HPX Host mode... anyone got it to work w/ HDD?

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EditingFX

Well-known member
Anyone? Put HPX in Host mode (1394), power down. Spin up external HDD, connect 1394, power up HPX..... and.... nada. No "format" or other disc commands "un-gray" & become available. Suggestions?
 
Sorry but you cant simply attach an external HDD drive. Though I wish you could!! And Im not entirely sure if thats what you are asking or not.
 
The manual (page 133) says the HPX can connect to a 1394 HDD, and offload cards with verification. It also says "format the drive for use with the camera". Ummm.... what KIND of format? Tried FAT32, no joy.
 
Well, you must be richer & prettier than me, Dolby! ;)
Any info as to how you prepared the drive? (The option to format the drive via the camera is greyed out as well.) .... Wondering if it's the 1394 controller on the drive? (it's a standard Oxford chipset though)
 
EditingFX said:
Well, you must be richer & prettier than me, Dolby! ;)
Click to expand...

You must be one poor ugly SOB, then. j.k

I formated the drive from the camera. I can't remeber the exact procedure and don't have a empty firewire drive around at the moment.

One a side note, I tried to dump some files to a 1TB lacie drive the other night and could not see the drive to let me do it. The drive I usually use is a 320GB Lacie drive and a 500GB Western Digital.
 
Does anyone know if you can use a portable harddrive that uses plug in power through the USB/Firewire port with this camera? I'm thinking about out in the field shoots when you don't have AC power accessible.
 
The HPX500 doesn't supply bus power. You'd need a battery-powered hard disk in the field. Very few firewire hard disk enclosures are battery-powered; I can only think of three:

1) some horrible little thing that I've got that the battery drains after 20 gigs

2) the Quickstream DV, but that's like $700

3) the Nexto CF Ultra. This is the only thing I've found that is a serious workable tool. It supports large-capacity 2.5" hard disks, it's firewire and usb, it can be bus powered or AC powered but the key thing is that it has an internal battery (good for 40 gigs) and an external battery included, which is good for 70 gigs, so between the two you can get about 110 gigs offloaded before the battery runs dry.

The Nexto is expensive by comparison to regular bus-powered enclosures, it's about $150. And only the ND-2525 model works this way. But if you want a computer-less, battery-powered offloading system, it's pretty much the best and only way to go.

As a side benefit, it also has a CompactFlash slot and automated high-speed copying of compactflash cards; could be handy if you use a digital camera that uses CF cards (or a Red One).
 
I've done it and it works just fine. I've seen this question from others, but I don't understand why they're running into an issue. I tried out my new Nexto Ultra enclosure with the 500 -- it popped right up, formatted the drive, and offloaded contents to it, just as expected.
 
Man, I *must* be uglier than youse guyz! I'll try some other brand controllers. Of course, this isn't the optimal workflow, as it "downs" the camera, but I could see it coming in handy, not having to lug a laptop on an extended "run & gun" project.
Thanks for the replies, all.
 
Yep, worked on another drive controller (albeit VERY slowly). Much faster via PCMCIA transfer to an external drive. (Hmmm..... shouldn't bus bottleneck be the same both methods?)
 
Has anyone tried powering a firewire or USB drive off of the Hirose DC out connector? It seems to meet the DC requirements of most standard drives and there for could be powered from the Anton Bauer on the camera... making a completely portable "dump" Solution in the field. Looks like 12V 1.5Amp.
 
I don't think that it's too incredibly slow if you're just looking to get some footage off to a drive, although it does take up your camera though. Perfect for a lunchbreak dump (I'm talking about footage people) to disc. We did this a couple of weeks ago on a multi-camera shoot. My buddy Adam brought is 500 out to pair with ours and it worked great. Didn't need to have 3 laptops going for all 3 cameras.
 
One other side note - Adam showed me that the "Verify" takes twice the time, one of the reasons you may be experiencing slow offload times. You can turn verify off in the menus.
 
Has anyone experienced plugging FireWire 6 to 4 pin and having the bluescreen of death appear? It happens everytime I tried using FireWire to dump footage.... So, I just stuck with USB 2.0 ..... This is on a PC running Vista home premium
 
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