So, what is everyone using these days?

And are the USB3 models backwards compatible to usb2 in case i need to plug them to my phone?

thanks for the help

==MY TEST==

I went on a shoot this weekend, and was using Sandisk Extreme 16gb 30mb/s cards. I wanted to ensure both spanning and playback in camera for the shoot, so I went with driftwoods "spanmybitchup" patch. I did just a few short preliminary tests: the test I did was to shoot the papasarts star chart (which I've attached--I also attached the more extreme codec test chart v2 2010), and let it run. I waved my hand around in the frame from time to time and also had some talking to get audio. Everything seemed good: I was getting spanning and smooth playback in camera with audio. (EDIT: also attaching Stray's death charts with color information!)

==MY SHOOT==

So during the shoot, after a few shots, I was getting the message "motion image cannot be played" for all my clips (or something like that I don't remember exactly)--my heart sunk! An actor asked me to check to see if we recorded something on a previous take, I had to say that "yes it was" without checking. I was worried about requests for playback--and this was only with one actor: imagine this on shoot with clients! For certain shots, I wanted to be sure that something was recorded since I wasn't at the camera, and I couldn't do this. The scene I was shooting was an actor in a car at night--he was lit and most everything else was dark. That's when I got the messages. I put in a new Sandisk card, and formatted it. Reshot the same scene and I was getting the same error.

==LESSONS==

1) In camera playback is important at least for some of us, and for some, like me, it is even more important than low gop. For me, I am willing to forego a very very high quality low GOP setting (awesome work driftwood!!) that doesn't have playback in camera on good SD cards for an improved long GOP with ultra reliable in camera playback. I'm NOT saying that everyone wants this or should want it (especially if you have the cash for more super high end SD cards or for extra harddrive space). But I'm guessing some people are in my situation as well.

2) It seems there's a relatively standard procedure for patch development (using streamparser, tweaking settings incrementally, etc etc). BUT there seems to be no standard procedure for testing spanning and in-camera playback. You might not think that makes a difference, but it seems that it does: it seems to matter what you shoot when you are testing things like spanning and in-camera playback. Or, at least the number of clips you shoot or the ISO you shoot at makes a difference: otherwise, I don't know how to explain the divergence between my pre-shoot tests and what happened on the shoot. I welcome some constructive thinking about standardizing spanning and camera playback tests.

==DESIRES==

The ideal for me would be to get a hack that improves quality over the stock settings, that has very very reliable spanning and in-camera playback with audio, and works on good quality cards like the Sandisck 30 mb/s (16gb). I know some people are getting the SandDisk extreme pro 64gb cards... but a lot of people (like me) already have a stash of good quality cards and don't want to fork over even more money to get these super high end cards.

I did test w/ @cbrandin 's (Chris's) 66M patch. We know that this doesn't span (but getting around 10 or 11 minutes is okay for me, although I'd love spanning). But what I did notice is that I couldn't get in camera playback with this either. I'm going to try the 44M patch.

Thoughts?