Ok....I'm lovin' the features of the new Panasonic Camera and I think it would go great next to my DVX100a......therefore, I am steadily trying to find a way to make it work for me. However the only thing is "P2", it's giving me grief. I would not use this camera for 720anything or DVanything. I plan to shoot 1080p24, 1080p30 and 1080i60 ONLY for various reasons/purposes.

Now.....All along we have been talking about P2 and its workflow, and how its supposed to make things better and be faster and more robust and all that, yada yada yada.... The counter argument is the astronomical price of P2 and its limited capacity and its scarce availablity, etc....

So tonight, I just read somewhere that it will take FOUR minutes for a FOUR gig P2 card to transfer FOUR minutes of DVCPROHD 1080 footage to my laptop (the laptop everyone says just bring to set, right?). So are you telling me that if I shoot in 1080 HD (which is the MAIN reason I would get this camera, not for it's 720, but for 1080 only!) so if I shoot in 1080 HD with the new HVX200 camera, I will only get about 4 minutes per 4-gig card, which mean, the transfer is REALTIME???? If I get the future EIGHT gig card it will hold only EIGHT minutes of 1080 HD footage and take EIGHT minutes to transfer it to my laptop????

WHICH BASICALLY MEAN IT IS JUST AS SLOW AS CAPTURING A REGULAR MINIDV CASSETTE TAPE????????? which also means it will take just as long to tranfer the P2 information to my computer as it did to shoot the footage???

Please tell me this ain't so!

someone...please tell me.....this IS NOT the case.

Barry or Jan, please chime in and break it down to ya boy Shan.

It's bad enough I have to spend extra $$ to QUADRUPLE my current hard drive space to handle the gigabytes that 1080 DVCPROHD will take up compared to my current 1080 HDV. Therefore, I AM NOT interested in buying some new Panasonic thousand+ dollars hi-tech capturing product in ADDITION to the expensive P2 cards and whatnot. I am also NOT interested in purchasing ANOTHER laptop that will cost me $2,000.00+ or more simply because it has some new space-aged hard drive that MIGHT be faster.

For DVCPROHD 1080HD shooting, I want to use my current battery operated and extremely portable Sony Vaio PCG-GRT170 P4 2.8Ghz laptop with a regular ole' external FireWire 80gig 5400rpm 2.5" laptop hard drive in a bus-powered external case (which I guess will hold only 1.5 hours of DVCPROHD footage) to 'transfer footage from P2 while on set inbetween takes'.

Is this possible??? Or is that a pipe dream because P2 card transfers of 1080 HD are as slow as real-time??

- Shannon W. Rawls *smile*

Is there currently any DVCPro HD ingestion method that is faster than real time? I don't know myself; I'm just asking.

Chris, are you saying that not just 1080, but ALSO 720p DVCPROHD footage only transfers to laptops at real time (1x)??

- Shannon W. Rawls

I don't know whether it's realtime or not.

But as far as I know, 720p and 1080i have the same data rate on DVCPRO-HD. They are both 100 Mbits/s. But, the 720p is really 60p = 60 progressive frames per second, and the 1080i is 60i = 60 interlaced, or 30 progressive, or 24 progressive frames per second. And the 1080i 24p is with similar pulldown as the DVX100. So there's half the frames and double the frame size in 1080 compared to 720, but the data rate is the same then.

I'm only using the name 1080i as it's the name of other DVCPRO-HD format, but it ofcourse can be used for those progressive formats as well. So, it really is 1080p then.

As they are the same data rate, they will take the same amount of time to transfer.

<<<-- Originally posted by Shannon Rawls :
Barry or Jan, please chime in and break it down to ya boy Shan.
-->>>

Shannon,

Until NAB, I can't break it down for you any better. It will become much more understandable in the big picture. I know everyone wants to know the answers now, but I just can't say more, just have some faith and we can talk next Tueday.

Best,

Jan

Well, Shannon, I don't know what you're worrying about as far as your laptop goes, but you shouldn't be too bothered to buy new equipment already. You just got the Z1 didn't you ;) ?

Anyway, your laptop sounds like it will be enough. All you'll need to upgrade most likely is external storage options. You can get a 500gb SATA firewire setup for $600 from Videoguys.com and you can always get a 250gb drive for less. I've got a 250gb drive that's just waiting to be used for this camera. For me though, I got an external USB 2.0 adapter and used a regular computer HDD, saved a buck or two in the process and I could always buy extra HDD's to swap in and out. Though, my Alienware laptop is a tad more powerful than yours, it's bulkier and I wish I had the foresight to buy a thin VAIO, oh well.

All I see with all of this P2 business is more practice time for the talent. Everyone else is just freaking out a bit too much I think.

Forgive me if I am completely missing something, but isn't the format (1080i/720p/etc.) completely irrelevant? Aren't we talking literally about transferring 4 gigs of data from solid state memory to a disk-based drive?

The factors determining the speed of the transfer would seem to lie solely in the hardware buses of the laptop: the PCMCIA slot's speed, and whether or not you were writing to an external drive, and if so, what kind of protocol being used, i.e. firewire vs USB 2.0.

In other words, how fast can your laptop copy 4 gigs off a PCMCIA card? You know the P2 card itself has a fast bus, but it's only part of the equation.

