VIDEO: Convergent Design

Hi,
Somewhere (other video news web) i read that Convergent Design at NAB, are showing the Gemini but only as for playback ..
Also, somewhere in this forum i read, Gemini may have problems recording 4:4:4 1080p with its 1.8 special made drives, cause i think it can only be used with its C.D. drives..

Can someone at NAB ask for a recording demo ??
I'm interested

As far as we could tell, the demo units at the booth were just that…demo units, not capable of capture. The footage being shown on screen was not recorded on the Gemini, but is (I believe) only for display purposes. Shipping is scheduled for August according to Dan Keaton of CD. And I've heard nothing about "problems" recording 4:4:4, though the ship date is far enough off that any issues they may be having will likely be fixed by that point.

You really can't beat the Gemini for the price. The Sony SR-R1 in just too pricey for most indivuduals... then there are the 1 ter cards. When the recorder cost more than the camera, something is off.

I believe that if you go to DVinfo to their support page the 'problems' are with other uncertified SSDs not CDs. This is because many SSDs do not deliver the sustained write speed that they advertise. The CD ones are absolutley guaranteed to work with all the data rates that the Gemini throws at it. It would be embarassing if it didn't work wouldn''t work it with their own branded cards .I believe that they have worked closely with an SSD manufacturer to get this aspect rock solid.

Dear Friends,

We did not demonstrate our Gemini 4:4:4 recording and playing back on Monday.

We were very busy at the show, nor did anyone ask us (as far as I remember) to show recording and playback on Monday.

On Tuesday through Thursday we showed recording and playback to anyone who asked.

Yes, we were in "Demo Mode", as not every feature of the Gemini 4:4:4 is ready yet. Specifically, we do not have our menu system implemented yet, so we were only doing a limited demo, but we were proving that the unit does actually record and play back.

(As a side note, I was being very playful during these recording and playback demonstrations. During recording I would put my fingers in front on the lens. Then during playback, I would do the same. Sometimes it looked like I got the timing right, other times my timing was off. Some did not realize that I was playing back and wondered why the delay. I got some pretty strange looks, then I explained what I was doing.)

Back to a more serious mode.

There are very few SSD's that can handle full uncompressed video.

We have tested many SSD's and found ones that will work. For certain very high bandwidth modes, we will be using two SSD's, writing half of the data to one, and half to the other.

For 1080p24, 4:4:4, 10-Bit, we only need one SSD. 1080p60 4:2:2, as an example, requires two SSD's.

When we do not need two SSD's, then we can write to both simultaneously, creating two masters for safety purposes.

The SSD that we have selected (a very high performance SSD from a leading manufacturer, not a priopriarity SSD), can support 260 Megabytes per second sustained writes in our unit.

Many people have used SSD's and found that they slow down as they get full.

This will not occur with our SSD's in our Gemini 4:4:4.

We have very advanced technology that prevents this from occurring. We may be unique in having solved this problem.

We also demonstated our industry leading monitor on the Gemini 4:4:4 to many people. This high-brightness, high contrast monitor has a very wide viewing angle; no color shift nor dimming as one views the monitor from even extreme angles.

I hope this helps.

SSD's do not write and delete files in the same way as platter based drives. Therefore they rely on things like garbage collection to mitigate this issue. Furthermore you get into performance decline issues over time due to too many writes or due to having the drive too full.

The OCZ Vertex 2 Extended for instance lacks the reserve space required to do garbage collection and therefore when it reaches 90% capacity it slows to a hault. Other drives like the Crucial C400 SSD's decrease in performance over time due to it's write algorithms.

tomshardware.com is a good resource for SSD's or anandtech.com.