USB bus power

C

CamVega

Member
Hi all,

I'm trying to figure out an easy solution for offloading footage without the need to bring a laptop with me.

From what I understand the HPX500 can offload 15 partitions to a firewire drive, but that the camera does not provide bus power over firewire.
Does the camera provide bus power over USB? and if so... is it possible a portable harddrive could be powered from the USB bus, and connect through the Firewire?

I'm sorry if this has been asked before, I did search quite a bit.
 
No. So you have two options:
1) use the Nexto CF2525 hard disk enclosure, it's a battery-powered firewire drive enclosure. The included batteries are good for about 110gb of offloading.

2) use a battery-powered USB "On The Go" disk enclosure.

Of the two, I highly recommend choice #1 over #2.
 
Hey Barry - I haven't done a "direct to FW" offload since a test I did last year, where I got absolutely HORRIBLE transfer speeds. Have you had any reasonable results?

On the other hand, if you're carrying a 500, you probably have: sticks, fluid head, bricks, a light or 5, c-stands, gel case, cables, etc etc. What's a small laptop add in the big picture?
 
The problem with the small laptop is power requirements, and cables.
I don't want to have to set up a laptop, hook up a drive to it, and then offload.

I also want the footage transfered to a standard USB harddrive for delivering footage to people. which is why the battery powered enclosure isn't really doing it for me.

Anyway I can power a harddrive from the Anton Bauer tap?
 
I do this all the time. What I have is a 2.5" external hard drive enclosure. It has both 6 pin firewire and USB (well, mini usb). It also accepts a power source. I use the powertap to power the enclosure (had to make a custom cable) and 6 pin firewire host mode to dump to the hard drive. Works like a champ.

I think the enclosures were like $10 or $15 from Newegg. The hard drives get cheaper every day. Never had one problem.
 
It's pretty quick, honestly. I get at least the same if not better than the USB transfers.

One thing people don't realize is that on the firewire in USB host mode, you need to turn off the varification process. What happens is you transfer over all of the data, then it reverifies that it transfered everything. Never once have I had a problem with it not transfering everything in tact the first time. It's freakin digital man. I know things can happen, but geesh. So the people that complain that it's painfully slow, that's why.

I usually dump 32 gigs at a time (cause I have 32GB cards), but I wanna say it only takes about 15 minutes to dump a card, maybe less, We have been at evebts where we needed to offload cards from a buddies camera after the gig and we were out of there in relatively short time.
 
Ahhh.... no verify. Soz, but that goes past my "warm n' fuzzy" line. I use P2CMS with "compare" enabled. Yeah, I tested it last year w/ verify on. Slower than molasses in February.
 
EditingFX said:
Ahhh.... no verify. Soz, but that goes past my "warm n' fuzzy" line. I use P2CMS with "compare" enabled. Yeah, I tested it last year w/ verify on. Slower than molasses in February.
Click to expand...

Well, do you verify your footage when you transfer it normally? Probably not. The Firewire host mode is a solid process. I guess I'm one of those people that doesn't automatically think that I'm going to get burned by technology.
 
If you Google Nexto 2700, there are some shopping results for them. The Regular 2700 I see for $129 and the Extreme version which has a 250GB hard drive in it for $239. That's from some "mydigitaldiscount" store which I have never heard of. You might try calling some of the DVX sponsors like Speccom and see if they have or can source it for you.
 
Hello Cam.
I purchased an 2.5 iomega HD 120gbs and also an external batt of the same size that last forever and use FW. It works very well!
If you are interested, I can find the info for the battery and send it to you.
jg :-)
 
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