Make sense? And da*n, Shannon. I wish I could have simultaneously have a Z1 and be pondering purchasing the Panasonic. Guess I've just got to get my business straight. :)

"Forgive me if I am completely missing something, but isn't the format (1080i/720p/etc.) completely irrelevant? Aren't we talking literally about transferring 4 gigs of data from solid state memory to a disk-based drive?"


Different format options on the HVX may have different datarates. So while you are right in saying that it's just 4GB of data, and the format shouldn't matter...it does become an issue when you are discussing the transfer time.

4GB of 720P/24fps could be up to 13 minutes of footage.
4GB of 1080P/24fps could be up to 4 minutes of footage.

So, the difference becomes one of transfer time being 'Real Time'
(i.e. 4 minutes to transfer 4 minutes of 1080P24 footage)

Or roughly 1/3 real time.
(i.e. 4 minutes to transfer 13 minutes of 720P24 footage)

That is a very important issue in terms of P2 card management, when you consider that you want to be able to transfer the data from a full card faster than it takes you to fill up your next card. If you only had 2 cards, and they took 'real time' to transfer, you'd probably have a rough time on set.

Does that make sense?



*NOTE*
Notice the use of the words MAY and COULD
Nothing is official until Panasonic spills the beans.

One week left.

Yes, I understand that there is a ratio between recording format/resolution and how quickly the card will fill up, but the speed of transfer between the card and the laptop is relatively fixed.

The Panasonic cards have a projected sustained speed of 20MB/sec. A little math therefore gets us to the estimated transfer time of 4 minutes for a full card. (4000MB/20MB = 200 seconds, or about 3 and 1/3 minutes; remember that it is 20MB/sec max sustained transfer rate, hence the addition of the 30 or so seconds).

If one had 2 4GB cards, I don't see the transfer time cramping things too terribly, as long as one has help handling the transfer while you continue to shoot. Unless you are shooting very long, continuous takes, the normal start/stop that it takes to yield 4 minutes of recording time would almost certainly be enough to get the other card emptied and readied. If you need longer recording times than 4 minutes, then we're back to the debate over the type of shooting best suited for this camera, i.e. events (not so good) vs. a news-gathering style or traditional film-based shooting in little bursts.

As technology improves with regard to the I/O busses the transfer speed will likely go further and further down as new interfaces appear.

I thought I remember Jan saying that the P2 card is a striped array not so much for writing video data as it is for quickly offloading it. Even if DVCPro HD offloads only at near-realtime speed, just think, it's 2x realtime for DVCPro 50 and 4x realtime for DV & DVCpro.

Perhaps for live event type stuff such as weddings maybe people should limit the shooting to 720p 30/24p. That way the record time would get you 13 minutes with only 4 minutes to dump the card. This gives you an extra 9 minutes to fumble with the card and get it back to the camera. With DV/dvcpro25 you could really take your time swapping cards.

For the life of me however I can't really figure out who would shoot a 1920 x 1080 4:2:2 100 Mbit wedding video.

<<<-- Originally posted by Thomas Smet :
For the life of me however I can't really figure out who would shoot a 1920 x 1080 4:2:2 100 Mbit wedding video. -->>>

Perhaps this wedding:
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/04/11/royal.pictures/

<<<-- Originally posted by Eric James : <<<-- Originally posted by Thomas Smet :
For the life of me however I can't really figure out who would shoot a 1920 x 1080 4:2:2 100 Mbit wedding video. -->>>

Perhaps this wedding:
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/04/11/royal.pictures/ -->>>



LOL! XD

I don't think you'd want that much rez for that bride!

*L* yeah, HD for wedding? Uh oh.....most weddings CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH !!









*as Aaron Sorkin would say.

I think this stat of 4 minutes for 4 GB has been taken out of context, misinterpreted, and repeated by a lot of folks on message boards as of late.

As far as I know, it comes from Panasonic saying that it will take 4 minutes to transfer a 4 GB P2 card on to their new portable hard drive off-loader. However, this is almost certainly due to the speed of the hard drive, NOT the speed of the P2 card.

On Panasonic's web site, they list the data rate of the 4 GB card as 640Mbps (https://eww.pavc.panasonic.co.jp/pro-av/sales_o/p2/p2card/index.html) . If you are recording 1080p30 or 1080i60, this means that it can potentially transfer the footage at 6.4x real time. For 720p24 (assuming that junk frames aren't captured to the P2 card), you can potentially transfer the footage 16x real time.

Of course, if the hard drive you are offloading the data to is slower than 640Mbps (as it is in the case of the portable hard drive Panasonic is marketing), then the transfer will happen more slowly.

That was an extremely worthwhile contribution from a first-time poster, Sasha. Welcome to DV Info Net. Hope to hear more from you soon,

That equals roughly 80 MB/S. That type of speed is usually only reachable on hard drives at a sustained rate on a raid 0 setup of 2 or more drives. Even a 2 drive setup may have trouble getting to that level of a sustained transfer rate. For example the G-raid external raid gets a sustained write rate of around 50 to 60 MB/S with using 2 drives. In order to get a 80 MB/S copy rate from P2 you would almost need a raid-0 with 4 drives or a really good hardware raid-5.

A 5400 RPM laptop drive will struggle to reach decent speeds.

If you have a laptop with 2 7200 RPM drives in a raid-0 you may get roughly 40 MB/S or a little under 2 minutes to transfer a 4 GB P2 card.