Cineport Harddisk recorder

stephen lamb · April 10, 2006

Hey all,

I have heard rumors, and looked at the webstie for the Cineport hard disk recorder system for Panasonic Camera's using the P2 system. The Cineport plugs into the p2 slot and records the DVCpro HD footage directly to it's drive. This system seems to be much better than the firestore, which connects to the camera via USB 2.0 or firewire. It would seem to me, that neither of the two (usb/firewire) would be handle the realtime data rate associated with DVCproHD. The company i work for is interesting in buying a harddisk system for the HVX, and i am trying to decide which one is better. From what i know, i would say the Cineport. What do you all think? Are there any systems that work better that i don't know about?

Thanks for the input,

Steve

PS. i have used the camera for a short narrative shoot using just the P2 cards without a problem, see my post about the HVX field report. The company just wants to be able to record longer than 8 minutes (or 16)

Phil Rhodes · April 11, 2006

Hi,

> It would seem to me, that neither of the two (usb/firewire) would be handle the realtime data rate associated

> with DVCproHD.

DVCPRO-HD is at best 100mbps if you're shooting at 60fps. If you're shooting at 24ps, it's only 40mbps. Firewire is capable of up to 400.

Yes, it's way more than fast enough, and if you record it as a firewire stream you will get a nice standard file format.

Phil

Michael Collier · April 11, 2006

DVCPRO-HD is at best 100mbps if you're shooting at 60fps. If you're shooting at 24ps, it's only 40mbps.

DVCPRO-HD, as I understand it is scalable, IE, if you shoot 60fps at 100mbaud, then the picture will just be more compressed. If you scale down to 24fps, then you are still capturing at 100mbs, so the compression per long-GOP will be significantly higher.

however, I am only sure this applies to the p2 cards, if I understood the sales reps who came by and demoed their HVX for me, as well as their P2 ENG cameras, the camera can only record standard def DVCPRO25 if it is going over a firewire.

Phil Rhodes · April 11, 2006

Hi,

> DVCPRO-HD, as I understand it is scalable, IE, if you shoot 60fps at 100mbaud, then the picture will just be

> more compressed.

Not as far as I know. You get more on a P2 card at 24 than you do at 60.

> If you scale down to 24fps, then you are still capturing at 100mbs, so the compression per long-GOP will be

> significantly higher.

No - DVCPROHD is not an intra-frame compressed format, and thus has no GOP in the video stream. Each frame is compressed only unto itself.

Phil

Mitch Gross · April 12, 2006

Phil's got it. At 24 or 60 the image quality and compression is identical. The only difference is that the designers knew that many would use the HVX at 720/24p (or 25p) so they cut the unecessary material so that more material could be recorded on the P2 cards. That's why this particular frame rate and resolution records longer than others on the HVX.

Don't know about the Cineport, but I do know that a LOT of gear is going to surface in a few weeks at NAB.

Michael Nash · April 12, 2006

No - DVCPROHD is not an intra-frame compressed format, and thus has no GOP in the video stream. Each frame is compressed only unto itself.

Just to be clear on the terminology, I think you mean it's not INTER-frame.

INTRA-frame compression means each frame is compressed individually, as in still images.

INTER-frame compression means compression "between frames," as in the long-GOP compressioned used by HDV.

But of course you're right about the rest.

For anyone else who's interested:

http://www.newmediarepublic.com/dvideo/com...sion/adv06.html

stephen lamb · April 12, 2006

Phil,

So then according to your numbers, recording DVCproHD over firewire to the firestore would be sufficient? The numbers seem to add up more than fine....I am only hesitant though because i have edited footage as DVCprodHD on my computer using FCP. The footage was on a LaCie external drive, connected via firewire 800. Even with the 800, the footage couldn't be played real time. However, when i brought it onto my internal harddrive, it was able to run fine. That small experience was what made me unsure about capturing the footage realtime to disk via usb or firewire. Thanks for the exact numbers though, very helpful.

Steve

Phil Rhodes · April 12, 2006

Hi.

> So then according to your numbers, recording DVCproHD over firewire to the firestore would be sufficient?

Sufficieng in what way? Sufficient bus bandwidth for them to have theoretically implemented it? Yes. Have they? Don't know.

> The footage was on a LaCie external drive, connected via firewire 800.

How many times...

Do not use firewire-connected hard disks for editing. There is no such thing as a "firewire hard disk" - what you have is a normal IDE hard disk and a firewire convertor board for it. This introduces latency and forces the host computer to do much more work on its own processor than it would have to while accessing a natively attached IDE hard disk. I tell this to people again and again (and again and again ad nauseam). Firewire hard disks are for office workers who want to take a bunch of Excel spreadsheets home, not video editors.

It's still pretty poor that it couldn't keep with 40mbit/sec. What I suspect happened in this case is that you had a firewire camera or output devce plugged into some other port. Many cameras initialise the bus at only 100mbit/sec, which is all they need, and can cripple the performance of other things. But no matter what, it's very hard to get consistently good performance out of firewire hard disks.

The bus has the bandwidth.

Phil

April 13, 2006

Phil,

How about Lacie's new "Two Big"SATAII raid external drives? Lacie Would they have a high enough data rate for hi-def media storage and editing? I'd pop for an XServe raid but cha-ching$$$!!! £££!!!

-Buck

Knoxville, TN

Phil Rhodes · April 13, 2006

Hi,

SATA II is a hell of a lot faster than firewire, and it's probably much nearer native to what the drive speaks - a much better bet.

That said - what on earth is this fascination with external drives? Pop the case and rack up a few off the shelf hard disks, software RAID them if you feel the need, and off you go. If your computer does not have space for more hard disks, then... you bought the wrong computer.

Seriously, there are rack case options for most of them which will allow you to achieve what you need. X-Raid is almost comically overpriced; you can build it out of a 3ware card and five hard disks for much less money.

Phil

stephen lamb · April 14, 2006

Phil,

thanks for the info on the external drives....I'm very interested in the five disk array you talked about in your last post. Could you give some details as to how one would go about contsructing such an array, and how i could then connect it to my Mac G5? Thanks Phil!

Steve

Phil Rhodes · April 14, 2006

Hi,

The problem you have on a G5 is that you don't have any standard PCI slots, so the otherwise-attractive 3ware options are not available to you. Usually I'd say:

Buy a 3ware Escalade 9500S/8 board and at least four, up to eight but usually five serial ATA hard disks. Plug the card into a 66MHz PCI slot, connect the drives then follow the instructions in the manual...

But you can't do that. I suggest you Google around for a suitable equivalent PCIe RAID controller and do much the same. I don't like Hitachi/IBM drives, Seagate or Western Digital are better brands. You may hit issues with power, and you will certainly hit issues with cooling and places to mount the drives. There's rack cases available for PCs that will allow you to stack up however many drives they have bays for, but agains I don't know if such things exist for Macs.

Phil