Apple condems SxS to the rubbish heap along with P2!

As a side note.

I recently did a job where we were locking down a wide shot and decided to let is capture directly to the person's laptop who owned the camera. The laptop was a Mac, but they did not have enough drive space so I offered a FW 800 drive to use.

I gave them the drive a few days before so they could format it for the Mac.

Well long story short the Mac formatting ended up being FAT 32 and the recording choked after 4 gigs.

I was stunned that the apple of the creative world's eye still defaulted to a FAT 32 file structure!

The Mac user did not even know to avoid this type of fomatting.

I don't know if there is another way to format, I am sure there probably is but it really got my attention.
 
I had always been told that FAT32 on a mac didn't limit file size. Huh.

I use a PC because I always have and can navigate it easier as well as the ability to customize hardware myself. By adding a $30 pcmcia slot to the front, p2 cards are easy to ingest and adding a "hotswap" hard drive bay helped adding HDD per project. I also like being able to add expansion cards, like my Firewire card with 3 FW 800 ports. I am a small growing business and I can slowly piece together a PC system as I need.

I may be wrong and Mac towers can also add these features but I have never seen one.

Overall PC's are what I know and I can fix most things inhouse myself.
 
As a side note.

Well long story short the Mac formatting ended up being FAT 32 and the recording choked after 4 gigs.

I was stunned that the apple of the creative world's eye still defaulted to a FAT 32 file structure!

The Mac user did not even know to avoid this type of fomatting.

I don't know if there is another way to format, I am sure there probably is but it really got my attention.

Apple's "Disk Utility" will reformat to FAT 32 because it recognizes the original format. I learnt this with formatting SSD's for my EX3. However, Disk Utility does have the necessary options to reformat to Mac OS Extended/Journalled.
 
Really? None of my drives are Fat32. All my externals are all MacOS. You sure you didn't offer them a FAT32 formatted external? I believe most drives are FAT32 out of the factory.

I have an older MCP. It does everything I want it to (I've crashed the entire system a handful of times too). But, I have a really old PC which I am currently replacing with an MSI wind and I will make it dual boot leopard and XP because I like having access to a windows computer still.

Quite honestly, apple isn't dropping a major market share. We aren't as big as you think we are. I'll keep using apple for editing unless something else comes along I like better. Then I'll go there.

It's the same as with your cameras. You don't like the HVX or it doesn't do what you want, you go to the EX3. Didn't like the RED? Use a Genesis next time. There are options out there.

I think apple would be a much much stronger platform if everything wasn't proprietary. I think thats why PC innovate so much faster. Because anyone can build one and the only limitation is the OS. Macs, it is only apple (unless you toss together a hackintosh.)
 
I have mentioned before, but got lots of guys disagreeing with me. The SxS and the P2 are technologies made to rip you off. The very simple solution would have been to add a 2.5" sata HD-slot to all these camera's. How nice would it be to record on a 500gb drive,
remove it and start editing with the same drive. Within 3 years the price of the solidstate "hard"drives will be in an very very exceptable range, just like the memory cards now.
Going from the mechanical sata drive to the ssd would be no problem whatsoever, but it doesn't serve the money hungry companies like Sony and Pana, who makes great products, but if they can will rip you off. So they invented P2 and SxS, great, but 1000% to high priced.
 
Kenny:

Ikegami had a hard drive recording system for their cameras. It was a big bomb. Shooting video to a mechanical hard drive is insanity, hard drives suck for reliability. You may think P2 and SxS are a ripoff but you are a single consumer. P2 and SxS were created for NBC, ABC, Fox and the studios, not for individual users. NBC has just made the HPX300 their standard ENG camera and has ordered hundreds of them and thousands of P2 cards. I don't think that they think P2 is a ripoff or they would wouldn't have bought them.

Pro gear always has been made mostly for the broadcast and high end EFP market, not for low end shooters. We are just lucky that Panasonic and Sony came out with low end cameras like the HVX200 and the EX1 that used the same media. It is amazing at how many users think that multibillion dollar conglomerates create systems and standards for single individuals. Go to NAB next year. If your badge says, "Kenny G" most of the larger booths will ignore you over someone who has a badge that says, "Kenny G - NBC". It's the way of the world.

