Ross, I commend you on your thorough testing.
Thank you,
I will be ordering four soon.

Steve

Can you add me as one of those enquiries Ross?

Thanks

That's perfect, Ross and I appreciate your response. Looks like you're a good party to do business with.

Jeroen

Do you need one of these cards also to download your Sandisk card into the computer?
I assume can you also do it with one of the many USB adapters on the market already.

Would it be slower ? There could be both an advantage (speed) and a disadvantage to tying up the expresscard card slot for downloading. For example I use eSATA hard drives at home that go into my Macbook pro with an expresscard adapter. So at home I might prefer a USB solution if it wasn't too slow.

Also it gives you the option of carry a smaller computer on location that doesn't have an expresscard slot.


Lenny Levy

Do you "need" one of these cards? No. You can certainly take out the SDHC card and insert it into any card reader than can read such for offloading.

It's all about having the best workflow for the situation at hand.

My typical workflow is SxS to MacBookPro in the field and when back in the office, MacBookPro via ethernet to the workstation on my network.

If I'm not shooting much material and the laptop is an inconvenience I take the SxS back to the office and use the Sony SxS card reader USB into my workstation.

With these cards I can avoid the laptop on many more shoots where it's inconvenient. These cards won't work in the PCIe based Sony SxS reader but any number of inexpensive card readers can handle SDHC. The transfer times may be slower but being able to record longer in the field without offloading will be a big advantage for some shoots.

In addition I can simply "sell" the SDHC card to client if they want to work that way. Given the media costs are now comparable to DigiBeta or HDCAM, I could even consider saving the card as the archive.

If you have a reader that can handle USB Express Cards, it'll probably handle these just like they can handle Kennsington adaptors. A laptop with an Express Card slot would be one. The reason I need these cards is that there are shoots where the laptop is an inconvenience.

It may very well depend on WHY you're bringing the laptop to the shoot in the first place. Use an SDHC card reader if the laptop doesn't have an Express Card slot. If I can use my laptop on location then SxS works. If I can't, these MxS cards are may savior.

Is it possible to keep MxR all the time in place within the camera and only change SDHC cards by extracting and inserting them into MxR on the fly? Or it will not work this way?
If it possible I could avoid downloading step in the field while I keep changing SDHC cards only.

Thanks Craig, That's all pretty much what i figured.

How much slower would an off the shelf SDHC USB card reader be for downloading than using the M&S cards?

lenny

With my SDHC>USB reader i'm offloading at about 4x.

Paul.

Remove complete mxr and sdhc, swap sdhc in mxr, put mxr and new sdhc back in cam.
You cannot take the sdhc out of the adaptor while leaving the adaptor in the camera, if you have 2 of these combo's in the camera, the camera gets confused if you don't take out the whole card and reader.


Paul.

Care to explain your workflow abit? i've tried a number of different readers and cant get anything quicker than 0.9x transfer speed.

Sandisk III & IV
 

Aloha Ross
i received the confirmation of my order. please disregard the message i left on your business phone before the pages went up.
i was wondering if you had tried the MXR with any of the Sandisk Ultra III or IV cards.
1) i don't know if they would fit
2) will they record at a higher bitrate
thought i would get the question out so it might be included on your FAQ page when you have time to develop it more.
looking forward to receiving my MXR
i was glad to read that they would work with the 8GB card, they are cheap now
tito

Tito, All the SDHC cards are physically same size, it wouldn't be standard if the size varied by model. Higher class cards won't allow higher bitrate in this case because the bitrate is limited by reader/camera itself.

What remarkable timing. I just received confirmation from eXpansys that my Kensington adaptors have shipped. Seems there was another batch manufactured as promised. Looks like I'll have enough adaptors to keep me going for a while.

Hi Ross,

Sent you a few emails, but did not get a reply, i know you must be busy, so i am posting this in hope you see it, can you add me into the australian list of buyers,
robert@rpbproductions.com i am wanting 2 more cards. thanks.

Ross,

I also sent an e-mail - can you please add me to the list of Australian enquiries - and let me know the Aussie dollar price with shipping up the road to Newcastle.

Much appreciated.

Yes Bob - my coincidence Kensington adaptor also shipped today. Amazing that!

Hi Ross...

Same here... there should be an email from me as well, but thought I'd post here as a confirmation .... 6 for shipment down to Canberra please!! :)

R.

Make a folder on my external drive, ie wedding xyz.
I use the transcend cards and transcend sdhc>usb reader.
Put card into reader into usb socket.
Open clip browser.
Copy files to folder xyz.
Takes about 15 mins to offload a 16gb card.
This external drive is connected via usb so there is the usb bottleneck involved.
I then copy the next card into the same folder, i use the drop and drag in clip browser 2, ie drag from top window (card) to bottom window (folder).
One i've copied all the cards from the days shoot into that folder i then open the folder and rewrap the whole folder/footage in one go onto my other hard drive ready for editing, so now i have 2 copies of footage, one original with the bapv and one ready for editing, for safety reasons.

When i was using the sony sxs card, offloading into my laptop express slot onto my laptop hard drive ( so no usb bottleneck anywhere) i was getting about 10x tranfer speed, 3 mins for a full 8gb card.


Paul.

Hi Robert,

We were surprised by the reaction in Australia, and were caught a bit off guard. Sorry about that. Won't make that mistake again.

We'll have a special page for Australian orders going up tomorrow, (Tuesday), as soon as our web developer can put it up which will allow either Paypal in Australian Dollars or Direct Transfer to our bank account.

I've personally resisted the credit card thing in our wedding business, I just can't see the sense in giving Visa 4% of either our clients or our money. But hey that's just me. So we don't have credit card facilities set up at present, although the new ecommerce system has a gateway to credit cards, and with the number of people looking for it we will have to set it up.

