CF Transfer Speed to Final Cut is Fast!
 

Finally tried the FCP plugin for M2T devices the other day and I was extremely impressed by the transfer speed. 21 minutes of 1080i footage took about 2 minutes and 30 seconds to transfer into FCP using the 8GB CF card that came from Sony.

Wow, now I really want to get the CF recording unit. That is amazing. I can't wait until they start selling them individually. Thanks for the encouraging news.

Was this a 300x card? Which I believe equates to 45MBs (360Mbs) max? Your figures equate to better than 8x real time, or better than 200Mbs, so I'm assuming it must be - a 133x card should "only" manage 160Mbs max.

Can I also ask how you were reading it, and to what sort of drives, as I have found this to be more of a bottleneck than card performance by itself. (May even have been the limiting factor here.) I'd also be very interested what sort of speed you'd get from a (much cheaper) 133x card - are you able to test that?

That's awesome. I'm buying one of those cf units for my A1 once it's available individually, it's been pretty cool so far.

It was a 300x card, I'll try a 133x as soon as I have some free time (hopefully Monday). I was using the actual CF unit to do the transfer with (firewire). The destination was a 3ware Sidecar unit 4 drive array.

Somebody else here timed the transfer of a file, to computer, using a 133X CF card. He said he transferred 70 minutes of HDV video in 23 minutes:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...274#post837274

Wow, that's fantastic. My review of several cards was posted on another forum - techthoughts . org - and it's amazing how different the speeds are and variations that everyone will get, all highly dependent upon the transfer method to the computer.

Did you transfer via 1394 using the CF drive?

Thanks, but we're then introducing a lot more variables (transfer device, hard drive speed etc) which is why it would be a very valid test for Daniel to use *the same setup* to see how a 133x card performs. His previous tests already show that given a high performance card, his drives etc can handle more than the theoretical max (approx160Mbs) of a 133x card. *IF* all the performance of the card could be used (unlikely) that would allow 6x downloads, or about 3 1/2 mins cf 2 1/2mins.

I suspect a lot of Daniels good performance figures may come as much from a good hard drive array as card speeds. What RAID is that set for, Daniel?

It was 4 Seagate 250GB 7200rpm drives in a RAID 0 setup. That raid usually sustains about 180/Megabytes a second transfer rate, also it is connected through a dedicated PCIe hardware raid controller.

Like I said as long as I can find a 133x to use at the store on Monday I'll do a quick test to compare the speeds.

Of course even if its 1/4 the speed of the 306X I'd still be very happy.

Very interesting. Check out the review I did - the numbers are so different than yours. The variation is quite interesting, even so much as one informal test I did (edit-related) that took twice realtime speed, which is the opposite of what it should be.

how did you guys use Log & Capture to grab straight m2t files? I've figured out how to treat it as regular footage off the CF device, but haven't figured out the fast download method that you guys have. I can just drag & drop the m2t files, but that doesn't help out too much. Thanks!

I am retarded, figured out it was log & transfer, so much for reading :)

Add me to the list of amazed transfer speeds. Setup:

- MacBook Pro (5400 RPM HDD)
- CF Unit connected via FireWire 400
- Transcend 133x 32gb CF

Transfers were blazing. I was transferring roughly 5min files at about 25-35 seconds a piece. This is pretty amazing considering that they're ready to rock with FCP right away. I am a very happy camper.

I posted something like this in another thread, but it seems appropriate here. I have a PC with 7200RPM drives. Using the Firewire method, I transferred a full 32GB CF card (146 minutes) in 18 minutes.