push the "copy" button on the drive, and the drive will quaff the contents of the P2 card in slot 1 (or, if there's no card in slot 1, it'll quaff the contents of the card in slot 2). This is a far cheaper, faster, and more rational way to get a battery-powered hard disk than an ipod would be.

Drawbacks are that it doesn't seem that fast, and you don't really get any tangible feedback as to what's going on. When you use the camera as a firewire host you can see menus that tell you what's happening, a bar graph that shows the progress of the copy, and you can perform a limited bit of browsing on the hard drive to see the status of the copied cards. With the USB On-The-Go device, all you get are a couple of flashing LED's, and no way to verify that what you copied is good or not.

The copy speed is dependent on the speed of your hard disk. I have an old Fujitsu 4200RPM 60GB drive in the enclosure now, and it took 9 minutes to copy the contents of a 4GB card. I just ordered a Hitachi 7K100 TravelStar 7200RPM drive for use in this scenario, and I'm expecting it will cut that offload time in half.

I'm wondering if the On-The-Go drive is actually performing a "verify" step. It took 9 minutes to copy a 4GB card, but when I plugged the USB-OTG drive into my desktop and copied the card contents from the USB-OTG drive onto my desktop it only took four minutes. So why did it take 9 to copy from the camera (seeing as the P2 card it's copying from is about twice as fast as my desktop drive)? If it was doing a verify operation, that would explain the additional time it took, as well as give me some more confidence in using this OTG option. Right now I don't know how much I trust it, but I will say it's tantalizing.

I still think a laptop is a far superior offloading device. Second choice would be a self-powered firewire enclosure, but there don't seem to be any battery-powered firewire enclosures on the market anymore. So the USB2 On-The-Go thing looks like it'll work, and it's cheap: with a cheap drive, you're at $100 for a battery-powered 60GB system, with the fastest drive on the market you're looking at $200 for a battery-powered 80GB system.

But let's just rule out the ipod, that's just not a good choice; it's too slow, and if you format its hard disk you lose all the ipod-ness of the ipod, and it costs three to four times as much as a dedicated hard disk system anyway!