The laptop drive is likely the limiting factor, but I don't think it'll really be a 'huge bottleneck'. Modern laptop drives are pretty fast - sustained read/writes in the 50-60MB/s range (http://www.barefeats.com/rosa06.html). That gives us a transfer time of 20 seconds per gig - so maybe three minutes tops for an 8Gb card and six minutes for a 16Gb. If you can't take a 10 minute break per hour of footage shot you should still be fine if you can swap between two cards.

If you want to avoid using the internal drive you can pick up the 250Gb WD Scorpio for ~$200 and a triple-interface WiebeTech ToughTech Mini enclosure for ~$100, use fw800 and have a small, portable, bus-powered drive that'll hold at least 10-12 hours of footage before the transfer rate starts to slow down. In fact, at that price/size you could get two so you have short term backups in the field - maybe even do a portable RAID1.

We transfered some 2 minute long clips to a workstation PC via the USB reader at IBC and timed the transfer. It took between 10 and 15 seconds. I have been using an EX over the last couple of days and the transfer is extremely fast, with short clips it happens so fast you start to wonder if the transfer has actually worked.

I bet it is faster than changing out a film magazine, which is a process you don't want your AC or second AC rushing through. Nothing worse than fogged film, it happened to me once. And of course you have multiple cards and it won't slow down your shoot. And this transfer sounds fast as hell so it will be no big deal to do a card download between setups.

Which brings up a point. The role of AC almost becomes one of a "data wrangler" as one of his/her tasks. I guess you guys probably already know that.

BTW, Engadget showed a 125 Gig SD card proto on their site.

Cheers.

So if the transfer to a HD is so fast, what do ou do if you are shooting for a client and need them to walk away from the shoot with the footage? How fast is the transfer to the XDCAM disk and do you have to go through a computer?

The ideal would be a "field" XDCAM recorder that would work sans computer. Pop the card in and copy to disc.

I believe Sony's XDCAM writers state 2.4x realtime speeds.

Depending on how much data (how many discs you need) one might burn DVDs (or dual layer DVDs) from a laptop. One might extend that thinking to a Blu-Ray burner in the field. I understand there are Blu-Ray burners that can be installed in a laptop for about $1000.

Another (probably more expensive) solution would be to copy the data to slower cheaper cards and sell those to the client.

There's also data copied to a firewire drive attached to the laptop.

The choices may also depend on what's available to the client. While all this seems more (sometimes much more) expensive than tape (except maybe DVDs) the advantage is that you're handing DATA to the client. Some clients still can't playback miniDV (they don't have consumer camera at home!) and other clients are faced with "heck" if you hand them an HDV tape.

In the possible XDCAM HD scenarios it's possible to hand a client data on card/disc, etc.. It would be nice if Sony made the codec freely available if needed for playback.

BTW, except for clients with "pro" connections, handing them an XDCAM disc might not be most convenient for them. I actually saw a Craigslist post yesterday from someone who had something shot on a 350 and was handed an XDCAM disc. They were looking for someone with the ability to transfer the disc to something they could use.

Transfer to XDCAM disks requires the use of the MXF conversion routine that will be included in the new Sony clip browser software. At the moment this only works for SP mode as XDCAM HD only supports 1440x1080. I expect this will get updated in the future. The MP4 to MXF conversion simply re-wraps the MPEG content into an MXF wrapper so happens on the fly. You can copy/convert straight from an SxS card direct to a XDCAM HD disk (using the transfer tool) at between 2x and 3x depending on the xdcam deck used.

Archiving to Blu-ray is a lower cost option and you can keep the full 1920x1080 resolution. Simply burn the root folder from the SxS card to the blu-ray disk and you will retain all the meta data and correct file structure.

For handing off rushes to clients I would recommend USB hard drives until such time as Blu-ray drives become common place. If you stick the Sony Browser Software on the disk as well the client can use that to view (full screen) and log the footage.

