OT: Another EX1 question

craftech wrote on 5/4/2008, 4:53 PM

After some research and some help from Serena, Bob, and a few others I was going to buy the Sony PMW-EX1 camera, but I am having some real second thoughts and they have mostly to do with those SxS Memory cards. They cost a fortune and they don't seem to be coming down.

When I think of the number of nights I get out of a show I am shooting at 11PM and have to be back there by noon the next day sometimes for three days in a row it seems like I would need five or six of the 16GB cards at a minimum. At $900 each it boggles the mind.

Sandisk came out with them and they cost nearly as much.

How do you deal with that? Are you transferring the footage every time no matter what time of the day or night you get done?

And what do you do if you are on location somewhere and you have to shoot all day?

And what the heck is in them that they cost so much more than other flash memory cards?

John

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craftech wrote on 5/8/2008, 6:06 AM

3) A SxS would have a life cycle of at least 50,000. That's the quivalent of $200,000 worth of tape, sounds a bargain to me.
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The Sony guy said...........
"Treat the BPAV folder in each SxS card as your camera original." then ....."Never modify or erase these camera originals! "

I took that to mean that he was suggesting one keep the SxS card each time you shoot just as you would an original miniDV tape. At $900 a pop, if you shoot 50 SxS cards a year it would cost you $45,000 a year for SxS cards. I guess I read it wrong.

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We've now got a very neat external drive system, two 2.5" drives in RAID 1. Instant backup. We didn't buy it for use with the EX cameras, it's part of our SI-2K but the same system would be great for anyone doing tapeless acquisition.
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That sound doable.
In terms of the FAT 32, I thought I read somewhere that FAT 32 was necessary for this. Guess I was wrong. A computer with NTFS formatted drives would work then I guess.

John

craftech wrote on 5/8/2008, 6:12 AM

4) he says that the fastest transfer to external HDD will be from laptop via firewire.
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I thought he said SxS card to HDD to Laptop

It's SxS card inserted into Laptop with appropriate card slot then firewire out from Laptop to HDD on editing computer.

I think I have it.

Thanks Serena

John

craftech wrote on 5/12/2008, 4:30 PM

Event DV has a review of the EX1 this month.

There were some interesting points for SxS backup.

Until the cost of XD-compatible Blu-ray Discs come way down, I’ve decided to use primarily 8GB cards with my cameras, because I can back up each card to its own dual-layer DVD. This makes backing up my cards very simple and straight forward. Each card gets assigned its own dual-layer DVD so after a shoot, so instead of a pile of tapes, I have about 6-8 DL DVDs as backup. I also have backups on two different RAID partitions, one internal and one external.

John