Looks like Panasonic will have 32 gig P2 cards out by the end of the year as promised. The AJ-P2C032RG is scheduled to arrive in November with an expected MSRP of $1,650. Which generally means you can get it a bit cheaper from your local neighborhood Panny dealer. The cards will double shooting time for P2 shooters, giving them 32 minutes record time or 80 minutes at 24pN (per card, assuming 720p DVCPRO HD).

It’s worth noting that earlier this year Panasonic suggested the 32GB card would debut at $1800, so this is a nice scale back in price. Surely the imminent drop of Sony’s solid-state XDCAM EX1 has had some effect on pricing. Competition is good for the community.

UPDATE: The Panasonic 32GB P2 Media is listed in B&H’s catalog at $1599.95.

(Via Engadget)

Convergent Design is getting into the video field recorder business with their newly-announced Flash XDR DTE device. Attached to a camcorder via HD-SDI, the XDR records HDV, XDCAM HD, and high-bitrate MPEG2 streams to affordable compactflash media. The 422P@HL option allows you to record full-raster 1920×1080 (interlaced and progressive) and 1280×720p 50 Mbps MPEG-2 streams at 4:2:2.

Features:
*HD-SDI <> HDV or XDCAM HD MPEG2 Streams
*Supports MPEG2 4:2:2 @ 50 Mbps and 4:2:2, full-raster (1920×1080 / 1280×720) I-Frame @ 160Mbps.
*1080i, 720p, 1080p23.98
*Embedded or External Audio, Time-Code inputs
*Internal time-code generator, GPI Trigger input
*Two Hot-Swappable CompactFlashCard Slots
*Enables File-Based transfers, 5x-12x real-time
*Rugged, solid-state; silent operation
*Compact, Ultra-Portable, 2kg with battery

Continue reading ‘Convergent Design Announces Flash HD Field Recorder’

Storage company Seagate plans to offer solid state flash drives next year in a variety of applications. These are not the flash-enhanced SSD+HDD hybrids that are already available, they are talking about full-on Flash SSD storage. No specifics on storage sizes are available at this time.

I believe that SSD storage will be a wondeful enhancement to aftermarket disk capture solutions like the Focus Firestore…they are lighter, more rugged, silent, and consume less power. Since they have no moving parts, you now can have many of the advantages of P2 storage in a commodity camera. Think HV20 + SSD Firestore = Cheap Crash Cam. How far we have come since the early hard disk storage! Unfortunately, all those advantages will most likely come at a premium price point. Here’s to hoping there won’t be a flash shortage and prices remain reasonable.

Shane Ross has posted a fantastic review of CalDigit’s new HDPro RAID solution. This 4 Terabyte (500GB x8) RAID5 editors dream performs in the upper 300 MB/s read speed (Shane’s average: 385 MB/s), which should catch the eye of all the uncompressed junkies out there. That’s enough for multiple streams. Write speed wasn’t shabby either. He also tested out the protection ability of RAID5:

“… I set it up to capture uncompressed 10-bit, and about 5 minutes in…I YANKED A DRIVE OUT! … But, it kept merrily match capturing…not missing a beat. When it was done I saved my project and set about fixing what I intentionally broke. I pushed the drive back in and went into the RAID SHIELD software and unlocked the drive and the software went about rebuilding the Raid. Again, that took about 3 hours. But the footage I captured was still intact and played fine.”

Currently you’ll need a PCIe computer to use the HD Pro, with PCI-X support in the works. There’s also an Express34 card interface for the unit, for Macbook Pro users. The HDPro starts at just under $4000 for 2TB, and goes all the way up to the 6TB model at $8K. Thanks Shane for the great review on what looks to be a solid offering from CalDigit.

Codex Digital has announced a new portable field recorder at Cine Gear Expo 2007. This portable device builds on the success of the Codex Digital media recorder/server. We are told the device is weather-resistant and designed for rough-and-tumble field use. Under 10lbs and constructed with delicious carbon-fiber (that’s “fibre” for all you UK readers), the Codex Portable can be powered by “standard camera batteries” and features instant playback on the touchscreen LCD or via wireless (can also be controlled remotely with PC or PDA). It can handle most of the major digital cinema cameras in video-mode, and data-mode input from the ARRI D-20, DALSA Origin, and RED ONE. Will do up to 4K on hot-swap RAID “diskpacks” that can hold up to 3 hours of best-quality JPEG2000. There is a matching Codex Transfer Station that can backup or dump the recorders and metadata. The Transfer Station would also be used for transcoding into other formats (a wide variety of standard formats are supported).

Other features of note culled from press release: Two dual-link HD 4:4:4 inputs, Infiniband and Ethernet data-connections, 10Gbps optical I/O, timecode and control ports, eight channels of audio, HD and SD monitoring of all formats up to 4K, and MP4 wireless video output. “Mutter Track� microphone input, which allows the user to add comments during a take for shot-logging and notes. Can handle two camera 4:4:4 streams simultaneously, independent or locked (i.e. 3D stereoscopic shoots). Can also handle four 4:2:2 cameras, and multiple recorders can be synched (allowing 6 recorders to record 24 video tracks, in sync).

