HVX Plunge

Ah! That might explain why I couldn't get Will's to work. I had no idea how to playback files and totally assumed that you had to go into Device mode to do it. I gave up and went back to my p2 cards instead.

Thanks for clarifying.

Second part - I keep hearing about editing STRAIGHT from the card. There's two problems with this currently

A) You'd have to have a pretty nice laptop to edit straight from the cards if you're using one. 32gig card or not.

B) What Mac's (or even Windows-based PC's) have PCMCIA slots built in? If they're not, you'd have to have a Firewire connection to an external device that could take p2 cards, right? Wouldn't it just be better to transfer to the internal 7200rpm drive than to deal with the slower speeds from an external device or even using the PCMCIA slot to begin with?

I'm probably missing some smaller detail... but it seems like editing from the p2 card itself would just be slow.
 
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Barry_Green said:
Stop searching, there aren't any (other than the Panasonic PCD20 or whatever it's called). Which is $2000, but it supports FW800 too.

What you want is the duel-systems PCMCIA->ExpressCard adapter, it's due out in probably two weeks and should cost something like $100.
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Well, that's a relief.
 
Mark, getting a Firestore may work for you on account that you'll have a free 8gig card coming soon anyway. BenB still has a p2 card, and he recommends having at least one even if you have a Firestore.
 
Kholi said:
A) You'd have to have a pretty nice laptop to edit straight from the cards if you're using one. 32gig card or not.
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Not really. My single-core Pentium M 760 could handle realtime 1080 in EDIUS right off the card. I've done four streams on my current laptop, which is a Core 2 Duo 2.00 GHz, certainly far from the top of the line. I could probably handle six streams on my current laptop, but I haven't had need to try to configure it that way.

B) What Mac's (or even Windows-based PC's) have PCMCIA slots built in?
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All G4s have 'em, no new Intel Macs do. Lots and lots of PCs have them. And even those who don't, the adapter is coming.

If they're not, you'd have to have a Firewire connection to an external device that could take p2 cards, right?
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Firewire adapters aren't the best way to go, although they're certainly better than USB adapters! The FW800 adapter is probably plenty fast enough. The better way would be the PCMCIA->ExpressCard adapter, so you get the full 640mbps the card offers.

Wouldn't it just be better to transfer to the internal 7200rpm drive than to deal with the slower speeds from an external device or even using the PCMCIA slot to begin with?
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No, because the drive has two problems that can't be overcome. First, drives are slower than cards; most laptop drives run at around 30 megabytes per second, the fastest ones might be in the ballpark of 40 megabytes per second. The cards are 80 megabytes per second.

But secondly, and worse, a hard drive has a read head that has to jump around the surface of the drive trying to read various sectors. That can really, really slow down your access, especially if you're doing multiple streams. You only get the highest transfer rates from a hard drive if the sectors are all laid out sequentially, so the read head doesn't have to jump around and seek around the drive. But there's no way to guarantee that, and if you have multiple streams of HD you have to have the read head jumping back and forth between sectors for each stream. That takes time. Even a five-drive two-terabyte G-RAID PRO will only guarantee three streams of DVCPRO-HD. The cheapest/smallest P2 card can do six. The cards don't have "read heads", they don't have to "seek", they just deliver information immediately. It's a quantum leap in performance that's possible because there are no moving parts. Moving parts mean delays while the parts are moving into position. With no moving parts, there are no delays.

I'm probably missing some smaller detail... but it seems like editing from the p2 card itself would just be slow.
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Quite the opposite. Editing straight from the cards blows every other option away. It's a night-and-day transformation in how we work. Not really practical right now because the cards are too small to hold a full project's worth of footage (which I think a 32GB card will overcome for many projects) and, secondly, because Apple has so far refused to implement MXF support on the timeline. If they add that (hopefully, again, by the time the 32GB card is available) then you'll see a transformation in workflow begin, almost as significant as the change from tape-based editing to NLE's.
 
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Yeah, I just want to dump footage from the card, in case I am doing a performance and need to shoot for 2 straight hours. Also, to back it up during any shoot, dump to laptop and have a couple of big HDs there to backup to.

Whenever I can I shoot DVrack. It's just the best all around solution for this stuff in my book. And any time I am shooting a "movie" I can pretty much do that. It's only run and gun or sometimes the performance spaces where I shoot don't have room, etc...

And every laptop I've ever owned up to THIS ONE, had that damned slot. I just never imagined any of them wouldn't...

but Barry, is there a thread or something about that adaptor? Where can I look at info on it?
 
Barry_Green said:
Not really. My single-core Pentium M 760 could handle realtime 1080 in EDIUS right off the card. I've done four streams on my current laptop, which is a Core 2 Duo 2.00 GHz, certainly far from the top of the line. I could probably handle six streams on my current laptop, but I haven't had need to try to configure it that way.


All G4s have 'em, no new Intel Macs do. Lots and lots of PCs have them. And even those who don't, the adapter is coming.


