HVX200 + P2 + FW Drive

Mr. Blonde

Mr. Blonde

RED Advocate
So since the HVX offers the ability to capture to P2 then dump out to a firewire hd, I was thinking of buying a small 2gb P2 card which should be pretty cheap (around $700 or so dollars) and then to a fw drive. My question is, what sort of fw drive does it have to be? I'm guessing it would need to be a fw400 drive?
 
Mr. Blonde said:
My question is, what sort of fw drive does it have to be? I'm guessing it would need to be a fw400 drive?
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Yeap, any standard firewire hard drive should work fine. The camera uses a four-pin (unpowered) connector, however, so you have to make sure that your hard drive gets its power on its own (ie, plugged into a wall).

rgdfilms said:
I thought the 4 GB cards were going to be $700..
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They should be roughly that price on the street when the camera launches. I don't think a 2GB P2 card is very functional at this point as they are slower than their 4GB and 8GB counterparts and are already outdated.
 
Mr. Blonde said:
Are there any self powered fw hard drives?
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Another possibility might be the Spark III from FireWire Direct. Its 40GB, tiny, designed to mount on a camera, and has an on-board lithium battery they say will power it for 3 hours. I've vener used one, but the small size and onboard battery could make it a good candidate for real mobile use...

Link: http://www.macobserver.com/article/2002/03/29.7.shtml

If you're only doing DVCPro50 and DV, the new CitiDisk HDV FireWire may work. It doesn't support the speeds needed for DVCProHD, but there are reports online that CitiDisk is working on a model to support the HVX.

Link: http://www.shining.com/products/totalsolution/citidisk_hdv/

There's a couple and ther's probably a lot more out there.

Gibby
www.cut4.tv
 
The thing about a self-powered hard disk is that a key factor is that you want it to be fast fast fast. Don't get a cheap little drive because it might take forever to offload the cards to it. I don't know what the speed rating is like on external hard disks and enclosures, but a slow drive might take 2x or 3x as long to offload some cards. Fast disks can sustain about 25 megabytes per second, which should let you offload a 4gb card in 2 minutes. So consider that whatever drive you're getting, it's likely going to be the bottleneck in the transfer process, so you probably want to find the very fastest enclosure (Oxford 911?) and the very fastest drive speed you can get.
 
That Seagate is probably reasonably quick, but I'll guarantee you it won't transfer at anywhere near 480mbps. 480mbps would be 60 megabytes per second. I would bet cash money that that particular drive can't sustain half that transfer rate, and for writing it's probably lower still. Probably in the 25 to 30 megabyte per second range.

What you need to look at is minimum sustained data transfer rate, and the most important spec is minimum sustained writing speed. Many/most single 3.5" drives are in the 20 to 25 megabyte range. 2.5" drives are a lot slower, and 1.8" drives (like in the ipod) are slower still. In order to get the maximum transfer rate, for maximum P2 offload times, you'll need a RAID of at least two drives, and probably three.
 
Glyph has announced, and will soon be releasing, a line of portable, bus-powered, ProTools qualified HDs. I think they're called "PortaGig". I'd trust these when they come out...

Of course, I don't think the HVX will power a bus-powered HD, but a Mac laptop would. I guess most PC laptops wouldn't... though I have a neat firewire 6-pin PC card that has a cable to steal bus power from a USB port...

Also, I'll append to what the Green Barry said: sustained transfer rate isn't everything. I have used many little bus-powered drives that could indeed sustain a high transfer rate under some conditions, but which had abysmal seek/access times that made them useless for many things (especially ProTools tracking). DV capture is pretty non-demanding of these drives when the drive is fairly clean; I don't know that we know enough yet about the FW capture formats for DVCProHD to say if that will hold true... I assume it's NOT true for MXF, if indeed it creates a number of streams and a bunch of metadata in separate files.... so look for more than sustained transfer!

-Barry
 
Can't remember where I saw it today...

Someone was selling an 8g card for $2,795 if I'm not mistaken...

So hopefully the price will drop when the camera is released at the end of the year...
 
i think that buying a drive that you can use not only out in the field, but one which you will be satisfied with whenn you bring it back to the studio and plug it in to edit with is the right way to go for myslef at least. these g-tech systems are pretty nice

http://www.videoguys.com/gtech.html
 
Neil Rowe said:
i think that buying a drive that you can use not only out in the field, but one which you will be satisfied with whenn you bring it back to the studio and plug it in to edit with is the right way to go for myslef at least. these g-tech systems are pretty nice

http://www.videoguys.com/gtech.html
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Got a question for you....how would you provide power to one of these drives when connected to the camera?
 
Nice that B & H has the card listed for less...

Maybe it'll drop even more in a month...

Okay if the banner that flashes saying you can purchase the camera for $5,499 and with two cards at $8,899 that makes the cards $1,700 each...

I'm wondering could you purchase two more cards at the same price that would come out to be $12,299 for the camera and four cards... if my math is right...

or just use the EVS rental card program... for extra cards...
 
GaryinCalifornia said:
Okay if the banner that flashes saying you can purchase the camera for $5,499 and with two cards at $8,899 that makes the cards $1,700 each...
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It's a bundle/pack, that's why (a good reason for a cool purchase unless we can't wait that long: March/April = Firestore)
 
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