HVX200 and ipod

E

ebarfie

New member
Searched forum and cannot find answer. Am trying to decide on purchase of HVX200. I will definitely NOT get any P2 cards right away, as I only need to shoot in NTSC 4:3 mini-dv format now, then high-def later. My question is: I have heard that the camera will record (HD) to an ipod (say, 60 gig flavor) directly via firewire. This is not true, is it?

thanks,

egb
 
Nope. It won't work. You have to record HD to one of the following:

P2 card(s)
Intelligent Drive (aka Firestore)
Direct to Laptop via Firewire

What you COULD do with an iPod is, once you've recorded the HD footage to P2 card, transfer to the iPod via firewire directly, without the use of a laptop.

Bear in mind that all the new iPods are USB2, not Firewire.
 
I'm wondering... since the new iPods are USB2, is there any way to have the camera copy the data to the IPod via USB2? or is that functionality firewire only?
 
thanks for quick response. that's what I thought. I will just wait for the hard disk from focus enhancements, or whatever their name is.

yep, forgot my 60 gig ipod is USB2... :)
 
External 80gb HDD is about $180, if you've got a laptop, why not?

iPods huh? Well, you could use them for the same purpose as an external HDD but you can't record DIRECTLY to one. I don't see why everyone is so ga-ga over recording to the iPods, what will that do for you exactly? With a video iPod, you can't view the movie files unless you make some smaller resolution versions in h.264. For dailies this is fine, but for reviewing footage quickly on the spot, it sucks. The best bet is to go Firestore and invest in a laptop and external HDDs to offload it to, that is assuming you're shooting a TON of footage on the go. If not, then the Firestore should work perfectly fine for most. Otherwise you're stuck with tape until you can get all of that mobile equipment together.

I personally can't wait until they do come up with an iPod with video input of some kind, but until then, we're stuck.
 
nope...

I see the IPOD only as a very lightweight Laptop, just to empty the P2, then fianlly to transfer the data to NLE's hard drives.

A lightweight and simple solution is important to me.
 
Wouldn't a Firestore fit the bill then Antoine? I haven't seen one in person, so I don't know exactly how big they are. But I'm just assuming that it isn't too big. Why not use that instead?
 
Jack,

The Firestore is probaly a better solution, but if the IPOD works, it would be lighter and cheaper.
I ordered only 2 8G P2 cards (for now) , so i must transfer the data in the field, and i dont want to carry a laptop....
If the Firestore is really lightweight and affordable, then for sure it would be 'the solution" until P2 becomes cheaper.
 
Antoine_Fabi said:
Jack,

The Firestore is probaly a better solution, but if the IPOD works, it would be lighter and cheaper.
I ordered only 2 8G P2 cards (for now) , so i must transfer the data in the field, and i dont want to carry a laptop....
If the Firestore is really lightweight and affordable, then for sure it would be 'the solution" until P2 becomes cheaper.
Click to expand...
The Ipod will not work by itself. To put the footage onto an Ipod you need a laptop to actually perform this task. That is why the Firestore is the only portable, non-P2 solution known of.

Personally I would not even try to put my valuable data onto a Ipod unless it was a backup copy. Normal everyday use of Ipods eventually lead to HDD failure. Put your footage onto a HDD that does not get banged around while in operation (IMO).

Best
 
Precisely, Antoine:

ipod is a cheap storage solution in this regards; that is, as a temporary offload of the HD data. Then, just drag the ipod contents to your computer's hard drive. Now, if Jobs would come out with an ipod which doubles as an HVX200 direct-video (HD) recording unit, like the Firestore will be, then we have something. But I suppose the 'pod would be much more expensive then... :(
 
The only major difference between an iPod and a firestore is that the firestore has firmware which allows it to act as a DV device. If you could customize the Apple firmware, or (more realistically) use iPod linux with the linux support for DV, you could capture on an iPod just like you can on a firestore.

Unfortunately with the new iPods all USB2, this is kind of a dead end solution.
 
whoa, khmuse... that girl in your profile, do you know her? She's the lead in the feature one of my best friends just finished shooting in Tulsa. Small world.
 
tigeba said:
The only major difference between an iPod and a firestore is that the firestore has firmware which allows it to act as a DV device.
Click to expand...
That's "a" difference, but not by any means the only difference. The FireStore is also likely to be dramatically faster than the ipod. The Firestore's designed to handle the minimum sustained data transfer rate of DVCPRO-HD; the ipod certainly isn't.
 
Antoine_Fabi said:
How long will it take to tranfer a 8G P2 card to an IPOD via USB2 ?
Click to expand...
You can't, so the question is irrelevant. You could only transfer through firewire, not USB2.

As far as transfer through firewire goes, the HVX will output it at 50mb/sec. But how fast will the firewire ipod receive it? The ipod is the bottleneck, not the HVX. If you were outputting via firewire to a SATA RAID, you could offload an 8gb card in about a minute and a half. But if outputting to an ipod, it could take 30 minutes or more, depends on how fast the ipod is.
 
Barry_Green said:
That's "a" difference, but not by any means the only difference. The FireStore is also likely to be dramatically faster than the ipod. The Firestore's designed to handle the minimum sustained data transfer rate of DVCPRO-HD; the ipod certainly isn't.
Click to expand...

The current firestore has a 5400 RPM laptop drive in it. No clue what an HD firestore would have. Most of the iPods out there have drives that can handle 66 or 100MB/s so this is not really an issue.
 
Jack_Felis said:
I personally can't wait until they do come up with an iPod with video input of some kind, but until then, we're stuck.
Click to expand...

Well, even if that does happen, it's not going to be suitable for capturing anything from a camera. Look at what we're dealing with: Here we have a camera that puts out DV100 over Firewire. You sure wouldn't want to convert that to some uncompressed analog format or even SDI. Then we have the Canon camera that does have an SDI output, but no way will an iPod in the foreseeable future have a storage device fast enough for uncompressed HD or a chip fast enough to compress it on the fly.

Add to all this the fact that Apple, the inventor of Firewire, has REMOVED it from their best-selling product and switched entirely over to an interface that was designed for keyboards, mice, and modems.

Basically, it's not going to happen.
 
If the HVX200 will not transfer video data by USB2.0 then what is the purpose of having a USB2.0 port on the camera? Per the Panasonic website spec it has USB2.0

johnc
 
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