Duel adapter and snow leopard not yet compatible

You know what kind of product would trully rock?

A single or dual PCMCIA\P2 reader with a gigabit ethernet port. Now that product would truly be universal...and it wouldn't cost that much to produce and sell..Plus it wouldn't carry driver or platform issues, it would always work no matter the platform\os version...

Imagine that...
 
jazzx said:
You know what kind of product would trully rock?

A single or dual PCMCIA\P2 reader with a gigabit ethernet port. Now that product would truly be universal...and it wouldn't cost that much to produce and sell.
Click to expand...

Been pushing, along with a bunch of others, this type of approach for nearly four years.

Apparently it does cost that much to produce and sell.
 
You know there are plenty of PCMCIA devices with Ethernet interfaces or Ethernet devices with PCMCIA slots rather. But most use the ATA protocol to access the PCMCIA flash.

P.S.
I was more speaking about sticking something into the USB2.0 of the camera and feeding 802.11n out of it and allowing it to mount a remote volume NFS/AppleTalk or NetBIOS.

PICTBridge 802.11 extensions have this for the DSLR market - Specifically Live retouching Hassleblad rigs, where 30+ megapixel photos x-fer over in seconds into a 17" aperature notebook for instant review.

I've just not decided whether it should be push or pull, in case of HDMonitor, OnLocation etc its push (camera pushing DVC stream). Pull would be the P2 transfer of shot material.

Now 802.11n is about 70mbps which is slower than the DVC codec, so pull is the more likely scenario. Since the CAM emulates a firewire/usb drive in transfer mode, any "timecapsule" type device can be used for transfer after it mounts and is available to the network.
 
Apparently it does cost that much to produce and sell.
Click to expand...
yeah, there must be some crazy mojo behind the whole thing. as i would have thought that firewire, usb or another equally ubiquitous format like ethernet would have been the way to go from the start...
 
Nothing crazy about Ethernet, actually ethernet is the cheapest data interface on the planet to date. The cable costs next to nothing. The speeds are going upwards of 10G. The ASIC's are mass produced. This is why people run storage over IP now and days.

Ethernet is as ubiquitous as you can get. (yes switching it and bridging it per port can get expensive) but compare the bandwidth to the cost. All specs are well published, known, and plenty of opensource exists.

I recall Hydra/Andromeda (HVX/DVX mod) or some such other using it as it's 4:4:4 datapipe.

Its used to long haul any other signal cheaply, including DVI, HDMI, Apple KVM and USB etc. (Look at Geffen extender products)

It's dirt cheap and so are the controllers. Thompson Grass Valley uses it on their capture media servers and so are alot of other folks. It's only prone to interference, this is when transcievers are exchanged from copper to fiber. It's beating out fibre-channel in terms of speed and sustained disk transfers (esp in clustered computing and shared storage).

I don't know why camera mfgs. are avoiding it like the plague.

Solid State is also a good Idea. You know whats funny, that Firestore business, if you crack one open, you can put a 2.5in 512GB solid state drive in em now.

Here is the SPEC link to AirPort Extreme, it has a USB HardDrive sharing function over Ethernet, and Wireless. Its fairly close to plugging in a USB 2.0 cord into an HVX and putting into Drive Mode and watching this thing mount/share, I'm actually going to try this since I own one.

http://www.apple.com/airportextreme/features/harddrivesharing.html

This KB even states that FAT16 and FAT32 in 512KB blocks is supported.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2426

Cost of this device (with all its thrills - given that my experiment will work.) - $179USD + TAX.
Cost of a dumber device with or without wireless, specifically made for reading P2 media - either via USB or PCMCIA, even less.

You can even make a universal one in theory taking in SD/Compact Flash/Firewire/SxS/P2 etc.. all of em.
 
Last edited:
The Addonics will not work, as Barry indicates, in an EC/24 slot with a Mac.

As to the Airport Extreme, why plug your HPX into it, and transfer via USB, when you can plug it into a USB port on your Mac?

The cam is the reader, not the Airport Extreme
 
David S. said:
The Addonics will not work, as Barry indicates, in an EC/24 slot with a Mac.

As to the Airport Extreme, why plug your HPX into it, and transfer via USB, when you can plug it into a USB port on your Mac?

The cam is the reader, not the Airport Extreme
Click to expand...


So on their page where it states OS.X 10.4 supported, they don't mean P2, just other PCMCIA/Cardbus cards.
(edit, nevermind, I saw the red lettering in the picture... sad sad sad.)
 
