What do you store your hard drives in? Here’s some great 3.5-Inch SATA/ IDE Hard Drive Protection

Looking for a way to protect your backup drives (especially if you use a drop-in dock like I do) then consider these handy little cases, which protect the drive from static, dust, spiders, etc.

I personally like to get a 1 TB drive per client/project and then, when that project is done, or awaiting approval, I pull it out of the dock and put it on the shelf to work on other projects.  The advantage of putting the drive in a case, aside from the protection, is that I  can put some very big labels with lots of notes about what’s on the drive, which is usually a lot of stuff.

P2 is the MOST SECURE…

It really bothers me when corporate marketing drones get so caught up in their own chest-thumping that they fail to recognize the hypocrisy of the stuff spewing out of their mouths.

For example, this is a quote by a Panny rep on a video mailing list:

P2 is reusable thousands of times
and is the must secure form of digital storage on the planet.

Incredible Sony Z7 information!

You may just want to learn French to really understand (correctly) all the information on this site. I’ve included a little bit of it here, and did my best to straighten out the rough automated translation– but all of this is just one section, of FOUR.

So without further hesitation, here’s the Sony HVR-Z7 as you’ve not yet seen it (in English):

CompactFlash Media Test Results.

We’ve worked with an early adopter of the Sony HVR-Z7U to test 10 different compact flash cards currently available. The test results of Marshall Levy, of Maverick Productions, will answer the following questions: Do you need to spend the extra money to get the absolutely fastest media available? What does the extra money actually buy? What kind of errors will we have by starting and stopping recording to compact flash over 100 times?
These are the questions we answer right now.

ROCK (tech) HARD PLACE. Yea.

The proverbial “between a rock and a hard place” is basically a tough place to be.

I was corresponding with a fellow videographer who works for a government video department. He tried to explain the troubles he faces with regard to new gear purchases. It’s beyond trying to decide between P2 or SxS. It’s beyond tape or flash media. It’s, well, let’s just say it basically covers the last 20 years of video production- every single day.

EXCAM EX hands-on video & more.

While there’s much ado with blogs (ahem) and other online resources telling you what we can about gear, technology and techniques, manufacturers have gotten wiser to the impact of online media and now release cool stuff directly that used to be limited to outlets like trade shows. Sony’s own web site has quite a bit of information about their new XDCAM camcorders.

SanDisk fails basic math. Intros “Video” SDHC cards.

In a move that makes absolutely no sense to me, Sandisk has introduced new “video” versions of their SDHC cards. Presumably, these cards are for video camcorders that record AVCHD onto any sort of similarly shaped flash media. (SmartMedia, your ship has already sailed)

But when one camcorder can record four different data rates, and different manufacturers camcorders use different data rates, there is no brand of math on this planet that ensures an 8GB card is 120 minutes of video, ever.

.

Sony PMW-EX1 vs Panasonic HVX-200? Easy Choice.

A Pair of Hands tested two pro flash media cameras side by side.

The $7000
Sony PMW-EX1,

The $5200
Panasonic HVX200.

.
I have already discussed the media.
But now we can compare image quality.
How do you think three 1920×1080 chips looked compared to three 960×540 chips?

Panasonic’s AG-HMC70 “Pro” AVCHD for

The blog transition took some extra time and slowed down getting all the video I shot at the GV Expo to you, but here’s the hands-on walkaround with Panasonic’s AG-HMC70 on-shoulder AVCHD camcorder.

Panasonics own Steve Golub shows us many of the new camcorder’s interesting features and explains what really sets it apart from Panny’s little “pro” AVCHD camcorder I panned not too long ago…

FreshDV compares Sony HDR-FX1 to PMW-EX1: low light

It’s no secret that HDV camcorders have not been able to pull in as much light as their SD compatriots. (at least until the HVR-S270 & Z7 arrive)

Primarily this has to do with itty-bitty HD imaging chips squeezing in as many as 6x the number of pixels into the same physical space as SD chips. Each individual pixel has to be so much smaller that it can’t possibly gather the same amount of photons.

Well, FreshDV has a pair of very clean tiff images comparing Sony’s new PMW-EX1 to the HDR-FX1, what I’ll call Sony’s last CCD-based HDV camcorder. (or last CCD-based non-CineAlta HD camcorder.) We’ll see…