P2 Workaround

Guess the sales dept. at Panny had a few words with the engineering lads. I'm sure it wouldn't take much for this to work...but they've got to make a buck somehow.
 
How do you know what it would take to implement? It is, in fact, very complicated (there are a number of old threads on this).

Ahhhh, here we go... From resident DV Guru Barry Green:

Barry_Green said:
As a former programmer, I can tell you that I wouldn't want anything to do with writing the software that controls a hard drive that someone's using to store their footage on! That seems like a liability nightmare just waiting to happen. You'd have to make sure that everything was so absolutely bulletproof and rock-solid (well, I guess some of the drive manufacturers weren't so worried about that, but no naming names!)

You're talking about a device that has to run AV/C protocol to capture the stream, and buffer it, while simultaneously employing some sort of 32-bit Disk Operating System to create file structures on an SBP2 protocol external device, and manage those files. And, ideally, it would also have to have the ability to parse and strip down an incoming DVCPRO-HD data stream to discard redundant frames. And it'd have to support playback, deleting, file locking, etc.

And it would have to operate at speeds of 2.5x as fast as any existing hard disk recorder.

Plus, ideally, it would have to be designed to take hot-swappable (or at least interchangeable) hard disks, unformatted, of various capacities, and be able to power them and interface with them such that it knows when they're dropping frames and can overcome that lag. And have to be able to give feedback to the user about that. And it'd have to have the electronics designed to support powering the drive, plus driving its own LCD feedback system, and you'd have to engineer a battery and power supply to go with it that's adequate to power the various types of drives people are likely to put in it. And it should have diagnostics in it to verify whether a drive is actually fast enough to be used. And theoretically it'd have to support multiple operating systems (i.e., MacOs, WinXP, and Linux). Or, just Fat32, but then it'd have to incorporate file-splitting and file-combining technologies for when file sizes cross the 2gb boundary.

In short, not free & easy. Not overly complex for today's level of technology, but so much more complex than you'd think at first glance. There's probably a reason that there are only three companies in the world making direct-to-disk recorders: Focus (firestore), nNovia (quickcapture, laird capdiv, etc) and Shining (citidisk, ads pyro, mce quickstream). And one of those manufacturers' products has a lousy reputation for reliability, on top of it.

I wish 'em the best of luck, but I doubt this is going to be an arena like homemade micro35 adapters spring up. I think there's going to need to be some serious R&D behind it if there's to be a reliable, serious effort made. I've contacted the two good companies to ask them to make the product we need -- hopefully it'll be forthcoming.

Until then, there's HD Rack -- not as portable, but way more flexible than any all-in-one disk capture solution!
Click to expand...
 
woah woah woah... hold the phone...


Barry is a former programmer??? my god.. I didn't think my respect for him could get higher.. but it just did..

I am a former "hobby/comp sci" programmer.
 
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