Firewire adapters aren't the best way to go, although they're certainly better than USB adapters! The FW800 adapter is probably plenty fast enough. The better way would be the PCMCIA->ExpressCard adapter, so you get the full 640mbps the card offers.


No, because the drive has two problems that would need to be overcome. First, drives are slower than cards; most laptop drives run at around 30 megabytes per second, the fastest ones might be in the ballpark of 40 megabytes per second. The cards are 80 megabytes per second.

But secondly, and worse, a hard drive has a read head that has to jump around the surface of the drive trying to read various sectors. That can really, really slow down your access, especially if you're doing multiple streams. You only get the highest transfer rates from a hard drive if the sectors are all laid out sequentially, so the read head doesn't have to jump around and seek around the drive. But there's no way to guarantee that, and if you have multiple streams of HD you have to have the read head jumping back and forth between sectors for each stream. That takes time. Even a five-drive two-terabyte G-RAID PRO will only guarantee three streams of DVCPRO-HD. The cheapest/smallest P2 card can do six. The cards don't have "read heads", they don't have to "seek", they just deliver information immediately. It's a quantum leap in performance that's possible because there are no moving parts. Moving parts mean delays while the parts are moving into position. With no moving parts, there are no delays.

I'm probably missing some smaller detail... but it seems like editing from the p2 card itself would just be slow.
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[/QUOTE]

I think that was the detail I was missing. NOW it makes sense. I read that in your book and was like... "HuH?" =B Durrrr. Does this apply to the HVX via Firewire transport? Or no?

Dang, Barry has crazy information.
 
Does this apply to the HVX via Firewire transport? Or no?
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Not sure what you mean. Do you mean in "1394 device" mode? If so, yes, but it's limited by the speed of the firewire. In absolute maximum optimum conditions you'll get 50 megabytes per second of data transfer through firewire, and I doubt you'll see those optimum conditions very often.

Dang, Barry has crazy information.
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I've been doing this with EDIUS, and it's just so eye-opening. Part of my frustration with FCP has been that they're one full step away. No matter how good an editor FCP is, as long as they insist on that silly unwrap/QT rewrap phase, they'll never have the full power that comes from going straight from the cards. Avid can sort of do it, but EDIUS just got it soooo right.
 
Mark Harris said:
Yeah, I just want to dump footage from the card, in case I am doing a performance and need to shoot for 2 straight hours. Also, to back it up during any shoot, dump to laptop and have a couple of big HDs there to backup to.
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I've been thinking about this. Powering Hard-Drives in a scenario where there isn't much power to be had to begin with.

http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/store_access.do;jsessionid=F6HNirV9GNNUy2WvXqKO2JAQ5M8DbwJBZ0Z2k3Hr8KMBa2ClXRmX!45679438?template_type=product_detail&product_code=RF244AA%23ABA

THey aren't big... 120gb is the largest capacity that I've seen, maybe 300gb if I search harder. BUT, it doesn't need EXTERNAL power. It's powered by the Laptop's BUS. It's only 5400RPM but I believe for offloading to a device, it would be totally viable.

The 80gb's are selling for 75 brand new on Ebay and they're legit. So you could theoretically drop 300.00 on 4 and get 320gb of self powered storage to offload P2 cards too until the larger ones come.
 
Barry_Green said:
Not sure what you mean. Do you mean in "1394 device" mode? If so, yes, but it's limited by the speed of the firewire. In absolute maximum optimum conditions you'll get 50 megabytes per second of data transfer through firewire, and I doubt you'll see those optimum conditions very often.


I've been doing this with EDIUS, and it's just so eye-opening. Part of my frustration with FCP has been that they're one full step away. No matter how good an editor FCP is, as long as they insist on that silly unwrap/QT rewrap phase, they'll never have the full power that comes from going straight from the cards. Avid can sort of do it, but EDIUS just got it soooo right.
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I'd have to get Edius Broadcast first. And yes, the 1394 Device mode is what I meant.

So basically, editing straight from the p2, to be as fast as it could be, it would have to plug right into the system via slot. Does that mean the PCMCIA adapter for the Xpress slot isn't going to be as fast as having a regular p2 slot?

Also, is that what it's doing in Final Cut when you import Panasonic p2? It's unwrapping and rewrapping into Quicktime? I just drag and drop the footage from the viewer. Never knew how it exactly worked; only that it did.
 
G-Tech is now making a G-RAID Mini, which is a RAID of two laptop hard disks, up to 320GB. Should make for some speedy offloads. And, it's bus-powered! But only through firewire, and PC laptops don't typically include powered 6-pin firewire ports, so it might be more appropriate for Mac users.
 
