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Article Search Advanced Search The Future of Tapeless Recording: Options for Solid State Cinematography By Michael Hurwicz Jun 8, 2007, 03:13 Looking for the cheapest, fastest way to get HD footage from a Panasonic AJ-HVX200 camcorder to a hard disk, I ran across a little $79 PC adapter card that ultimately led me to a vision of the future of solid-state video recording. Basically, the flow of my discovery went like this: "Wow! This is a really inexpensive, high-performance way to capture footage from solid-state media. Too bad it's not mobile!" "Wow! In a year or two, we won't be worrying about mobile capture!" Solid State = Sorry State? First, let's look at the problem. With tape-based video recording, all you need on the shoot is your camcorder and tapes. Capturing your footage to a hard disk for editing can happen later, and somewhere else. This process is especially convenient for documentaries, event photography and many types of location shooting. Compare that with the P2 cards that provide tapeless recording the Panasonic AJ-HVX200. Depending on exactly what kind of HD you're shooting, you get 8 to 20 minutes of footage on an 8GB P2 card, the largest card currently available. (Panasonic recently announced the May availability of 16GB P2 cards and expects 32GB P2 cards to be available by the end of the year.) Of course, you can use as many P2 cards as you want, but the fact that each 8GB card costs more than $1,100 is a limiting factor for filmmakers on a budget. Even if you have the budget for many cards, there are two possible problems. First, 8GB cards have not always been readily available in quantity; you might not be able to get all the cards you need. In addition, if you're rolling, say, ten hours a day, the logistics of getting all that footage onto hard disks still leads to a search for an efficient means of doing so. For one reason or another, many HVX200 users find themselves on a quest for the best way to capture footage to hard disk on the spot, reformat the P2 card and immediately reuse it. You can capture directly from the camcorder to a laptop hard disk via FireWire (for Macs) or USB (for PCs), but you have to stop shooting to do it. But most HVX200 users are shooting in professional, time-limited situations that require them to be able to shoot continuously. By the way, there are other approaches to tapeless shooting with the HVX200 that don't require P2 cards. Each of these solutions has its advantages and disadvantages. (See sidebar: "Four Ways to Shoot Tapeless HD.") The focus of this article is an efficient workflow using P2 cards. Four Ways to Shoot Tapeless HD When shooting HD with the Panasonic AJ-HVX200, the initial storage medium for your footage can be P2 cards, a laptop, Focus Enhancements FireStore FS-100 or a Panasonic HD VTR such as the AJ-HD1400 or AJ-HD1200 tape deck. (For shooting SD, the camcorder can also record to standard Mini DV tape.) Except for the P2 cards, all of these solutions connect to the camcorder via FireWire. Depending on your working conditions, you may have problems with the small, fragile and easily dislodged FireWire connector. Also, the camera is tethered to the recording medium (laptop, FireStore or tape deck), and the "leash" is the length of a FireWire cable. In addition, the FireWire output of the HVX200 does not support Native mode recording, which records at the shutter speed you select, such as 24p, as opposed to recording extra frames and using pull-downs to achieve speeds such as 24p. There are no extra frames in Native mode. The inability to use Native mode with FireWire devices means you'll need more storage space for the same number of minutes shot. In addition to the inherent disadvantages of FireWire with the HVX200, many hesitate to use laptops or the FS-100 as a primary recording medium because of reliability issues. The HD VTR solution is expensive, in the neighborhood of $20,000 to $25,000, including the necessary FireWire and HD-SDI cards. It also introduces workflow issues associated with managing tapes. Still, all these solutions do provide significantly longer recording times than P2 cards, and mostly at a lower cost per gigabyte of storage. A fifth option is on the horizon. The CinePorter from Specialized Communications, which is expected to ship this summer, will use the P2 slots as its interface, which should be a much more solid way of connecting to the camera. It will provide all the functionality of P2 cards, support redundant mirrored drives for increased fault tolerance and accept up to a six-foot cable. The CinePorter will contain two removable hard disk drives. Linetsky says that he expects new solid-state laptop drives to be less expensive than other types of media in the near future. This will enable a solid-state CinePorter with larger capacities. Three Paths from P2 to Hard Disk