Officially it's exactly 100 Megabytes now using the modern base-10 definition, which equals 95.367 "Mebibytes". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megabyte. However, the Windows file manager still uses the base 2 definitions.

Transferring files to an iPod
 

I'm not sure whether this should go under this thread and whether this has already been discussed elsewhere.

Is it possible to transfer video clips from the EX1 to a fifth generation iPod without a pc? I got this idea from this site:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301059

And I also found this needed item since the EX1 has a firewire and not a USB connector:

http://www.eforcity.com/220567.html?...t071015=220567

Theoretically with this connector + an iPod + the EX will lead to file transfer on the field. Or am I missing something? Any feedback on this?

Also there still remains the issue of transferring speed which has to be seen whether it is worth it.

Yes, I think is technically possible use the iPod as a small field storage. You can use the ipod with the Sony USB reader/writer instead the adapter. This reader will come as XDCAM EX accessorie.

That's very interesting... I assumed that there would be no way of offloading without a laptop in the field...

But that would be incredibly cool. Let's hope that the Sony Card Reader uses one of the protocols supported by the iPod...

Apparently it needs to be PTP protocol otherwise the iPod will only import what it finds in the DCIM folder on the media card...

I'm guessing that the PMW-EX1 does not store clips to a "DCIM" folder...

Lets hope the card-reader supports PTP...

The EX1 has USB, firewire (HDV), HD-SDI, SD-SDI as well as the usual analogue outputs.

The actual manual don't say anything about the USB protocol, but gives a hope:
"With the PMW-EX1 camcorder, recordings are made as data
files in the “MP4” format,which is widely used in a number of
recent electronic portable devices and has been
standardized by ISO.
The file-based recording allows material to be handled with
great flexibility in a commonly available IT-based
environment for copying, transferring, sharing, and archiving.
All these operations are accomplished lossless without any
“re-digitizing” process required."

Sounds good but does this viewer software need to be installed natively into an OS to run ? I dont believe clients will be enthused about installing new software on any of their machines whether laptop/ desktop or workstation, to log and view footage.

I think most clients wouldn't object to installing a simple viewer. The issue really is how to hand the material over to clients at the end of the shoot (as in - the client is posting it and the camera operator is no longer involved at all).

For those concerned about client playback keep the following in mind.
With miniDV a client was able to playback the tape with a consumer camera.
HDV on the other hand, is a major headache since there is no single deck and certainly no consumer camera that can play back every format from every HDV camera.

With EX1's .mp4 files the client may now download a simple free player (so we hope).

Yes what one hands to a client after a shoot is an issue. Portable 80GB USB drives can be found for under $100. 40GB are under $50.

While this is more expensive than DV or HDV tape it may not be too unreasonable.

Although we're comparing to DV and HDV because that may be where our client base in coming from, compare the same costs to DVCProHD tapes XDCAM discs or maybe even HDCAM tapes and the costs vs quality and ease of client playback of the file, make this format very attractive.

In addition to handing the client a USB drive, if they need to see rushes you could hand them a tape.

HDCAM through HDSDI out, Betacam SP through component analog, DV tape through iLink or dare I say it, a VHS from the composite out. It's a good thing Sony included all of these outputs.

Really? It downconverts to DV via FW? That would be great!

No, it does not - HDV only.

35mm Adapter
 

Thanks for all the infos in this thread..

There is an option for a flip 35mm Adapter on the EX. It's called EXTREME :-) and comes from Letus www.adapterplace.com

I will get 2 of those brand new adapters this week I hope or maybe next and will keep this forum updated about it. I will "only" be able to test it on my HVX200 and a F330 from a friend of mine. But the first scenes I saw look very very promising. The coolest thing is it cost only 1500$.

Peter

Piotr is right. My mistake. I should have read the fine print on the brochure.
It does however downconvert on the SDI. So in theory you could get a Convergent Design SDI to 1394 converter and make your downcoverted DV that way.