Barry_Green said:
G-Tech is now making a G-RAID Mini, which is a RAID of two laptop hard disks, up to 320GB. Should make for some speedy offloads. And, it's bus-powered! But only through firewire, and PC laptops don't typically include powered 6-pin firewire ports, so it might be more appropriate for Mac users.
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I know my laptop sure as heck doesn't have a Firewire port. >=\ It's only USB2.0 which is why I've been pondering investing in two to four (2-4) of the 80gb Pocket Media Drives. Have you any experience with the PCMCIA Firewire 800/400 converters? I was thinking that it'd slow down the transport because there's another connection in between the actual firewire transport. But... that's probably inaccurate as well.

G-tech is a great brand, though. I love my G-Raids. They look like baby G5's. =P
 
Kholi said:
So basically, editing straight from the p2, to be as fast as it could be, it would have to plug right into the system via slot. Does that mean the PCMCIA adapter for the Xpress slot isn't going to be as fast as having a regular p2 slot?
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Should be every bit as fast. The difference between firewire and plugging straight in is that the straight PCMCIA bus is much faster than any version of firewire; it's capable of over a gigabit per second. But the card maxxes out at 640mbps, so plugging the card straight in assures the maximum transfer speed. The ExpressCard bus is over twice as fast still, so ExpressCard->PCMCIA should be 100% full speed that the card can deliver.

FW800 should be able to deliver 100% speed as well, assuming all goes well with the firewire bus.

Also, is that what it's doing in Final Cut when you import Panasonic p2? It's unwrapping and rewrapping into Quicktime? I just drag and drop the footage from the viewer. Never knew how it exactly worked; only that it did.
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Yes, it unwraps the MXF file, and re-creates a new Quicktime file, copying the contents of the MXF file into the new Quicktime file. So it's a lossless conversion (other than discarding the metadata and such). But going through that step necessitates copying to a hard disk, you could never edit straight off the card, so you'd always have to go through that conversion process. If FCP6 adds straight native MXF support, that limitation goes away and FCP becomes, perhaps, the absolute ultimate HVX companion.
 
Kholi said:
Have you any experience with the PCMCIA Firewire 800/400 converters? I was thinking that it'd slow down the transport because there's another connection in between the actual firewire transport. But... that's probably inaccurate as well.
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Potentially they can be every bit as fast as a native firewire bus, because PCMCIA is faster than FW800.

In practice, that's another matter. I had an old PCMCIA FW400 adapter on my two-laptops-ago laptop, and it worked fine. I have an ExpressCard FW800 adapter for my current laptop and it's a dog-slow pig, completely useless. I don't know what the problem is, as it should be twice as fast as FW400, but in practice it takes 40 minutes to offload a card to my G-Raid through FW800, and it takes 2.5 minutes to offload to it through FW400, so obviously there's something very wrong there.
 
Barry_Green said:
Potentially they can be every bit as fast as a native firewire bus, because PCMCIA is faster than FW800.

In practice, that's another matter. I had an old PCMCIA FW400 adapter on my two-laptops-ago laptop, and it worked fine. I have an ExpressCard FW800 adapter for my current laptop and it's a dog-slow pig, completely useless. I don't know what the problem is, as it should be twice as fast as FW400, but in practice it takes 40 minutes to offload a card to my G-Raid through FW800, and it takes 2.5 minutes to offload to it through FW400, so obviously there's something very wrong there.
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My Laptop is older than yours I'm sure, so I'll let you know how it works. I'm about to go out and buy one at lunch to see how it fairs when transporting to the G-raid.

Did I Hi-Jack Marks thread? Or maybe he's getting great info out of this?
 
PCMCIA adapters don't deliver power though, at least in all the ones I've found. They have an optional power connector so you can plug in a power supply to the adapter, but that kind of defeats the whole reason of wanting a bus-powered drive.

Plus, PCMCIA adapters would get in the way of doing faster offloads. I wanted the ExpressCard FW800 adapter so that my PCMCIA slot was available for the cards, and then the FW800 would go to the G-RAID, and I could offload a 4GB card in probably 90 seconds with that configuration. If I used a PCMCIA adapter, I can't use the slot for offloading anymore...
 
This is a hijacked thread, but man it's tough to keep up with it! This is one of the fastest-growing threads I've seen in a long time! :)
 
Barry_Green said:
PCMCIA adapters don't deliver power though, at least in all the ones I've found. They have an optional power connector so you can plug in a power supply to the adapter, but that kind of defeats the whole reason of wanting a bus-powered drive.

Plus, PCMCIA adapters would get in the way of doing faster offloads. I wanted the ExpressCard FW800 adapter so that my PCMCIA slot was available for the cards, and then the FW800 would go to the G-RAID, and I could offload a 4GB card in probably 90 seconds with that configuration. If I used a PCMCIA adapter, I can't use the slot for offloading anymore...
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Oh! You only have ONE PCMCIA slot! I have two. I get where you're coming from now. I could have one for my firewire PCMCI slot and one for offloading the 8gig straight to that Firewire Device.

I still want to try the Buspowered USB 2.0 drives, though. Though I guess if you have enough external power to run the laptop, you should be able to hook up one or two externals as well. Less you're just running off Long life Laptop batteries the entire time.
 
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