There are currently three basic approaches to getting footage from P2 cards to a hard disk for editing: the Panasonic P2 Store, a laptop with a CardBus slot and a desktop computer with a CardBus slot. With all these approaches, you need to install P2 drivers on your computer. The drivers come on a CD typically included with the camcorder. Another extremely useful piece of software for PC users (not Mac users at the present time) is the P2 Viewer, which can be downloaded from panasonic.biz/sav/p2/index.html. The Panasonic P2 Store (AJ-PCS060G) has a shock-resistant 60GB hard disk and five CardBus slots for P2 cards. It sells for around $1,550. The price often strikes people as high given the plummeting price of storage and the fact that CardBus has become a ubiquitous, commodity technology on laptops. Some have even imagined that Panasonic saw in the inadequate capacity of the initial P2 cards an opportunity to gouge its customers with the P2 Store--effectively raising the price of the camera by $1,550 for many applications. In fact, the price of the P2 Store largely reflects the technical requirements of CardBus, which is in effect an extension of the PCI bus. PCI, in turn, requires a processor to manage it. And given that the P2 Store does have some display requirements, what you end up with is a special-purpose, extra-rugged laptop designed to hold up under typical location shooting conditions--in other words, practically anything. From that perspective, the price seems reasonable. Of course, that doesn't reduce the pain of writing the check. A potentially serious drawback of the P2 Store for Mac users is transfer time from the P2 Store to a Mac hard disk. Users report that it takes about 25 minutes to transfer one 8GB P2 from the P2 Store to a Mac laptop with the P2 Store's data verification feature turned off. With data verification on, the time nearly doubles. The transfer takes place via USB. Apparently, the slow transfer speed is due to the fact that the P2 Store uses USB 1.0 when transferring to a Mac. Transfer times on PCs are better because the P2 Store uses USB 2.0. Mac users typically import HVX200 footage into Final Cut Pro. FCP "wraps" the native MXF files from the P2 card in a QuickTime wrapper, and it is the QuickTime files that the FCP user sees. The FCP user has no way to see the native MXF clips. (P2 Log from Imagine Products includes a P2 Viewer and allows Mac users to work with MXF files.) In contrast, on the PC, there are NLEs that provide direct access to the MXF files on the hard disk or even directly on the P2 card. PC-based NLEs that currently support direct P2 access include Canopus Edius Broadcast, Avid Xpress Pro HD and Adobe Premiere Pro with Matrox Axio. (I understand that Sony Vegas now has the ability to directly import DVCPRO HD MXF files straight to the timeline, through a plug-in offered by Marcus Van Bavel of dvfilm.com. I'm looking forward to testing this workflow in the future.) In my initial testing of Edius Broadcast, I found that it provides full-featured, robust access to P2 files. (Barry Green, author of The HVX Book, agrees. See sidebar, "Canopus Edius Broadcast: A Great Way to Access P2 Files.") SIDEBAR: Canopus Edius Broadcast: A Great Way to Access P2 Files Here's what Barry Green, HVX200 guru and author of The HVX Book, has to say about Canopus Edius Broadcast and its P2 features and workflow: "I've used Avid and FCP and Vegas/Premiere and now Canopus, and I can say this: Canopus is ideal for MXF/P2 import/export. The Canopus guys really got this part right! "You can edit right off the card, you can import the files directly from the card, you can tell it to import files and copy them to your hard disk at the same time. Version 4 even copies the files to the hard disk in the background so you can keep working while the files are being copied. You can view the metadata associated with the clips on import. Basically everything import-wise is fully supported. "And when it comes time to export, you can do everything you'd want. You can export an MXF file straight from the timeline directly to the card for playback in the camera. If you don't have a PCMCIA slot on your computer, you can export through the USB 2.0 cable to a card mounted in the camera. You can export to a 'virtual card' on your hard disk. And you can set custom clip names and set metadata parameters for the files you export. "You can even launch the Panasonic P2 Viewer program from a menu item in Edius." Green points out that Edius was the first application to elegantly support all shooting modes, including 1080/24p, 1080/24pA and 1080/30p, and was the first NLE to offer 720/25p and 720/50p support--all features that other NLEs struggled with. (Adapted from dvxuser.com and expanded with e-mail input from the author.) Note that transfer from the P2 card to the P2 Store is approximately real time, and sometimes better