FlashAir, a good solution for in-studio recording?

[Vadise]

Greetings.

 

As the title suggests, in my search for storage media for my Canon Vixia HF R700, I came across Toshiba's site showcasing these FlashAir SD Cards, and in Canon's site I see the camera is compatible. So, it seems pretty straightforward and efficient if I intend to record in my office, record, when it is full I just offload it through WiFi to my workstation, then just go on without swapping cards.

 

Have you had any experience with FlashAir? would you recommend it for an In-Studio scenario where you are always within WiFi range of your workstation and then save high capacity regular SD Cards for on-site shooting?

[AkiraDaarkst]

I have a question, let's assume you buy the 32GB version of the card.  You record and it becomes full.  Do you know how long it would take to transfer 32GB by wifi?

[Vadise]

I do not, which is why I am asking for opinions and experiences from other users here in this very topic. If you have that information, please share it. FlashAir supports a wide array of WiFi, B, G and N.

[AkiraDaarkst]

5 minutes ago, Vadise said:

I do not, which is why I am asking for opinions and experiences from other users here in this very topic. If you have that information, please share it. FlashAir supports a wide array of WiFi, B, G and N.

It'll be faster to take out the card, plug it into a card reader slot and offload the footage.  Hell, you can even connect the camera to a capture card and record the video straight to the workstation, if the camera has a way of outputting a clean video signal.

 

32GB file transfer takes several minutes if not hours, still many times longer than using an USB 3.0 SD card reader.

[mama_fluxus]

As a professional photographer I probably wouldn't use this. 

 

Even the thought of data loss makes my spine quiver, and I feel like this system would make it easier to corrupt. Ethernet tethered is the best way to shoot all the time, it's just not always available.

 

Are you using this for photos or video?

 

If its video then just buy a bunch of regular low capacity SD cards and keep switching them out and dumping them on an ingest computer.

[AkiraDaarkst]

 

Just now, mama_fluxus said:

As a professional photographer I probably wouldn't use this. 

 

Even the thought of data loss makes my spine quiver, and I feel like this system would make it easier to corrupt. Ethernet tethered is the best way to shoot all the time, it's just not always available.

 

Are you using this for photos or video?

 

If its video then just buy a bunch of regular low capacity SD cards and keep switching them out and dumping them on an ingest computer.

A Canon Vivia HF R700 is a video camera.

 

I use wireless tether occasionally for photography without issues, of course I use the expensive Nikon wifi dongle instead of SD cards with some wifi capability.

[Vadise]

It would be for 1080p 60fps video recording off that camera. So what I am getting from Akira is that if time is of the essence, then FlashAir is not a good solution, but otherwise it could probably work?

 

And from Fluxus that it could cause data corruption. About corruption, the most common times I get corruption is when I swap cards around and offload them through readers, no matter what reader I use, no name Chinese stuff, or even my Anker USB 3.0 card reader. You think that is due to the cards being low quality or just the inherent fragility of SD Cards? One of the reasons I looked at FlashAir was to avoid that scenario completely as well.

[AkiraDaarkst]

6 minutes ago, Vadise said:

It would be for 1080p 60fps video recording off that camera. So what I am getting from Akira is that if time is of the essence, then FlashAir is not a good solution, but otherwise it could probably work?

 

And from Fluxus that it could cause data corruption. About corruption, the most common times I get corruption is when I swap cards around and offload them through readers, no matter what reader I use, no name Chinese stuff, or even my Anker USB 3.0 card reader. You think that is due to the cards being low quality or just the inherent fragility of SD Cards? One of the reasons I looked at FlashAir was to avoid that scenario completely as well.

What cards do you have?  If the files inside them are frequently being corrupted, perhaps something's wrong with them.  I have SD cards that are 15 years old and still work, though they are like only 1GB capacity or so.

 

Could work, but I'd never be able to accept the slow speed of transfer.

 

If I ever use wireless tether, or any other tether, I still record in camera to the memory cards just to be safe.  But I've never had any sort of file corruption before, as long as there was no interference to the wifi signal.

[Vadise]

They are from all sorts of brands, Sandisk, Kingston, Emtec and a Sony one, sure, they are small (1,2,4,8GB) because I used to have older point and shoot cameras that recorded sub 720p, and later just moved the cards to Smartphone duty or just storing bootable tools for IT work. But almost invariably if I unmounted them from whatever device they were happily in more than a couple of times, I'd get file system errors and the typical "Card's damaged, format it" errors. Slow formats made them work again, and checking for bad blocks yielded nothing.

[AkiraDaarkst]

Do you format the cards in camera or on the computer?  I use my cards on different types and models of cameras, but each time I format them on the camera to be used.

[Vadise]

I tried both ways at one point, seeing the same thing happen so I decided then that it didn't matter. My experiment was with a Sandisk 2GB card, format it to FAT16 on the PC, shove it into a Samsung Galaxy S4, have it say that it needed to format it, say no, unmount, plug back onto the PC and see that the card was unformatted. Try FAT32, same result. But if I format on my S4, it works fine in the S4, but doesn't work on the PC 1 out of 3 times. Same with my Blackberry Q10.

 

For the camera I intend to try Lexar's Professional line of cards to see if I get the same thing, and I'll get a Lexar card reader as well. Thought I'd also be able to circumvent this whole card swapping with FlashAir, just leave the card chilling happily in it's place.

[AkiraDaarkst]

7 hours ago, Vadise said:

I tried both ways at one point, seeing the same thing happen so I decided then that it didn't matter. My experiment was with a Sandisk 2GB card, format it to FAT16 on the PC, shove it into a Samsung Galaxy S4, have it say that it needed to format it, say no, unmount, plug back onto the PC and see that the card was unformatted. Try FAT32, same result. But if I format on my S4, it works fine in the S4, but doesn't work on the PC 1 out of 3 times. Same with my Blackberry Q10.

 

For the camera I intend to try Lexar's Professional line of cards to see if I get the same thing, and I'll get a Lexar card reader as well. Thought I'd also be able to circumvent this whole card swapping with FlashAir, just leave the card chilling happily in it's place.

I know that a certain generation of Kingston cards were not supported or wasn't compatible with certain cameras and that I think Kingston has resolved the issue since (I'm talking about something that happened around 10 years ago).  Usually the file system should be Fat32, not Fat16.

 

As I said, perhaps something is defective with the cards.

 

I generally prefer Sandisk and Lexar cards, the most reliable cards I've ever used in 10+ years of digital photo/video work.

 

You might be able to do what you want with FlashAir, but the performance would be so slow.  If you want to save directly to the workstation, use a cable and capture card.  Does the camera have HDMI out?

[Vadise]

It does have HDMI out and I do have a generously long compatible cable for it, so I will look up some capture cards just to have the reference, it would open up the possibility of doing more than one camera recording at once in the future if I have any sort of positive feedback on my work that warrants any further investment in gear.

 

Thank you for the information on not just FlashAir but everything else. I think I got what I needed for the time being to make a more educated decision.