Record directly to External Harddisk via Macbook Air

Hello,

is it possible to record 5 hours straight without stopping via Thunderbolt Macbook Air to external harddrive?
RAW has probably too high datarate and cannot be captured like that as I understand.

Can it be done with the software shipping with the camera or is there anything else needed?

Thanks.

Best Regards

Hi John,

Assume you are talking about the BM cinema camera?

I don't have experience with the camera but have captured from both an intensity extreme and ultrastudio express to a Lacie Rugged drive (5400rpm) conencted via USB2. The most I've done has been a bit over an hour. And was capturing in ProRes 422 LT. Was using media express.

Looking at the website, with thunderbolt designed on the camera for live computer capture however it says it's for "capture of RAW video and Audio". I know I have had issues with my captures when capturing uncompressed to the internal SSD drive.

If you have an external drive and the camera, would test it to see if it works at all or if it drops frames. As you are going for 5 hours you would need power for the laptop, prehaps investigate whether the hyperdeck studio pro can use it's thunderbolt as an input (or use the HD-SDI from the camera to the hyperdeck). The drives on it can be used in series so once one fills, it automatically switches to the other drive and you can replace the full drive and it will keep doing so until you finish recording. Definitely a more expensive option.
Or upgrade to a MBPro with 2 thunderbolt ports and attach an external thunderbolt RAID device which if done in RAID0 should enable you to do the 5 hours.

Not sure this has helped or caused more headaches!

Hi Daniel,

Yes, this question was directed for usage with BMCC.
It's great that capturing is possible.. cool stuff.

Thanks that helped a lot. Could have only been a better answer if you actually used the camera to do this. =)

Anyways it seems to be a process not without risk when not being able to test it out a couple of times before the actual event. An additional FS100 might be good.

I have several SSDs but not enough for this much footage. Organizing a RAID0 with 7200RPM drives is no problem. But figuring out how to have a solid connetion will be complicated.
Probably I rent a Macbook Pro.

Thanks again.

Cheers

No problem, good luck!

Ideally thunderbolt from camera to MBPro and then thunderbolt from MBPro to RAID.

Though just thinking about it, if you have a RAID with 2 thunderbolts, should be able to connect camera to RAID, RAID to MBAir! (but test it!!)

Hi John,

See this post from Chris: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5911

[Chris Pearse]

Hi,

I don't see any problem using the Cinema Camera to record for long periods of time. Of course if using SSDs for Raw you're going to have to swap the disk out several times. Recording ProRes to a big SSD might just get you to five hours, but I think it'll be tight. But SDI or ThunderBolt I think should be fine as long as the rest of the setup is stable.

We've used external ThunderBolt disks for events that will run constantly for hours. And so far I've not seen a problem with daisy chaining ThunderBolt disks and our ThunderBolt products. Maybe adding other

As previously mentioned, if you didn't want to use a MacBook, there's the HyperDeck Studio that would take the SDI out from the camera and record in Uncompressed (or ProRes, or DNxHD), and again if you were to use both SSD ports you can record for as long as you like without any gaps.

As I mention in the other thread, Raw is only recordable on the SSD. SDI and ThunderBolt both provide a 10bit Uncompressed stream of 1080p.