than real time. Six to eight minutes for one 8GB P2 is typical. An alternative to the P2 Store is a laptop with a CardBus slot. This is a workable solution, and a number of HVX200 users have employed it successfully. The laptop of choice seems to be the 17-inch model of Apple's G4 PowerBook, which has a CardBus slot that has proven to work well with P2 cards. Six to eight minutes for one 8GB P2 is a typical transfer time. With space often in short supply in location production facilities, laptops have obvious appeal; however, where space allows, you get more disk space and processing speed for your money with desktop computers. Unlike laptops, however, desktop PCs almost never come with CardBus slots. That's where the little $79 PC adapter card I mentioned at the beginning of this article comes in. A Little Wonder: The SCPCI-P2 The SCPCI-P2 is a PCI-to-CardBus adapter from Specialized Comm[mh1]unications for Windows 2000/XP PCs. Install this adapter in your desktop PC, slip a P2 card into it, and you get all the same functionality you do when accessing a P2 card in the camcorder using USB (or, for the Mac, using FireWire). Unfortunately, the P2 card has to be inserted at the back of the computer. There is a good reason why no one is likely to come up with an inexpensive P2 card solution that goes, say, in a drive bay at the front of a desktop computer: Barring expensive PCI bus extension hardware, the distance from a CardBus device to the PCI bus can't be more than a few inches. Note that this is not necessarily true of all PCMCIA (also called PC Card) devices, but it is true of CardBus devices like the P2 card. With a desktop PC, this restriction means the CardBus device has to be at the back of the unit. In a typical setup, with the computer's on/off button, CD bays and so on facing you, getting at the back of the computer to insert or remove a P2 card requires bending down, reaching around or other awkward maneuvers. Laptops, being much smaller, can have more conveniently located CardBus slots. A front-loading card would be preferable, and Specialized Communications does intend to produce a product offering a single or dual front CardBus slot in a 3.5-inch bay connected internally to a PCI Card for around $400 list, perhaps by the end of 2007, says David Linetsky, president of Specialized Communications. All the necessary technology has already been developed for Specialized Communications' CinePorter product, Linetsky notes. I have found that laying the desktop computer on its side on a table is a pretty reasonable compromise that gives me access to the front of the computer on my left and the CardBus slot on my right. I don't lose much work space because I can use the computer like desk space. The SCPCI-P2, for Windows 2000/XP desktops, goes in a PCI slot in the PC and gives you a CardBus slot like the ones you typically see on laptops. Insert a P2 card in the SCPCI-P2, and the P2 card looks like a hard disk in Windows Explorer. P2-capable NLEs can also work with the files directly on the P2 card via the SCPCI-P2. There are other inexpensive CardBus adapters available, but Specialized Communications optimized the firmware code in the SCPCI-P2 to favor P2 cards. "The SCPCI-P2 works with other CardBus devices, but it's optimized for P2," says Linetsky, adding that the company was able to increase transfer rates an average of 25 percent or better on properly configured systems. The "properly configured systems" proviso is an important one. PCs can have myriad bottlenecks, any one of which could prevent you from exploiting the full potential of the SCPCI-P2. Using a Windows XP PC (2.53GHz, 512MB RAM and a 7,200 rpm hard disk), Specialized Communications came up with the following average transfer times for copying a full 4GB P2 card with multiple clips on it: - From one P2 card to P2 Store internal hard disk (verify on): 6:10 - From P2 Store hard drive to PC via USB (copy one P2 Store partition): 5:20 - From one P2 card in the P2 Store to PC via USB: 3:47 - SCPCI-P2: 1:51 One P2 Store partition is the equivalent of one P2 card. Again, your mileage may vary. "There are a lot of variables, especially with USB," cautions Linetsky. Though the potential for significantly higher speed is attractive, an equally important consideration is the availability of fault-tolerant solutions such as RAID and computer mirroring. With a RAID solution, you don't lose any data even if a disk fails. With computer mirroring, you have two separate but identical machines, with data copied to both; if anything fails on either machine, the other can take over. RAID and computer mirroring solutions are available for laptops, but, in general, you're going to find more affordable, higher-performance solutions on full-size machines. There is at least one report of a RAID 1 (disk mirroring) solution that was so slow on both Macs and PCs that it had to be