I ran into HD maven Randall Dark moments ago at the Maxell booth, where he was practically rubbing his hands together in glee, anticipating shortly dragging “a bunch” of spanking new Maxell iVDR removable storage disk drives, designed to work with Panasonic P2 media cards, out into the field. Randall will be one of the first users of the iVDR technology in a grueling field application, and grueling it will be indeed. He’s taking the system into the Grand Canyon for a television documentary called “Boat Men” (about river guides in the Grand Canyon), and he’s excited about finally having what he calls “a better way” to offload data from expensive P2 cards in the field, making the media cards more efficient.

Richard D’Ambrise, Maxell’s director of technology, told me the company is also excited about Randall’s foray using the lightweight 160-gig hard drives for his project. He is confident they will hold up in the field, being able to withstand temperatures of up to 10 degrees farenheit, and strategically designed with recessed connectors, beveled edges, and tiny shock absorbers, among other doodads.

Still, Randall better be careful: the devices aren’t yet waterproof. As long as the boats don’t tip over, though, he should be fine …

By the way, Rich also told me Maxell is continuing to push and support its holographic recording disk technology, which he says is now being used for archival work with InPhase recordinging systems at Turner Entertainment, Technicolor, and NBC. I wonder when that technology will start making more of a splash. Thousands of hours of media all recorded to a single cube, after all, seems kind of cool …

–MG