BUMMER - Looks like no recording to off the shelf drives

T

town

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from creative cow p2 forum:

http://www.creativecow.net/forum/view_thread.php?threadid=809628&forumid=193

Hi,

Have been totally inundated with stuff since I left LV. The 1394 output must see an intelligent device on the other side, like a Firestore device. Please note that Focus Enhancements is a P2 Partner and as such we are working together to find a solution.

There may be others but in the least you could record to your Apple or the Avid.

Best,

jan



Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems
 
A) that doesn't necessarily rule out USB2 control of a hard disk.

B) no other camera can do it, so if Panasonic does, it'd be unprecedented anyway.

C) I fully predict that if the camera doesn't allow for it directly, someone will engineer a device that plugs into the P2 slot and has a USB2 or Firewire port on it, which *will* allow you to record directly to an off-the-shelf hard disk. That device would take care of whatever electronics/intelligence that the camera needs to see and the drive needs.

In fact, we should probably start lobbying Focus to get them to produce exactly that product!
 
No surprise that it would need to connect to an intelligent device. Barry's right that someone will come up with something. One possibility might be a "smart" Firewire enclosure for a hard drive...if that makes sense.
 
can't you just make a go-between card that tells the camera that there's a powered drive, and then a controller device on the card that manages harddisk capture? Hmm, okay that sounds complicated. Any electrical engineers out there wanna give us some input? :D
 
C) I fully predict that if the camera doesn't allow for it directly, someone will engineer a device that plugs into the P2 slot and has a USB2 or Firewire port on it, which *will* allow you to record directly to an off-the-shelf hard disk. That device would take care of whatever electronics/intelligence that the camera needs to see and the drive needs.


Come to think of it, it seems weird that a product like this doesn't exist already for DV cameras. Or does it?
 
Well, it does, but it's called a laptop computer. i.e., you can use a laptop running a capture program or DV Rack or something like that, and use it to capture to an external hard disk.

What we need developed is something that would be a small standalone piece of hardware, and would understand and support the 100-megabit data rate of DVCPRO-HD.
 
I brought this up on a previous thread.

It isn't difficult at all to create a 1394>SATA/EIDE adapter. There are already plenty of single-board computers (SBC) the size of a credit-card which have 1394 and hard-drive interfaces. The bandwidth is trivial for a relatively modern processor and I/O chipsets. The OS is already built-in to the SBC from flash-ROM (Linux, of course). Linux already has 1394 libraries and drivers.

All that needs to be done is to write a bit of software that peeks at the 1394 DV stream, and starts writing the stream to disk when it encounters a "Record" flag (and stop recording when it encounters a "Stop" flag.) The stream will have to be wrapped into a video format (such as .avi), but that's trivial.

Nothing else is needed. All administration can be done from a PC later by simply mounting the device as a hard-drive over USB or 1394. This bit is already written for us.

It can be made more complicated with LCD displays and switches for scene reviewing, but the bare necessities can be hacked together quite quickly. Things like power-management also need to be though of.

Something like this would make a great open-source project, because small vendors can quickly build something to sell for a bit of profit, and end-users can start hacking away at it, adding new features that they NEED in the field -- which the vendors can add into their future versions. If someone doesn't have enough money to buy it from one of the innumerable vendors, they can hack it together themselves.
 
Barry_Green said:
What we need developed is something that would be a small standalone piece of hardware, and would understand and support the 100-megabit data rate of DVCPRO-HD.
Click to expand...

I thought that's what the HVX200 was
:)

Seriously, is there anything that difficult about making the camera able to record directly to hard drives? Seeing as it can already recognize an external hard drive in order to transfer files from the P2 cards, is it that much more difficult to get the cam to shoot straight to that same hard drive?
 
Why not use a firewire PCMIA card used in laptops to be used in HVX-200? Wouldn't that "trick"
the camera of viewing a P2 card but instead it records to a HD? A thought?
 
Seeing as it can already recognize an external hard drive in order to transfer files from the P2 cards, is it that much more difficult to get the cam to shoot straight to that same hard drive?
Click to expand...
Well, we're hoping that they'll do exactly that. But it may not be possible to support it for live streaming.

Personally, I think the hangup isn't necessarily the technology -- I bet it can be done. I think the hangup is the users who would cheap out, trying to use substandard technology, then whine and gripe and moan when it doesn't work. As an example, if Panasonic supports the feature (recognizing that you *must* have a drive that can sustain a minumum sustained rate of, say, 15mBps across the entire surface of the drive), what do you think will happen when some user plugs in an ipod?

