CF Card External Recording Ideas

[rebelj12a]

Just throwing around ideas, getting an idea of limitations. External recording via CF to SSD is not possible because of the bottleneck in data and processing power of the 5d Mark III.

Just some ideas based on things ive seen.

1st Idea to throw out there
Theres an DSTWO cart which can be used for game emulation on the nintendo 3ds. Now it has its own CPU built into it to help leverage more computing power for running those emulators.

Is the camera already attempting to write to the CF card by the time the data gets there? Would there be a possible way to circumvent writing of the data and instead make it a straight data transfer to a secondary CPU built into a custom CF card that could leverage a separate processor for writing the data to the card or even to an SSD via an interface like SATA.

2nd
Direct modifications to the 5d Mark II or III would be the only way to make this possible.

So basically you would need to engineer a custom firmware via Magic Lantern or whatnot and actually remove the CF card slot and circumvent the data transfer cap in general. So more of a hardware modification.

From what i've gathered SSD writing via CF card slot just is not going to happen.

[Midphase]

They both sound like awesome plans, please let me know when you got it all working...Mkay?

[tjaja]

If you are removing the CF slot, just install a Cfast slot while you are at it.
http://www.sandisk.nl/products/memory-cards/readers/cfast/
Dismantle that one and just smash it in your 5d3.

Enjoy the modding

PS: My 5d3 costed 3000 euro's and for me that was a lot, for you maybe not so you can try.
PS2: Just replacing the cf with something else can't be done even with a firmware hack
PS3: Don't do it.

[ilguercio]

Let us know, man.

[enliten]

hey bud,

as far as I'm aware the statement:

External recording via CF to SSD is not possible because of the bottleneck in data and processing power of the 5d Mark III.

is incorrect. The processing power is not the bottleneck, it is the inbuilt card controller (probably an IC) and the firmware that drives that. You would need to replace (at least) that part of the hardware and modify the existing firmware. I'm going to assume that the firmware that controls the IO for the CF is high level in the hardware design and can't be over-ridden / run alongside ala magic lantern.

So there is a physical limit to the data throughput.

Is the camera already attempting to write to the CF card by the time the data gets there?

The camera dumps the raw files directly to the CF, with (I think only a little) CPU involvement. There are other threads where the devs have spoken about and dismissed raw compression as being viable. Unless the CPU on that emulator thing is much faster than the DIGIC then you won't have much luck compressing the data either.

If you are an engineery type person the easiest solution would be to modify an IDE/SATA to CF adapter to be bi-directional. Even that isn't a simple task and won't allow for more speed, only more storage space. 

The emulator thing could be cool if you could program it to do some post production tasks. Thats probably about it though.

[ilguercio]

While you're at it, try and see if you can attach a coffee machine to it.
I'd love to have a cup of coffee while i am shooting.
It should be really easy.

[Stedda]

Must have been a facebook or twitter post recently because here comes another wave....

[dubzeebass]

Let the guy be excited for fucks sake. Hatorade is alive and well. Ideas are not for denigrating during brainstorming. I really though this forum was free of unabated flaming...

[Audionut]

And it looks like this thread has run it's course.

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