Dual recording option on the af-100

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OldCorpse

Rockin the Boat
So far I love everything I'm reading about the af-100. But, as always, there is no perfect camera, and at this point my one big disappointment is the lack of dual-recording option. The af-100 has two SD slots, but from what I gather based also on what Jan said in the interview, you can only record continuously - when one fills up, it keeps recording seamlessly onto the other one. This is pretty useless from my point of view, when we have 64GB cards out there. I mean, space is not what I'm worried about when I have such big cards. I'd much rather that the other slot was used to simultaneously record the same data stream to both cards as a back up.

My question: what's involved in adding this capability? Is it a hardware question? Or would it be possible to add a firmware solution to enable that capability on the af-100? Maybe some clever hacker... hint, hint. I freely admit I don't understand the technical aspect of this - seems to me, if we take the example of RAID as a template, you can have RAID1 solutions implemented either in hardware or in software. So in principle, as long as the controller allows for this, it should not take hardware mods to do this for the af-100, and either Panasonic could update the firmware to enable this, or maybe someone could hack something together.

What would be great is if we could switch to either continuous or dual recording modes. That way those who have small cards can have their continuous recording and those with big cards could have their peace of mind.

Can we have this or is it a pipe dream on the af-100?
 
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That's kinda how I see it when paired with a recorder like the KiProMini. Record to the mini while a "backup" recording onto SD in AVCCAM.
 
OldCorpse said:
My question: what's involved in adding this capability? Is it a hardware question?
Click to expand...

Issue is that it would require extra hardware in the camera, like another codec card, and it would eat more batteries and need some additional means of cooling and all of this would have cost more money. So we didn't do that.

Sorry,

Jan
 
Cool. Thanks for responding, Jan. So there is more involved hardware-wise than I thought, which would raise the price - fair enough. I can live with that. Maybe one day - or 3rd party solutions, we'll see.
 
Thanks for explaining that, Jan.

From someone who has never had any issues with SD card failure when recording AVCHD, I would just suggest using an external recorder for redundancy. Correct me if I'm wrong, but anything coming out the HDMI or SDI ports is better quality anyway.
 
Correct - the signal coming out of the SDI should be uncompressed 8 bit if I understood correctly, not having gone through the AVC Cam Compression.
I'm not 100% on what flavor of signal we're getting out of the HDMI port though.
 
The HD-SDI and HDMI should be outputting an identical video and audio signal, both at full uncompressed 1920x1080 at 4:2:2.

HDMI doesn't include timecode, so that's one major difference between them. And the connector for HD-SDI is a locking type, vs. the consumer connector of HDMI, so for those reasons I would always use the HD-SDI for attaching to an external recorder whenever a choice is available. But for raw uncompressed video quality they should be the same.
 
Barry_Green said:
The HD-SDI and HDMI should be outputting an identical video and audio signal, both at full uncompressed 1920x1080 at 4:2:2.

HDMI doesn't include timecode, so that's one major difference between them. And the connector for HD-SDI is a locking type, vs. the consumer connector of HDMI, so for those reasons I would always use the HD-SDI for attaching to an external recorder whenever a choice is available. But for raw uncompressed video quality they should be the same.
Click to expand...

Don't forget cable length. SDI can go much farther than HDMI.

-X
 
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