KxS: Replacing Costly Sony SxS Media with Cheap SD Cards at FreshDV

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KxS: Replacing Costly Sony SxS Media with Cheap SD Cards

Published by Matthew Jeppsen October 22nd, 2008 in Cameras, Featured Content, Hardware, News, Storage

Here at FreshDV we’ve written and talked at length about the Sony XDCAM EX1 and XDCAM EX3. It’s an absolutely brilliant HD camcorder series, well suited to use stock, with a 35mm lens adapter system, and now with interchangeable lenses on the EX3. However, one common complaint about these cameras is the cost of the SxS solid-state media. This complaint is the same one that has always dogged the Panasonic HVX200 and other P2 cameras. Solid-state media simply isn’t cheap, and no real generic, non-oem solutions have been available. Until now…

Guy Barwood has been researching this issue for a while now, and recently wrote at length about a new SxS media alternative. You see, SxS cards are really just high-performance Express Card 34 (SSD) media. However, two variants of this standard exist, USB and PCI Express internal interfaces. USB is cheaper to make, and therefore most generic SSD cards use it. Sony happens to use the PCI Express variety, and the shipping EX1 firmware didn’t support the USB SSDs. However, with the recent release of the EX3 and Sony’s EX1 1.11 firmware update, these cameras now accept both USB and PCI E media, with some exceptions:

“So not long ago someone tried to test the Lexar cards again. Low and behold, with the EX3 (from day 1) and EX1 with firmware 1.11 the cameras suddenly recognise the media. This seemed pretty amazing as these cards are really low cost compared to SxS. Unfortunately their write performance did prove to be their undoing. While they work most of the time in SP (25Mbps), in HQ (35Mbps) they don’t fair too well with media errors happening from a few sec to a few minutes of recording :-(

So then the quest for other options continued. People started testing other Express Card card readers. CF cards are actually wider than Express Cards so that was never going to work well (CF cards would be hanging out), so other card reader were tried. I tried the Sandisk Express card reader without success (unrecognised media) however others found an one obscure card to be showing promise. This card is the Kensington 7 in 1 Express Card reader (credit goes to Alister Chapman for first testing this adaptor). No other reader has been found to either work, or work as well.”

Guy goes on to list the unique reader+card options that seem to work best. The reader is the Kensington 7-in-1 ExpressCard Media Reader ($40), and test-proven cards include the Class 4 Sandisk Ultra II SDHC cards ($25-$75) and Sandisk Extreme III 30MB/s Edition SDHC cards ($48-$120). Technically speaking, all Class 6 SDHC cards should be fast enough to handle the EX1’s 35mbps bitrate…however, like hard drives it is the sustained write speed that matters. So I suggest you consult Guy’s article for notes on Transcend and other card compatibility besides the ones just mentioned. There are also some issues with overcranking, etc. So caveat emptor.

It’s overstating it a little, but bear in mind that a 16GB SxS card will set you back $850. A 32GB SxS is $1500. A 16GB SDHD card and reader is under $115! That is an amazing disparity, and may be well worth it for you to deal with the above-noted limitations. Beyond price, the beauty of this DIY solution is that you don’t have to own multiple readers, just bring a wad of SD cards with you when you shoot. In fact, you can leave the card reader in the camcorder media slot and just swap cards in and out (this does not work with two readers installed, you must be using one SxS card in the other slot to enable KxS hotswap). You’ll want a safe storage case for your smaller media now, consider something like the Pelican Memory Card case.

Back at NAB 2007 when Sony announced they would be supporting an open solid-state media standard, we cheered them on. It’s great to see that promise finally coming to fruition. And now that the EX1 and EX3 camcorders offer increased media compatibility, I fully expect third-party companies to start coming out with better-integrated SxS media alternatives. It’s a good time to be an indie filmmaker!

(Via Bruce Johnson)

9 Responses to “KxS: Replacing Costly Sony SxS Media with Cheap SD Cards”

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1 andrew Oct 22nd, 2008 at 5:52 pm

[QUOTE]Beyond price, the beauty of this DIY solution is that you don’t have to own multiple readers, just bring a wad of SD cards with you when you shoot. In fact, you can leave the card reader in the camcorder media slot and just swap cards in and out.[/QUOTE]

You may want to double check this, I thought I read that it best to remove the adapter and the SDHC card so not to confuse the camera. Granted its a bear to sift thru 47+ pages over on DV info, but worth the effort to see the lengths those guys are going thru to get this working.
2 Matthew Jeppsen Oct 22nd, 2008 at 8:48 pm

Yeah, I’ll clarify that note. Here’s what Guy says:

“Do not remove the SD card from the reader if you have two KxS modules installed. Eject the complete combination to change SDHC cards (the same as you do for SxS). You can remove just the SD card and insert a new one if you have one SxS and one KxS module inserted. If you remove a SD card when you have two KxS modules installed, the camera will stop recording and confuse which media is in which slot. If this occurs, just eject both KxS cards and put them in again and you will be able to resume normal operations.”

-MJ
3 Dave C Oct 23rd, 2008 at 6:00 am

I was wondering why they supported the cheaper USB SxS cards, but of course if you capture to a fast Sony card THEN dump the clips onto a cheaper Lexar card in the second slot, you can wipe the Sony card and keep going.

That way you can back up a whole lot more data onto cheaper cards, while using one expensive card as a buffer in the camera.

Just an idea.

Dave
4 Nick Oct 29th, 2008 at 6:42 am

Great stuff! Just ordered two Kensington 7 in 1’s for £13 each from the UK…

http://accessories.euro.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=uk&l=en&s=bsd&sku=A1654910&cs=ukbsdt1&dgc=SS&cid=5186&lid=121454

Cheers,

Nick
5 Mike Nov 27th, 2008 at 10:45 pm

I just want to say thanks to Guy Barwood for all his research on this. I followed the published steps and now have 2 very inexpensive 16Gb cards in addition to the 2 8Gb cards that came with my PMW-EX1. I have shot 2 paying jobs since then that had continuous takes of over an hour with no problems. I bought the fastest SDHC cards to help with download speed and I think that was a good call. Downloads are significantly slower than with SxS cards.

In addition, by doing the firmware update myself, I didn’t have to rent a camera during a busy time. I’ve seen posts where people complained that their cameras were in the shop for weeks (one guy’s camera was in the shop for about a month!) and I just couldn’t justify that. The only thing that made me think about taking it to the repair shop was to fix the “battery drain when camera is off” issue. Guess what! The firmware update fixes the battery drain problem. Shame on you Sony for not doing this firmware update to fix the defective camera for free. I suspect the battery drain was engineered in to help sell batteries.

Thanks again to FRESHDV, Matthew Jeppsen and Guy Barwood for saving me $1600 - which I spent on audio gear of course!

-Mike
6 Tom Jan 5th, 2009 at 4:58 am

Do class 2 sandisk ultra II cards work?
7 D?? cephe Jan 6th, 2009 at 3:09 am

Good idea Matthew.Thanks
8 Rob Jan 12th, 2009 at 2:00 pm

I have been shooting on sandisk ultra II class 2 cards for about 3 weeks now, they work fine (minus the extreme overcranking). FYI.