Solid-State DV Camcorder

melorama writes "The NAB convention passed 2 weeks ago, and I'm surprised nobody has pointed out the really neat Solid State Video Camcorder that was unveiled by Panasonic. It seems a bit kludgy right now (it records onto a series of PCMCIA cards), but it definitely beats the klunky Avid/Ikegami Camcutter (aka Editcam) from several years back, which records onto a self-contained harddisk. This is certainly a blow to Sony, which is working on a camera acquisition system that uses a blue-laser optical disc (read: moving parts) technology."

Comments

don't forget

[mrpuffypants]

that not only does the Sony camcorder use moving parts but that also any device in the past that involved burning discs sucked the juice fast and furiously

get ready for 30 minute family outings, tops(hey....that doesn't sound that bad :)

If this stuff is...

[Recoil_42]

..as cheap as the article presents it to be; why arent we using it in PC's? screw 32-meg usb-keydrives, i want a 4gb solid-state drive!

Neat, but necessary?

[stratjakt]

What exactly would be wrong with a gigantiforous hard drive? This thing has 5 cards x 4 gigs each (max) for a max of 72 minutes.

Why not 60 gigs of HDD for 216 minutes? Or 120 for 432 minutes? For a consumer level camera, this seems more useful.

Imagine going on vacation and needing a bag of ($$$expensive$$$) PCMCIA cards to film with, or having to stop in the middle of a shoot to transfer 20 gigs of footage to a laptop.

A big enough HDD could just store all your footage, and you just point and shoot and dont think twice about it 'till you're back home.

I can see this being cool for professional cameras, as no doubt you can build a solid-state rig with better shockproofing, etc, etc..

But I doubt it can really become ubiquitous for home use - at least not until the spinning magnetic disc is replaced with solid state components.

Re:Neat, but necessary?

[NanoGator]

"If hard drives are so fragile, how come there are a plethora of hard-disk based portable MP3 players available?"

There aren't a plethora of hd based MP3 players out there. There are a handfull.

Let's see, hd's in Mp3 players don't need to spin as fast. They don't need to be accessed as much. (I would imagine the music's cached into RAM and then played...) etc.

Laptop drives are very fragile. I ruined one by drumming my fingers on the case of my laptop once. I didn't know the drive was right under the case. Doh.

Re:Neat, but necessary?

[NanoGator]

"And how does it get into ram? BY READING IT OFF THE FUCKING DISK!!!!"

Nice troll. So how long does it take to transfer a 5 meg file into RAM on a decent laptop hard drive?

Re:Neat, but necessary?

[Natalie's Hot Grits]

Not really.

If the drive is being accessed, a 1 foot drop could crash the head all over the platter. Once that happens, there's nothing you can do about it. Even on the most expensive drives, this will happen.

The solution is to spin the drives slower, and so you can have the head placed farther from the disk. This increases the force it takes to get the head to crash. They do this in laptop hard drives, but still it's not gonna withstand anywhere NEAR 10ft.

Even if you don't notice damage, it is possible for a head to damage the platter and you can get bad sectors. Nowadays, hard drives automatically hide their bad sectors by using data redundancy on the disk. So you might not notice it, but if important data is being stored in that area of the disk, its redundancy is greatly reduced, and your data is not as secure.

Of course, technically the manufacturer is supposed to detect bad sectors and mark them as such(internally in the HDD, the OS has no knowledge of this), but not many MFG's do that in the real practice in the IDE world because they hide it with data redundancy.

Re:Neat, but necessary?

[autopr0n]

What exactly would be wrong with a gigantiforous hard drive? This thing has 5 cards x 4 gigs each (max) for a max of 72 minutes.

It couldn't take as much rough handling. This camera should be able to take huge amount of shock due to it's total lack of moving parts.

Why not 60 gigs of HDD for 216 minutes? Or 120 for 432 minutes? For a consumer level camera, this seems more useful.

If you'd read the article, you'd see that you can swap out cards on the fly. Use up one card, it moves on to the next empty one, so there's absolutely no limit whatsoever on how much video you can record.

It's also not even close to a consumer level camera. I mean, just look at the pictures of the thing!

AVI Format?

[M.C. Hampster]

From the article:

The video and audio is recorded in an AVI format, so any system that can recognize this format can edit the audio.

I couldn't see in the article, but does anyone know what actual codec they use? Is it the same DV codec that my Sony Digital 8 Camcorder uses?

Solid state DV Camcorder

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anybody know if NetBSD has been ported to this yet?

Internal Problems

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at Panasonic's Inca Labs (the lab responsible for this product product).

Working as a tester on a a prior version of SS HDD, there were many reports of instantaneous memory losses. After much experimenting, these were ultimately diagnosed as a result of intertia change factor > 2.23G. The result was the HDD was trahed because it was highly suseptible to "memory loss" from daily usage.

I have since transferred to another team, and I don't know frankly, how much the product could have improved in a little over 10 months. I hope it is good enough to released in public, but, I seriously doubt the management had the patience to wait for a finished engineering product.

Cute, but professional???

[pastpolls]

I think the idea of the Panasonic camera is good, but much like the editcam, I don't think it will do anything but fill the needs of hobbyists. The Sony camera that records to discs scares me too. Recording to a disc, what happens when I shake the thing? Does it skip?

Most professionals want durability and reliability. Most of these types of cameras, and some of the lower-end DV cameras, are good for hobbyists but I know I demand more (and I am a professional). Cameras like DV5000 from JVC are inexpensive and are solid pieces of equipment, but may not be for the geek. Automatic focus is something you will not find on most professional cameras.

I know that there have been some successes in the profesional world with this type of camera, but that is the exception rather than the rule. Almost all movies are still shot on film and most television stations and production companies demand something more durable than a disc based camera... and something more standard than a PCMCIA rig. Most places are still using BetaSp, even though Sony quit development a couple of years ago (please don't think I mean BetaMax). I believe this PCMCIA based camera will come and go much like the EditCam. Hopefully venders will realize that people like standards and that they get upset when "left out in the cold" with a product that no one else will support (see Digital 8mm). I think this not only holds true for professionals but hobbyists as well.

God bless this rant... and my karma.

Umm, no.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, this is nice and all. but 4GB sux. Also the video is stored compressed.

if the storage capacity was in the 100 GB range so you record losslessly .. I could see it's uses.
Also, I dont see the problem with tape/moving parts based cameras. I never had probs.

Re:BLOW

[luzrek]

The biggest problem for recording to anything is the speed with which you can write. Relatively rugged/lower power consumption hard drives (notebook-type) max out at about 4000 rpms and about 1/20th of a terrabyte (desktop drives max out at about 10000 rpms and about 1/3 of a terrabyte). Flash memory seems to max out around 2 Gigabytes (at about $750+ a gig) and is much, much slower than hard disks, it also sucks juice when you write to it. While relatively small data transfers can be buffered by much faster RAM, neither of these is a really good option for high resolution, continuous acquasition, but the hard disk is much better. The solid state storage must be something different than Flash memory.

Re:Solid state for recording video?

[agallagh42]

Not that big a deal when you're talking about what is probably a $20,000 camera. This ain't no handicam you know. The digital camcorders used in filming the new Matrix movie cost ~$100,000 each.

Re:Solid state for recording video?

[Whispers_in_the_dark]

Very true. OTOH, having the flexibility of being able to use solid state in nasty enviornments and cheaper, longer duration, rotational media in saner ones might be advantagous to some.