P2 Offloading via USB OTG Bridge Device

K

karlgent

Member
Hi all,

Been really struggling with this and hoping someone could shed some light on this problem.

I bought an HVX200 a couple week back and it came with two 8 Gb P2 cards (16 mins footage @1080). Since I can't afford more P2, a firestore and can't bring a laptop to the field with me at the moment - I wanted a cheap, portable hard drive so I could offload in the field multiple times and shoot more than 16 minutes at once.

I was going to go for a Lacie Rugged or a WD Studio Passport firewire drive - but of course you need an external power source if using a firewire drive in host mode - so that idea was out the window.

A USB portable hard drive was my last option, and I found out via these threads that in order to use a USB portable hard drive to offload - it would require On-The-GO (OTG) technology. Doing some research on this, I came across this OTG bridge device (battery powered), which I purchased cheaply on eBay:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...SIN=B000CRPTCA

I then purchased the following hard drive, figuring I could use it together with the OTG bridge device to offload footage in the field in PC Mode without an external power source:

http://www.amazon.com/iomega-Select-.../dp/B00449HAXI

Now came the test! I locked my P2 card, set my HVX200 to PC Mode and connected the camera to the OTG bridge device as instructed. The red light on the camera flashed and the "TURN POWER OFF" message was displayed on the camera's LCD, before the OTG bridge device could even register it.

So, I then unlocked the P2 card and tried the same thing again. This time it showed that it had connected to the OTG bridge device. I then tried to connect my USB portable drive to the bridge device which would not register (which could be due to requiring an external power source) but regardless of this, when I turned on my camera again the "P2 FORMAT ERROR" message was displayed and all my clips were gone. Even when I power my OTG bridge device drive via the mains and get it to recognise the hard drive - it wont allow me to pull the footage and still formats my P2 card. I'm totally confused! Could the fact that my hard drive is formatted in NTFS cause any problems - although it formats even without the hard drive being connected?

Could someone out there pretty please enlighten me on this problem. I'm pretty new to the HVX200/P2 and I really want to get out and shoot more.

Thanks folks
 
Yeah it was me, thanks again. The camera definitely recognizes the device but something seems to format the P2 cards in the process, it's so confusing and a total pain.

I'll try reformatting the drive to FAT32, and let you know.

Cheers
 
Never used a USB bridge device. It certainly sounds like it's not working... first of all, keep your cards locked. If you have a spurious command coming from the OTG device that's formatting your cards, that would be prevented by keeping your cards locked. And that's just proper offload procedure anyway -- you lock your full cards and keep them locked until they've been successfully offloaded; only then do you unlock them.

I've used OTG to offload cards several times and it's always worked fine; but what I was using was hard drives that had OTG protocol built into them, not some separate OTG bridge device. With the camera in USB Device mode, and an OTG drive plugged in, the OTG device takes control of the camera and reads the data off the cards. But that's all it's supposed to do. I don't know what that bridge device could be doing that is causing the HVX to want to turn the power off, but that's a big red flag.

I would be inclined to throw the "cheap device that's formatting cards and making the camera demand the power be turned off" straight into the trash.

If you really, really want to try it again, I'd suggest trying a different USB cable; maybe there's a bat's shot in hades that your troubles are caused by a bad cable?
 
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