David S. said:
The Addonics will not work, as Barry indicates, in an EC/24 slot with a Mac.

As to the Airport Extreme, why plug your HPX into it, and transfer via USB, when you can plug it into a USB port on your Mac?

The cam is the reader, not the Airport Extreme
Click to expand...

I want to do this for a test. Ethernet can run 100meters (GIG-E supported on airport).

This means the loader may not need to be on the set, and for various other silly reasons such as shared access. Meaning 2 ethernet loader machines can read the footage simultaneously from a single source and operate on different plafroms, like Windows and Mac. So a tethered cam w/o disconnect from the tripod can provide MXF playback and FCP Log and transfer at the same time on-set. If its a multi-cam shoot, it would be possible to use same-size cards, and offload in sync with 3 airports and 1 computer.
Yes 3 P2 devices read over GIG-E is faster than 3 cams connected via USB to the same machine.

No I'm not crazy, just did not have much sleep.

Also the Loader Machine can now be a MacPro up-to 100meters away, an no need to walk over the cards, or use the 5 card USB reader.



Also, is it me or is the HVX200/HPX170 running an embedded linux kerenel for firmware?
 
Last edited:
Barry_Green said:
Explain to me how I can manufacture and sell it for "not much" and I will gladly set up the corporation and fire up the production lines.
Click to expand...

I don't know why you're being ironic, but my intention was to communicate a quite feasible idea, which might not be that original, but possible nonetheless.

I'm not an engineer (altough my old career was in IT) but Implementing a PC Card slot, using some kind of bridge chip and e.g a marvell gigabit phy, shouldn't bring the cost to more than 150-200USD. It could well may be quite less than that.

And I guess my idea is not targeted to DIY builders but maybe to companies implementing that kind of stuff, hell even Duel Systems....
 
jazzx said:
I don't know why you're being ironic, but my intention was to communicate a quite feasible idea, which might not be that original, but possible nonetheless.
Click to expand...
I'm not being ironic. Show me how it can be done, and I will set up the company to build it.

Everything I've researched has said that it simply cannot be done. If someone can show me how, I'll do it. The caveat being, it has to work with a Panasonic P2 card.

I've told people for years why it can't happen, and they keep telling me it's no problem, so now I'm at the point where I say "show me how, and I'll do it."
 
http://pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.net/specs/DP83903.pdf


The above (altough quite old) pdf speaks of a PCMCIA interface chip from National semiconductor which can support lan. It could may as well not be the best example as I don't understand that well these documents, but I don't think its impossible.

Any engineers can correct me on this.

Cheers.
 
jazzx said:
http://pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.net/specs/DP83903.pdf


The above (altough quite old) pdf speaks of a PCMCIA interface chip from National semiconductor which can support lan. It could may as well not be the best example as I don't understand that well these documents, but I don't think its impossible.

Any engineers can correct me on this.

Cheers.
Click to expand...

The chip is for the socket side of CardBus I believe based on the Doc, not the card part. But, its interesting how they juxtapose Function 0 between bus and LAN.
 
A New Hope

A New Hope

Hi guys.

I went to the SATIS today in Paris (the french equivalent for NAB) and I did talk with some guys from Panasonic. P2 drivers for OS X should be updated in november to be Snow Leopard compatible. The guy told me that this update may solve the Duel Adapter issue... Suspense...

By the way an other solution will be available soon at Sonnet's with the Qio : http://www.sonnettech.com/product/qio.html

The price in Europe will be around 700€ including the controller card (express card or PCI Xpress)
 
USB boot

USB boot

So could I just boot from a 10.5.x from a thumb drive and transfer with the adapter? Would there be a significant speed loss in the actual p2 transfer to the internal drives(I have raid 0 in my mbp)? I know booting would be slow.
 
as far as i know you cant boot from a thumb drive. can you?

what you might consider is partitioning your internal drive into two segments. put snow on one and leopard on the other. then you can just boot from whichever one you need...
 
As far as I can tell- Panasonic has made a 3rd party P2 reader almost impossible via licensing and technical issues- same experience as Barry. Every manufacturer I've ever asked about it over the years has said the same thing. It's just when of those realities you come to accept with this workflow.

Have you considered an AJA KiPro as an alternative? That gets you out of P2 entirely while upgrading from DVCPROHD to ProRes and you keep the same camera quality.

http://www.aja.com/products/ki-pro/

Noah
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top