P2 questions: transfer speed & wear

[Philip Bast]

When I first bought my HVX200 I continued to shoot to SD tape then upgraded to P2 cards about a year ago. I have a pair of 64 Gig cards (Black with 800 transfer rate) which I rarely take out of the camera. I offload straight to Final Cut via 1394 cable and do not own a P2 reader. In essence, it's the same process I had always used with tape, going back to DVX100 days.

When I first moved to P2 cards, I was tickled to discover faster upload times. Whereas tape transferred in real time, the P2 transfer seemed to take half the time. I don't have specific transfer time notes from a year ago to document this, but that's my recollection.

In the past several months however, transfer rate seems slower ... almost as slow as the old real time transfer from tape.

For example, last night I shot a stage performance in two acts, so I had two clips to upload. I noted the time of transfer start and stop. Act One, 82 minutes, took 73 to upload. Act Two, 86 minutes, took 77 to upload.

So, I have several questions:

1) What is the actual transfer time from P2 to Final Cut supposed be, using 1394 cable?

2) Is there a tendency for that slow down after extended use?

3) Do P2 cards get cluttered and need to be "de-fragged" despite being constantly reformatted?

4) Do I need to swap cards from slot to slot each time I reformat?

5) If so, is there a way to specify that in format settings, rather than physically swapping slots?

Not sure whether it makes any difference, but I always shoot 720/24PN for maximum data storage, allowing me up to 342 minutes continuous shooting without offloading. Speed of transfer isn't normally an issue, but during summer months I will be shooting some day-long events and need to offload fast during a supper break, in order to free up space for 3 or 4 hours shooting in the evening.

Also, just to confirm: apparently the camera doesn't sense space recently used on the P2 card once it's erased. I just checked. There were two minutes remaining on Card 1 from last night's shoot. I erased, then let the camera run 5 minutes. It chose Card 1 as expected, but did not move to Card 2 after 2 minutes; all 5 minutes are on Card 1. That tells me the camera is not choosing to spread data storage equally throughout both cards.

Any thoughts on this appreciated.

 

[David Jimerson]

The camera will record to one card until it's full and then switch to the next card. It does not "spread" the footage evenly across cards.

If there's a slowdown in transfer time (which there probably isn't), it'll be an issue in your computer and not in the camera or card. That will remain the same.

1) There are two things at play here -- actual transfer of data, and rewrapping through Log & Transfer. I suppose the rewrapping could be slowing down as your hard drive fills.

It is better for you to transfer your footage off the cards, to a hard drive, and THEN go through Log & Transfer. This will also have the benefit of creating backups of your original MXF files, which you should absolutely do.

2) No.

3) No.

4) No.

5) Not sure what you mean.

 

[Philip Bast]

Thanks David,

This is helpful.

If I understand correctly, I shouldn't worry that the card in slot 1 gets vastly more use than the card in slot 2.

I have tried transferring footage straight to my hard drive previously and found that was an even slower process than straight log & transfer to FCP. Ninety minutes footage took almost 3 hours to transfer. Again, this may be a computer issue, not the camera's.

With regard to hard drive storage, I'm on a MacPro with a terabyte main drive less than half full and I input and store my video projects to the other three drives. In this case, adding my footage last night still left me with 1.6 TB free on that storage drive, so I don't think it's because I'm filling up my drives too much.

Interestingly, I just checked my system specs and discovered that particular 2TB drive is spinning at 5900 rather than 7200. My main drive (and 2 other storage drives) are 7200. Last time I stopped to pick up hard drives, the clerk advised me that many drives may specify 7200, but operate at variable speeds or even go into rest mode. He recommended a Western Digital Black for constant 7200, so I bought a TB in that with the intention of migrating my operating system to it, but haven't taken the time to do it yet.

He also recommended considering a solid state drive for improving system speed, but since my video projects and movie files are stored on other drives, I don't see how that would help.

 

[David Jimerson]

If you're worried about it, you can swap cards. But it never would have occurred to me TO worry.

Transferring to a drive first will indeed increase the time it takes to get editing, but you should always keep a backup of the original MXF files anyway.

Slower hard drives will make a difference for transfer speed, yes.

 

[wgzn]

unless you are shooting something that requires long takes, like weddings, business meeting or live music event. i would just shoot to one card until its full. then pop it out and insert the other.

its not any better, just eliminates a stage of questions...

 

[docrock]

"If I understand correctly, I shouldn't worry that the card in slot 1 gets vastly more use than the card in slot 2."

No, the cards you have, have a lifetime warranty...the black ones, right? However, I HAVE lost a card (Black one), it was replaced....but even after sending it to Japan, the footage was NOT retrievable. What David says, you should think about seriously. Having an intermediary form of back up, especially with paying projects.

As a Mac user myself, I went to ebay and picked up an older G4 PowerBook, 15". It has the older expansion slot, so the P2 cards plug right in to the laptop...this model also has FW800 port, so I use OWC FW800 On-The-Go drives (powered by FW port) as my backup and transfer drive (to my main editing MacPro at home). A 16gig full P2 transfer 1080p/30 takes about 7-7.5 minutes...so about 30 seconds a gig. Seems like that would be a good solution for ya...and you can pick up a decent PB on ebay for around 400 bucks.

The other issue with the HVX is the flimsy/plastic FW connection...the more it gets used, the better chance it has of failing...I believe this was fixed on the 170. Yet another reason to off load your footage in a different fashion.

Otherwise, I agree with David...your computer is the likely culprit...actually, more likely your HDD. Are you using FW? 4 or 800?