Pricing info is not available at this time, but I was told it would easily beat the cost of a HDCam SR deck. Production Codex Portable systems are expected to ship late in 2007.

Specialized Communications announced today that the eagerly-anticipated product CinePorter will not go into production.

“Due to lack of market interest, the CinePorter will NOT be going into production. With the introduction of larger P2 Cards and lower prices, the P2 lineup no longer needs a product such as the CinePorter.”

(Via Little Frog in High Def)

This fall, early adopters will have the storage and backup option of…holograms. It seems somewhat surreal, as holographic storage has been considered for nearly 40 years. And finally, it quietly arrives. The company first bringing a holo solution to market is InPhase Technologies, the system is called Tapestry. They’ve been working on the product for 13 years. And it’s a timely debut, considering our industry’s shift towards IT-based camera and footage acquisition systems. All that footage and data will need to be backed up. Holographic storage currently offers 160Mbit/sec data transfer rates, with improvements to come.

“Could magnetic tapes, hard drives and optical disc formats like Blu-ray be replaced by a data storage format that uses holograms? The world’s first commercial holographic storage system is launched this autumn, with the product able to store the equivalent of 64 DVD movies on a (write-once) disc about the size of a CD.”

“The first holographic products are certainly not mass-market - a 600GB disc will cost around $180 (£90), and the drive costs about $18,000. Potential users include banks, libraries, government agencies and corporations.”

Read more at the Guardian. Obviously, current transfer speeds are a limiting factor. And the price is also rather prohibitive. But InPhase is claiming a 50 year archival life for the media, which is a sight better than current optical disc backups. I wonder, will this mean that the Blu-ray and HD-DVD “generation” will be completely skipped over as a long-term mass-data backup solution?

Two new mass-storage options on the market. The Mercury Elite triple interface 2TB array is a $1100 solution in brushed aluminum with a Mac-inspired cheesegrater front grille. And Buffalo ups the ante with their 3TB TeraStation at a cool $2,499. Read on for all the juicy details.

Swap your Powerbook, Macbook or Macbook Pro optical drive for a MCE OptiBay add-on kit, and you can install an additional hard disk for more storage or even RAID use.

(Via Engadget)

Saw this new product offering mentioned over at the new Studio Daily Blog. Purplelink is an integrated uncompressed capture and media storage solution, all built into a hardened case for simple on-set capture and playback.

After making a quiet debut at last year’s Cinec tradeshow in Munich, Germany, Pentamagik is bringing its completely tapeless digital video field solution for uncompressed HD, Purplelink, stateside in time for NAB. Purpleink acts as both media storage (five 400GB hard drives), with two HD-SDI inputs and four audio inputs, and editing suite all housed in a hard case and includes metadata fields for comments and a suite of color correction tools. And as a Windows-base you can load your software on it to check the plates against composites and CG work.

More specs and details at www.purplelink.info

Just-announced Sandisk 8GB SD Card = $190.00
Panasonic 8GB P2 card = $1,200.00

If you hadn’t heard, P2 storage uses SD cards internally. Now I don’t EVER expect P2 technology to be equal to consumer storage prices, obviously Panasonic is using the cream of the SD card crop in manufacturing it’s cards (or they should be). After all, who wants their solid-state storage crapping out in the middle of a critical take? Professionals are willing to pay a premium for quality and reliability. How much of a premium is the question I ask. It does seem odd that P2 pricing hasn’t shown much of a downward trend, even as major advances in both capacity and pricing have been made in the consumer arena. I wonder if we will we ever see generic-brand P2 options?

(Via Camcorderinfo Blog)

There’s a fantastic article at DV.com by Mike Curtis on the topic of configuring a solid HD editing workstation. Detailed, in-depth, and informative. A must read for anyone getting into that workflow.

And in typical handy fashion, it’s broken down into 3 different feature levels, to allow for budgets of all shapes and sizes. The scope of the article focuses on building a Final Cut Studio editing workstation, but there are tips and info for Windows users as well. Plenty of good info to go around.

Mike has posted a few corrections to typos over at HD For Indies, so that’s a must-read also.

A new study on hard disks was recently presented at the 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies by Bianca Schroeder and Garth Gibson. The research paper called “Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you?” is the culmination of years of statistics gathered from 100,000+ hard drives in a variety of “real world” production environments.

The study reveals a number of fallacies, misconceptions, and some outright lies about storage technology and reliability. High-dollar SCSI, FC, SATA, and even RAID users are in for a few suprises…what you thought you could depend on might not be so dependable. An excellent summary of all the major points can be found over at Storage Mojo in a post entitled “Everything You Know About Disks Is Wrong.” And yes, that title sums it up nicely.