I have a question hopefully either Jan or somebody else who has used a SD P2 camera can answer.

What file structure and how are the files named on the P2 cards and/or hard drive?

What I mean is lets say you are shooting a large event and swap the cards throughout the event. Now you go back and start to edit and how will the clips be organized? If you keep shooting for a long segment and swap cards live does the file merge together during transfer or is the one large shot split into many smaller files such as how we use to have to capture DV in 9 minute chunks.

How are the clips named and if you transfer clips from more than one P2 camera how can you tell the clips apart from the name?

The reason I ask is because sometimes when you have more than one shooter keeping the clips organized can sometimes be a mess. This can be very hard if you need to keep some type order based on the order of events.

If you shoot an event with multiple cameras and have 100's to 1000's of clips this could be an editing nightmare. At least with tapes you know which camera the clips belong to and what order they were shot in.

I haven`t used one but you may find this site has relevant info.
https://eww.pavc.panasonic.co.jp/pro-av/sales_o/p2/P2brochure_e.pdf

At around page 22 of this brochure there is a description of the P2 viewer and its use. The file format is mxf which appears to offer scope for adding useful data.

Speculation here.
But I'd think it would be usefull if each clip contained 2 peices of data: the camera serial number (unique) and and n'th clip that the camera had [ever] recorded, (uniaue to the camera) ... that way you'd always be able to sort who shot it and in what order.
..than again that's almost sounding like a tape workflow.. all that linerarity..

- Mikko.

The vast array of metadata that can be assigned to an MXF file (that is what P2 uses for its file structure) will allow you to designate a wide variety of information, so keeping track of clips should not be a concern. You can work with P2 video as a searchable, indexed database.

Although the HVX200 is not yet available, you could download the operator's manual for one of the other P2 cameras and get an idea of how you can work with P2 video clips.

I finally saw a screen shot of the program from Panasonic to view P2 media and the info. I can see a lot of information there. The only downside is that you almost have to use this viewer program to tell what is going on. The actual filenames seem to be some complex number system. So just looking at the filenames might be a little hard to tell what is going on. You would either have to use this program or a NLE that could read the data.