We'll be sending out invoices with payment details tomorrow for everyone who has ordered by email and expect to ship ex Sydney for Australia on Monday and Tuesday, so that will be in time for Christmas.

Thanks again or the support, and keep a watch on the website at E-Films we will be updating it some new ideas we are currently working on. ( As soon as I learn how to work the blog! ).

Tuomas
thank you for the answers
the questions came from looking at the recording rates for my Sony EX-1

HQ captures full 1920 x 1080 images, or 1280 x 720 images, at 35Mbps.
SP mode captures 1440 x 1080 images @ 25Mbps

and comaping them to sandisk recording speeds

sandisk ultra II "Minimum of 10MB/second"
sandisk ultra III "Fast minimum speeds of 30MB/second"
sandisk ultra IV "read/write speed of 45MB/second"

so 35MB/second can be handled by the sandisk ultr II and the faster minimum rates of the II and IV are not needed?

thanks
tito

Mb = Megabits
MB = Megabytes
8 bits to 1 byte

In other words
8 Mb = 1 MB (more or less but I won't go there).

Basically 35Mbps is about 4.3MBs

Actually, the minimum for SanDisk Ultra II SDHC is 15MB/s.

Thanks Craig, duh, i should have caught that.

MIcrocenter has those right now for $49.99 if you have one near you.

Micro Center - Ultra II 16GB SDHC High Performance Card

John

Alright Ross, just got approved for a couple of these bad boys. Order coming from FL soon!

Order with paypal
 

Hi Ross,

I orderd 2 cards and payed with paypal on 14/12/08. What do you think, when could the cards be in germany?

Thanks

Volker Ide

info@tvdocs.eu / TVDOCS IDE FILM+FERNSEHEN TV PRODUKTIONEN NEWS REPORTAGEN DOKUMENTATIONEN MEDIZIN WISSENSCHAFT & KULTUR TV Journalist Volker Ide

With the new possibility to write back to the camera/SxS card (for Mac at least), could we now start to use SDHC cards as masters and backups as well?
At least shorter projects?

Certainly easier to stack and store than hard disks.

I can't seem to get this import stuff to work on my PC. Any tips?

At this point it would seem you can only send back to the camera with the Transfer Software plugin for FCP. I've asked Avid folks about this capability and it's "on the wish list." Don't hold yer breath.

If I want to shoot 720p50, I would have to use the SxS cards, don´t I? Is it possible to copy this footage to MxR Expresscard, within the camera?

No. You only need SxS for overcrank.

That is good. Thanks, Perrone!

At risk of sounding very ignorant I need to ask you guys this question: why we should use SxS or SDHC as a backup storage? Why we cannot use ANY external (or even internal) SATA HDs for this purpose? Today 1.5 TB cost nothing and give you "unlimited" storage capacity. If you wish to increase reliability of your backup system, buy two 1.5 TBs and use them in parallel. The probability that both HDs would go out of service is practically speaking equal to "0". So, what is the problem?

because the best backup you can get, is the original to keep.
that was de facto the case with tapes, but with expensive cards, you need to make a copy (with all the risks) and that takes a lot of time and require expensive equipement (a laptop)
if you can shoot on SDHC and keep the card , that is the best workflow.

That's assuming that the only reliability risk is equipment failure, in practical terms I suspect human error in doing the transfer is a far more significant risk, especially if it's being done in the field and in a hurry to free up space for recording. All that chance for error goes away if the backup is the original recording, and as far as economics goes, a download on set workflow sometimes means an extra man - his wages will pay for quite a few SDHC cards.

In regular short term use, then the HDs you talk off are indeed very unlikely to fail simultaneously. But I believe HDs don't like long periods of non-use. If you relied on them for long term storage and didn't access the material for several years, the chances of neither of them working become significant.

Even if SDHC cards aren't used as a very long term backup, their cheapness relative to SxS and P2 means that they may at least be kept as the backup until the project is completed and a master derived, even if they are then formatted and reused. There's no way you could viably do that with P2 or SxS.

As you said "at least be kept as the backup until the project is completed" I do not know what projects (Length wise) you guys are working on, but in my case (TV commercials) project length is usually does not exceed 3 months. So it is not a problem for me to keep my backups on INTERNAL hard drives (that are always in use when my Mac is turned on).
Moreover, those SATA drives are mirrored, so storing info in one automatically is mirrored to another one.
And, by the way if downloaded data in your editing media storage is good, so the same data being stored in your backup HDs, also should be good.
Considering how inexpensive SDHC cards are, one should be able to afford a bunch of them to be available in the shooting field to cover whole shooting period. Unless you couldn't get back to your studio for downloading during the considrable time priod. But If shooting is so long, in this case I assume that you working not exactly on low budget project and it looks like it worth additional investment to buy another bunch of SDHCs.
Am I wrong?

Thank you! I just purchased two myself. I will let you know how it works!

12/17/2008 2:26pm PayPal still won't take my order? same problem again?

Thank you,
Mike

Mike, there seems to be a problem with the script rather than Paypal blocking. If you try and order by express delivery ( the right hand side) it works fine.

trouble is I want to order standard delivery!

Just ordered one now. Seems to work again...

Hi Krikor,

That was my fault. I asked the web designer to get rid of this funny line on the right of the page, it was just a cosmetic fix, but for some reason it interracted with the rest of the code, and bingo it stopped working.

He fixed it as soon as someone reported it, to us.

What a great occupation, you can make mistakes, and you just shrug your shoulders, not like us. We make a mistake, and pay for it for a long, long time.

Try missing the vows or the Best man's speech.