Board after board after board spammed with "HVX doesn't work", "they said it'd write to hard disk but it doesn't", "don't trust Panasonic", "my shoot was RUINED because hard disk recording didn't work", etc. You know it'll happen. I know it'll happen. We all know it'll happen. And the thanks Panasonic gets for giving us this cool, unprecedented feature? Abusive beraters, who will try to cheat the system and then complain loudly and frequently when their cheat doesn't work. A compatible-model, high-speed hard disk might cost $80, but they'll find some slow, underpowered 4200-rpm drive on "special" at NewEgg for $39, and guess what -- it's too slow and won't work. And who will they blame?

I mean, we already see that -- how many posts do we see that ask about "different brands of tapes", etc... people buying a $3400 camera, and then trying to save 50 cents on the type of tape they use in it.

Well, perhaps that's being cynical, I don't know. I am hoping that they do implement the feature, and they come up with ways to protect themselves and the users. Maybe some sort of speed benchmark the drive needs to pass before it can be used to record on, I don't know. Three years from now, when hard drives are 8x faster than they are today, this will all be a moot point, I'm sure. Of course, three years from now we'll have 128gb P2 cards, so this will be a moot point as well!
 
three years from now we'll have 128gb P2 cards, so this will be a moot point as well
Click to expand...

Then again... in three years we could be recording true 1920x1080 4:4:4 at 440/880 Mbps to 512 GB Memory Sticks... you never know ;)
 
I hadn't really considered that angle Barry.
Hopefully Panasonic will see fit to include the feature regardless.
It would be a shame to see a company refrain from adding another groundbreaking feature to a camera soley because of the ignorance of those who might use it.

It does seem like a simple feature to implement, and as you've said many times, this camera is all about options. I hope they keep that spirit in the final specs. Imagine that, this could be the first camera to shoot to tape, solid state, or any hard drive fast enough to handle the datarate. Given all the other options the camera has, options on recording media would be in the same spirit. Panasonic realizes P2 might be a little bit ahead of it's time, why else would they include a tape drive. This is a 'transition' camera ... transitioning us from SD to HD, from tape to solid state...why not add HDD support, to ease the transition away from tape?

Keep lobbying Barry!
This would be a huge addition, if they made it happen, and one that would help silence the "Panasonic is just trying to get you to spend your retirement money on P2 Cards" crowd.

Personally, I would MUCH rather shoot to P2 than to a hard drive.
But, until I can afford all the P2 I would want, a hard drive would be a nice option.
 
Barry_Green said:
Well, it does, but it's called a laptop computer. i.e., you can use a laptop running a capture program or DV Rack or something like that, and use it to capture to an external hard disk.

What we need developed is something that would be a small standalone piece of hardware, and would understand and support the 100-megabit data rate of DVCPRO-HD.
Click to expand...

Actually, it's also called a FireStore FS-1, FS-2, or FS-3. The FS-4 is the only part of the FireStore lineup that DOESN'T allow you to just plug in OTS firewire drives. The 1, 2, and 3 actually allow you to hook up 5 or 6 drives at once for super-duper-long recording.

Hopefully they'll do something for the HVX...
 
Difficulty

Difficulty

Anyway, just for the record, it's easy to say "How hard can it be to implement a smart FW drive controller", but it's not necessarily true. Certainly, in my day job, whenever we deal with vision systems these days, porting FireWire drivers and code to new logic boards is a major and tricky part of the effort. I'd also point everybody toward actual discussions on this forum of the QuickCapture, the FS-4, the CityDisk or whatever... none of these efforts have proven easy. That may be OK for a third party accessory, but Panasonic is going to want to be real sure it's rock-solid before releasing anything like this.

-Barry
 
Excellent points! Excellent points. The Quickstream/CitiDisk scenario being a prime example of "obviously, it isn't that easy"!
 
You know, I'm no electrical engineer, but I am a software one. I really don't believe that adding a controller system to the HVX so it can use Firewire drives, is really that hard. Maybe it's a bit expensive so they don't do it, but really, I don't believe it's that hard. There is code on the HVX to write to P2, so it knows about filesystems and if it was designed correctly, you'd think that there'd be a way to add a hardware system into it's current configuration to support firewire devices.

Aaron
 
Great points... But if Focus is working close enough with Panasonic to have a working product out when the HVX ships it doesn't seem unreasonable wonder why they can't team up to build that functionality right into the camera. This also makes me wonder if the cam will have upgradable firmware to sort out any issues that pop up...(or add features!)
 
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