Dan
 
Last edited:
Within 3 years the price of the solidstate "hard"drives will be in an very very exceptable range, just like the memory cards now.

This is the crux of the matter. Within three years the price of P2 and SxS should be in a very exceptable range as well but the only beef with these major manufacturers is the pricing of these proprietary memory products does not follow market pricing models.

P2 finally came down but only after folks found the SD card solution with the EX.

I agree with puredrifting, I would never want to rely upon a hard drive as my main recording device. The P2 ans SxS memory have the option to error check the data as it goes by. If a solid state drive could do that and stay cool then we might be in business. But remember, the design of the cameras is for a future period of time using the technology of the day, so they by nature are not forward looking.

BTW, the drive I provided was already formatted NTFS. I don't know how it was formatted for the MAC.
 
Dan, the point is not to use HDD, but SSDs which are the same as SxS, no moving parts.

Thats not to say you couldn't use a HDD with your own caution, Sony's own 60GB SxS drive is a spinning platter hard drive, but clearly the slot would be recommended only for use with 2.5" SSDs. These SSDs are dam fast too, so considering the capacity and bandwidth they offer, the option of offering the full 100Mbps 4:2:2 XDCAM codec in little cameras is very possible and practical. Until then we have to strap on a nanoFlash/FlashXDR...
 
Guy:

You are a braver man than I am to trust your shooting to a mechanical hard drive, I have had three 2.5" notebook drives fail me in the past year (two in my MBP and one in my daughters MB - thank you Applecare!). I also booted up a bunch of drives I had in storage from 2-5 years ago. Out of 60 drives, 8 failed to boot up, 6 failed to even spin the platters. In my mind, hard drives are as disposable as rice paper, it is amazing that we have done as much work with them as an industry as we have without too many failures.

SSDs? Whole other story. I agree, they should be as reliable as the cards but the form factor is still too large.

Dan
 
mbp
no options for a second hd
no options on choosing card slots
no options on batteries
I've had mine 2 weeks and crashed it twice already
I am sorry I bought a mac
 
Solid state is here now and its the future. We'll be able to buy 4Tb SDHC cards within 5 years and they'll all have blistering fast speeds, maybe 10 times faster than now. I wouldn't be overly confident in saying we'll still be using SxS or P2 in the near future. Things are about to make a huge leap forward in humanities race for the ultimate in superior technology,,, within the next 10 to 20 years there'll be so much wow factor, much so more than we've advanced in the last 50 years.
 
Solid state is here now and its the future. We'll be able to buy 4Tb SDHC cards within 5 years ....

Nope :( SDHC has a max capacity of 32GB (artifically limited in specs from their theoretical 2TB max).

SDXC is the only hope but even that is still limted to 2TB

of course, you could be funny and say you really did mean 4 terabits (Tb) which is only 500GB :huh: but still you'll need SDXC for that.
 
I too moved over to Mac from PC about two years ago just so I could work with "pro" level gear. I bought a Matrox MXO2 specifically so I could use it in the field via the ExpressCard slot. I know that nothing is stopping me from using it NOW, but when I have to replace my MBP....I'm screwed. And, I use an audio interface for recording sessions and I sometimes need to have a secondary Firewire bus. That just got kicked in the bus, too. Bring on the Hackintosh!!
 
I too moved over to Mac from PC about two years ago just so I could work with "pro" level gear. I bought a Matrox MXO2 specifically so I could use it in the field via the ExpressCard slot. I know that nothing is stopping me from using it NOW, but when I have to replace my MBP....I'm screwed. And, I use an audio interface for recording sessions and I sometimes need to have a secondary Firewire bus. That just got kicked in the bus, too. Bring on the Hackintosh!!


If it's any consolation, the ExpressCard 2.0 spec was officially announced today. This is a significant upgrade and it is backward compatible. So it's not going away and with all the hub-bub over their move, Apple is more likely to restore it with compliance to 2.0.

One take on Apple's move that I read today is that they are trying to edge into the netbook market until such time as Apple actually produces and sells their own netbook. Who knows what went into Apple's move?

http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/09/expresscard-2-0-standard-finally-finalized-faster-than-ever/
 
Nope :( SDHC has a max capacity of 32GB (artifically limited in specs from their theoretical 2TB max).

