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Ask The Expert: What Kind of USB Card Reader Can I Use to Import Video Files?

Question: At present my card reader connected to the generation 3 cassie can only provide or input still pictures yet on my Samsung Pro815 and two smaller cameras and a Panasonic SD-7 I can take video footage direct to the Compact Flash or SD card but cannot input it into the Cassie from my card reader.

Do you know of or are you aware if there are any card readers that can connect to the Cassie Generation 3 machine that can input video footage direct from a card?

One customer who holidays frequently has to bring his camera and leads with him for me to input his video footage for editing as my card reader doesn't see or acknowledge any files on the card that are moving footage but only JPG or JPEG still pictures.

Any info or suggestions to guide me to find a card reader that could read those type of files into the Casablanca?


ANSWER:  A number of our colleagues are using USB Card Drives/Card Readers to import video files into their Bogart OS 3+ editors.
 
I am not aware of any particular brand limitation or issue, except to say that the card drive/reader should be a contemporary reader. The reason is that older USB card drive/readers were created only to move data or image files whereas the newer card drive/readers allow faster movement of data between the card and the device you're importing onto (whether it's a PC or your Casablanca editor)

Here is a useful bit of info from the Wikipedia article on USB Flash Drives:
File transfer speeds vary considerably and should be checked before purchase. Speeds may be given in Mbyte per second, Mbit per second or optical drive multipliers such as "180X" (180 times 150 KiB per second). Typical fast drives claim to read at up to 30 megabytes/s (MB/s) and write at about half that speed. This is about 20 times faster than older "USB full speed" devices which are limited to a maximum speed of 12 Mbit/s (1.5 MB/s). 

And here is a great resource I discovered that makes it clear what 'Class' you should seek in Flash Media and the Reader that supports the transfer from that card into your editor (http://www.sdcard.org/consumers/faq/)
Class 2 : H.264 video recording, MPEG-4, MPEG-2 video recording
Class 4: MEPG-2 (HDTV) video recording, DSC consecutive shooting
Class 6: Mega-pixel DSC consecutive shooting, professional video camera
Class 10: Full HD video recording, HD still consecutive shooting

To be clear, this article only pertains to those working with the Bogart OS Casablanca video editors. And I find this works best/only when using Bogart 3.2c and higher.






Tips & Tutorials by the Casablanca Expert, Chet Davis
www.CasablancaExpert.com