was set on a hmc150 but now if the 170 can..

B

BrettR.

Active member
Was going to get the hmc but people talking about card failures makes me scared... I THINK I recall hearing the hvx will double write to the cards so if one card was busted you'd always have a back up. If that is true can the hpx170 do the same? That insurence would be worth the large price difference i think.

Thanks.
 
The HVX will write on one P2 card until it is filled and then cascade seemlessly to the second card if you have two cards in the camera. It will not write to both cards at the same time giving you a redundant copy if that is what you're asking. I am quite sure, but not positive, that the HPX-170 works the same as the HVX in this respect.
 
All P2 cards are inherently designed to be failproof. It's not the camera that does it, it's the card itself. The P2 cards have microprocessors in them that manage the data, and the cards will write the data out to their memory and then read it back to perform a byte-for-byte data verification to make sure that the data got written out properly. If for some reason there was a data error, the cards will actually rewrite and retry up to six times, before marking the cell as bad and moving on.

So any P2 camera will do this, because it's inherently built into the P2 card.
 
well that does sound a bit more comforting, but I still have heard of p2 cards failing (on this forum), but you'd think that p2 cards loosing information would happen drastically less than The cards used in the hmc?
 
Brett,

If you truly need redundant recording, you will need to run a firestore type device, or tether a laptop, or possibly a P2 gear product to achieve that goal. There is no perfect media; memory cards can fail, the recording device can fail, tape and tape transports fail. Life is a risk Brett. P2 is probably the least risky.....for a price. But all these products are used by professionals every day and they live with it. Are your needs that important; are you shooting once in a lifetime work?

Best Regards,
Grant
 
ive been shooting to P2 for well over three years now and ive not had a single hint of any kind of card failure. that WAY better performance than ive had from any other recording media - including tape.
 
wgzn said:
ive been shooting to P2 for well over three years now and ive not had a single hint of any kind of card failure. that WAY better performance than ive had from any other recording media - including tape.
Click to expand...

David S. said:
Three and a half years.

No failures
Click to expand...

Barry_Green said:
Three and a half years. Never a lost frame, much less anything worse.
Click to expand...


While only judging off of 3 people isn't smart this seems wayyy better than the number of people that have lost info on hmcs and they haven't even been out that long...
 
the 150 is a new camera. its a lower-priced camera shooting to a MUCH CHEAPER (and IMHO much less robust) recording media.

while im not suggesting that lower price = lower reliability, the old saying "you get what you pay for" does come to mind...
 
Same thing as we've been saying for decades now -- if it's important footage, shoot on the very best media you can get. There's always been cheaper alternatives, whether off-brand tapes or reused/recycled tapes, but for the mission-critical stuff we always always used a fresh new BetaSP or DVCAM or DVCPRO tape. I would never shoot HDV on a cheap miniDV tape; spring for the bucks to get the right/best stock. Saving a few bucks here or there can never make up for losing footage.

And so it is with tapeless. Use the best cards you can possibly afford, and leave the bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping-the-last-nickel stuff for something else. For many of thus, that means shooting the important stuff on P2. For the HMC150 and HMC40 I'm using Sandisk Extreme III, they've been working out so far.
 
No doubt P2 is more reliable since it is over 10 times the cost it better be. However I have been using sd cards for over three years with photography and I have never had a problem. And I have been using the the HMC150 for over six months with no failure, I did have to repair a clip once. Take this what its worth!
 
The only failures I had with the P2 Work flow was the Duel Adapter on a mac.
I worked on a crazy 30+ hours of raw footage transferred on mirrored drives (do not use them to edit, think of them like your negative reels).

The idea of a P2 card failure never actually crossed my mind :)

Yes it is expensive but I've been shooting for over a year with it and never ever had any issues with it.
 
I was a bit wary of joining the P2 crowd because of the high media cost. But data loss is very important to me, and while I've lucked out so far on tape (I've had tape failures for sure, but I was always able to creatively edit around them so far), the stories of people I've heard having some issues with SDHC made me contemplate the choices that I had. Hearing everyone's testimonials on here about the reliability of P2, coupled with the new E-Series cards, caused me to pull the trigger on an HPX-170 with a 64GB P2 E-Series card. I cannot say enough how much I've enjoyed this camera and how thankful I have been to get into solid-state recording.

Unless you absolutely cannot afford the HPX-170, it comes with my highest recommendation. Price should not be an object if you're using the camera for professional work and cannot fathom yourself being in a situation where footage is "lost".
 
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