Just picked up my HVX200, 4 P2 cards, and a P2 Store. I've been studying the manuals and playing ever since. So far I'm very impressed. Although I don't find the controls to be immediately intuitive, having never used the DVX100, once figured out I find them to be very comfortably placed. Much more so than the Canon's I've been using. Also, I find the camera to be much better balance, particularly when used on the Fig Rig that I've grown to love.

I've been having some problems with the P2 Store and have emailed Panasonic. I'm not sure whether it's a hardware problem, software update issue, or just operator error, but I can't get the P2 cards to copy onto the internal HDD. All diagnostics on the P2 Store seem ok. Also, I've had no problem transferring the files to either a Mac or PC using firewire or USB from the camera, or inserting the P2 Card into the Powerbook directly.

I'm going back to my learning. More to come...

Hello Bill,

When I was using a P2 Store it took about 10 minutes to copy an entire 4GB card. For example, if you just record a 30 second clip, it will still back-up the entire card. Try letting it go for about 10 minutes or so and see if it completes the card back-up.

Best regards,

Andrew Hoffman

With the help of Panasonic Engineering we resolved the P2 Store problem. The P2 Store firmware needed an upgrade for 8GB cards. It is much faster than your experience. I'll time it but it seemed like only a couple minutes to copy the full 8GB card (16 minutes of 720/24PN). The drive is 60GB, and it looks like it can store about 7 8GB cards, close to two hours. This appears workable to me as long as the copy time is less than the recording time on a card. Workflow would be to hot swap a card when full with the card in the P2 Store. Then to edit, mount the P2 store as a drive(s) on the NLE system.

There is another issue with the P2 Store however. Although I didn't check this carefully in advance, I assumed that it would appear as a USB drive on the Mac, like most USB drives. In fact, the inserted P2 card in the drive will show up, but the copied cards on the HDD do not. The whole thing works fine on a PC and it also worked via Virtual PC on the Powerbook. This is still not a very useful work flow. I'm waiting to hear back from Panasonic again to see if there's a fix or planned driver.

I suspect that the Firestore may be the best overall option when it becomes available.

Bill - thanks for the info! But can you be a little more specific about the download tome to the P2? "A couple of minutes" for 8 GB = 4GB/min = about 66MB/sec - which sounds just a tad high to be reasonable...

If you get a chance, can you get a better number, and let us know if this includes verification or not?

Thanks! And keep us posted on the Mac issue, that's interesting to know...

I've done some further tests and the copy times seem pretty linear at about 1.5 minutes per gigabyte. My first test was about a 25% full card and it took a bit over two minutes to copy. A full 8GB card took around 12 minutes. The good news for me is that it can keep up with the camera at 720/24p.

I'm still going to give very serious thought to the Firestore FS-100 when it becomes available. Having used the camera, I'm not too excited about the P2 based solutions, which appear to require that the the P2 card cage be left open with a cable dangling across the back of the camera. A small firewire cable out the side is a bit more palatable. Especially if the P2 cards are providing some redundancy while recording.

I read this post and was going to call my Panasonic dealer, but I noticed an email that read...1ST WEEK OF MARCH!

The anticipation is killing me...
Jimi :(