abandoned in a location production situation. (http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/tv_pilot_hvx_200_brockett.html) I'm looking forward to testing fault-tolerant computer setups to determine what works best with the HVX200. The alternative is a time period after you've transferred the footage and reformatted the P2 when the survival of your footage depends on a single non-fault-tolerant PC or Mac hard disk. That means a lot of nail biting and eventual assured tragedy. Of course, the desktop approach is not suited to situations in which a camera assistant or "P2 technician" has to carry your capture solution in a backpack. With the limited capacities and high prices of today's P2 cards, such situations do arise. But lift your eyes to the far horizon and you will see a new day dawning... The Future of Video Recording Panasonic has promised 16GB and 32GB P2 cards in the not-too-distant future. Eventually there will be P2 cards up to 128GB. The price per gigabyte will fall dramatically with these new cards. Greater capacities and lower prices will eliminate most situations where a P2 jockey has to run around behind the camera operator with a laptop. "As the cards get bigger," notes Green, "a quantum shift in workflow is going to come about. And I believe that, for many shooters, that can start happening as soon as the 32GB cards come out, perhaps as early as late 2007. "Right now, we shoot, pop the P2 card out, plug it into a computer and copy the files over for 'permanent' storage. Then, if we're on the Apple, we have to import the file into FCP and have it convert to QuickTime. If we're on Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas, we use [DVFilm] Raylight or CineForm or Serious Magic [DV Rack] to convert the files to AVI for editing there. All a very tedious, tape-like 'capture' process." (Since our interview with Green, DVFilm has released Raylight 2.02, which supports direct import of MXF files into Vegas and Premiere timelines. No more tedious conversion!) "But look at what happens with Edius or Axio or, to a certain degree, Avid. When larger cards come out, you'll shoot to the card and edit directly from the card, immediately." Even today, Green has edited four simultaneous streams of HD from a single P2 card--a main image with three picture-in-picture segments--in real time on a laptop. "No single hard disk could support that transfer rate," notes Green. "But the P2 card supports up to six streams in high def, all simultaneously. So when we get large-enough cards, all the 'P2 workflow' issues that we currently struggle through will just disappear. No offloading. No copying to hard disks. No dedicated P2-media-manager crew position. No File->Import->Panasonic P2. No unwrap/rewrap. And no waiting. Just shoot your footage, plug the card in, edit and finish/master back to the card. And you're done." This workflow is possible because of the high transfer rate of the P2 cards. The no-moving-parts design eliminates the head seek time that slows down disk drives. "You can't even get that type of transfer rate if you use a five-drive SATA G-RAID," notes Green. "G-Tech will only guarantee three streams of DVCPRO HD." A 32GB card will offer 80 minutes at 720/24pN, more than enough to do a TV commercial at a 160:1 shooting ratio, Green observes. "It's more than enough to get through a full day of shooting in almost any imaginable dramatic narrative-style shoot, and it's probably enough to get through most documentary shoots. "So you shoot all day on a single card, then edit directly from that card. Then, when your workday's done, you archive the footage off to a hard disk or whatever." Green has tested this workflow with Edius and 4GB cards. But, he observes, when you have a 128GB card, you can have more than two hours of 1080 footage on a single card. With two cards, you could have 10 hours of 720/24pN in-camera at once. "Think about that: Entire feature films have been done at a 6:1 ratio. That means nine hours of footage. You could shoot an entire 90-minute feature film at a 6.5:1 ratio and never ever even remove the cards from the camera!" With the ability to edit directly from the P2 card, an editor could start working as soon as the day's shoot is over and potentially have a rough cut of the entire day's work done by the time the crew shows up for call the next day. "Can you imagine how valuable that would be? No more worries about missed shots or needing to schedule pick-ups. You'd know for a fact whether you got the shots you needed because your editor would cut the scenes overnight. "Solid-state is the future, unquestionably, undoubtedly. Hard disk recording and optical disc recording--those are interim, temporary solutions. Solid state has replaced tape and hard disk in professional audio, and it will do so in video as well; the benefits are too enormous." Email this article  Printer friendly page