Panasonic HVX200 direct capture to hard drive

OK, OK, I keep hearing it, P2 cards are still too expensive and don’t hold enough video, in spite of price drops and the migration to 16G cards. But don’t give up on the HVX just because of P2 cards. There’s always the FireStore, or better yet, record straight to a hard drive connected to a MacBook Pro or PowerBook (sorry, I don’t do Windows) laptop on the set!

You will need to use an EXTERNAL hard drive (unless you can deal with the tiny capacity of the laptop’s internal drive and the suffling of data to an external as the show goes on), and thus if you want to use the camera and the hard drive connected to the laptop at the same time, things gets a little complicated: you need to have the camera and drive on separate I/O busses in order to avoid drop frames, however, this easily done. You can connect the camera to the FireWire 400 port, and then you’ll need a second port on a separate bus in order to connect an external hard drive. This could be a FireWire or SATA port via a Cardbus interface for the PowerBooks or an ExpressBus interface cards for the MacBook Pro.

Matthew Cohen at Tekserve in New York turned me on to this direct capture to external hard drive via Laptop arrangement that he’s been using since the summer: HVX200 camera connected to MacBook Pro FireWire port and an external drive connected to FireWire 400 ExpressBus card (Matthew has used Sigg’s card. For people who are in the New York area, you’ll find lots of Mac expertise at Tekserve just like you find lots of HVX expertise at Abel Cine Tech.