SDXC is the only hope but even that is still limted to 2TB

of course, you could be funny and say you really did mean 4 terabits (Tb) which is only 500GB :huh: but still you'll need SDXC for that.
I stand corrected Guy, I misread the article I meant SDXC.
http://www.dailytech.com/Secure+Digital+Cards+Get+a+Boost+to+2TB+with+SDXC+Format/article13875.htm
You'll find these things will double in capacity every 6 to 12 months until they max out somewhere and a new card will be developed.
If someone told you a few years ago that we'd have new CPU's with multiple cores called i7's and PCI\e2 and DDR3 rams you would of gone yeah yeah.

We are just at the infancy stage of SD card tech.
 
no probs Shaun, I wasn't really worried about it or anything. I was surprised that the brand new SDXC spec is limited to 2TB though. Its not that I don't think at the moment a 2TB SDXC card wouldn't be ginormous, but in the future it could become a significant limit and the demise of that format for SDZC??? lol
 
Solid state is here now and its the future. We'll be able to buy 4Tb SDHC cards within 5 years and they'll all have blistering fast speeds, maybe 10 times faster than now. I wouldn't be overly confident in saying we'll still be using SxS or P2 in the near future. Things are about to make a huge leap forward in humanities race for the ultimate in superior technology,,, within the next 10 to 20 years there'll be so much wow factor, much so more than we've advanced in the last 50 years.

However, Shaun, this Macbook Pro is for 2009, not 2014. I have a 4 years old Powerbook G4 that's obsolete right now. It served its purpose and its in the end of its life cicle. You can say Apple is forward thinking, but having a SD card slot is definitely NOT forward thinking, since SD is not an expansion port, but a media port. With an expresscard slot, you could add extra FW ports, an esata port, connect different hardware that needed fast, secure connections, etc.

Taking this out makes the 15" a machine that has limited expension. The FW800 port is the fastest you can get on that machine- which means not enough for High end HD work.

Forward thinking means pushing new technologies that you can use today and give you an edge over the competition. Having a Blu-ray drive and native blu-ray authoring, for example, accessible to the average consumer, an I-Blu, or whatever, would be forward thinking. As much as Apple wants to ignore, Blu-ray is a success, and Full HD digital online distribution is still many years from now. Blu-Ray is THE next format- after it, physical distribution will gradually give way to online and solid state distribution. Untill then, there's still 10 years or so of Blu-ray life left- this year and the next we'll see the massification of Blu-rays. Today, we are starting to see pirated blu-rays in CHina for 8 USD. You know Mass market penetration is happening when pirates "adopt" a format...

Market protection to their digital store is harming Apple's reputation to a big part of its core market.

I feel Apple is shooting itself on the foot by neglecting the Pro market, the one market that gave them the prestige, glamour and word of mouth of excelence, and also by market protection policies. Apple is more and more, like Sony- and Sony has changed recently due to massive losses by following similar sttrategies that Apple are employing today. Sony is opening up, listening to costumers and offering more options today, embracing other standards even when they have proprietary formats/media. In other words, Apple is living the success Sony experienced on the Walkman era. Their fall will be as big as Sony's, if they don't get their act together...
 
My PS3 is a BD player, but I can also watch full HD content straight off an SD card in its slot too! Most of the new LCD TV's have card slots in them now, car stereos have slots now and will soon be without a CD slot (that marks the death of CD) , DVD players as well will soon become solid state card readers, this is all conditioning for the new SD solid state era. Optical drives are on the way out and BD will be dead before it reaches its full potential. It will end up as an archive format.

Also full HD online content is here now. There are just so many delivery and playback methods available today, its just a case of what becomes the more practical and cost effective and IMO SD technology will be it. Years to come and your PC's system disc will be an SD card of some sort rather than a physical spinning disc. PC's will be 80% smaller than they are now.

And just one other thing, Sony have always been pig headed and have had the need to be better than everyone else, history had proven this with DVD+R format, BD disc, I think apple are just appealing to the masses and know that SD cards will be a ubiquitous standard media platform for everything eventually.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top