64GB flash drive under $1000 by end of the year.
 

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32315


This will hopefully be good news for P2 camera owners, as it is an indication how much the price of P2 could reach.

The high cost problem of flash for consumer should hopefully now be coming to an end, making professional or consumer HD acquisition of flash totally affordable. A hour long flash card should be affordable, and hopefully should be able to be backed up in field to those external Hard drive enclosures that have flash card inputs.

32GB Flash drives can already be had for less than an 8GB P2 drive. So, using the same logic, if 64GB is $999, then a 16GB P2 would still come in at $2000. AFAIK, only Panny makes the P2... unless more people start making it, the price wont fall off as quickly as it should.


ash =o)

There is another way of looking at it - why bother with P2 at all? Is it not the case that P2 was developed at a time when the only way that the required performance could be achieved was by such a raided system with selected chips? And that the speed of development of memory (both speed and capacity) has been such that such a solution may now be seen as unnecessarily complicated? (And expensive.)

It begs the question of when we may expect the first 1/3" camera using SD or Compact Flash technology - with four (say) slots taking up less space than two P2! Perhaps Panasonic have too much invested in P2 to go down such a route, but Grass Valley have already pointed the way with the Infinity. I wonder......

According to the Panasonc media guy at NAB, yield is another reason for the high price. They need to work over a range of temperature and such as well with full performance. Consumers may tolerate bad memory locations for their digicams, but professional videographers will not.

BTW, I've owned three different consumer flash cards that went bad. And they died while working with different equipment.

In any case, with no competition, Panasonic can charge whatever they want based on the value of the cards in the marketplace - totally decoupled from manufacturing costs.

(The best example of this was the early days of touch tone phones. The phone company would charge an extra buck a month for the service, even though the cost and maintanance of the electronic equipment was much lower than for the Rube Goldberg machines they used to detect dial pulses.)

From what I understood (I don't keep track of P2) the P@ drive sues PCMCIA compatible cards (which Compact Flash cards are a smaller subset of) which is one of the oldest standards out. So, it should be easy enough to make replacement cards. But the whole thing, as David pointed out, is that you don't need P2. There are HDD recording solutions that would take this. So the competition will force P2 prices down from ridiculous highs, or just sue an alternative. Honestly, I didn't mention this because I thought the only thing people wouldn't argue about was P2.

They would say that, the drives mentioned here probably have nearly as much temperature range, performance and quality as the flash they use, and it probably cost very little to add (though the limited runs of the P2 would have influence on price). Flash systems are file systems, which allows them to easily isolate bad sectors, though back up regularly if you use something cheap.

But I think I saw a P2 example device that could be loaded with SD cards years ago, and you can buy PCMCIA card adaptors you can put SD cards into (wherever they are compatible enough with P2 is another matter).

Pity Panasonic sees itself having to put out equipment that is not the top competitor and with storage priced to make P2 have small influenced on sales for small sales. If there was real competition, how come they haven't produced something of better grade compared to XDCAM HD for the price. All this stuff disheartens me. The market is still well structured to accommodate very expensive cameras. At least the 50mb/s h264 codec should turn out to have reasonable professional quality, 100mb/s 4:4:4 would have made it a good level of quality.

I don't see that as a reason for P2 - it is, after all, based on selected SD cards, so surely the same selected SD cards used as such will work over a range of temperatures equally well!? Professional videographers may indeed not tolerate bad memory locations, but then neither do top professional stills photographers - who seem quite happy with Compact Flash. (Though no doubt using the faster and more expensive variants.)

Ask an industry rep the question "can I record broadcast quality video on a 1/4" tape running at slow speed" and he should answer yes. Ask the same question around 1960 and the answer is likely to have been an emphatic "NO" - probably with quite a lot of laughter! The point is that both yes and no answers are 100% correct IN THEIR OWN TIME.

Same with the conversation with the Panasonic rep. When P2 was first conceived it was indeed the only way to reliably record broadcast video with solid state - the solid state answer to quadruplex if you like! But times move on, and if the Infinity lives up to expectations, any justification by Panasonic reps of the need for P2 v CF or SD is going to sound increasingly hollow. The conversation ceases to be academic and becomes "well, if Grass Valley can manage it, why can't you?" Couple that with computers moving on to a different architecture for their expansion slot........

I suspect they were surprised by the amazing speed of improvemnts in solid state memory as much as most consumers. In hindsight, the real worth of P2 may be seen as pointing the way to the future, rather than as being successful in it's own right.

It is not that simple... P2 is a 32-bit card with an intelligent RAID inside... Also, as an HVX user I can tell you that currently, the HDD options are buggy. What would have been perfect is a camera that did DVCproHD to blueray discs... but of course that just makes too much sense =o)



ash =o)

I suspect the reason we're not seeing that is that the discs couldn't handle the datarate of DVCPROHD.

Can you clarify what you mean by "it is not that simple"? P2 may indeed be a 32 bit card with intelligent raid, but the question is..... why is that (now) necessary? Now Compact Flash cards can be fast enough to handle the sort of data rates needed for video, why bother with the complexities of P2? If it can work for Grass Valley, doesn't that now mean that with todays technology it really can be that simple?

Well,

Cameras that record to BluRay are essentially XDCAM as that is what XDCAM media is. We may see such a thing (DVCPRO to BD/XD media), but personally I prefer the solid state recording. Makes so much more sense in terms of robustness in the field. IMO, P2 is a little premature and has a lot of things going against it. For starters, it should not be based on PCMCIA Cardbus as an interface... This is an interface that is being phased out and it will be increasingly difficult to acquire notebook computers with PC card interfaces, thus requiring P2 users to always have external media readers or separate readers installed in their desktop computers if they don't always want to use the camera itself as a reader. Why Panasonic couldn't have jumped to an ExpressCard 72 format is somewhat of a puzzle. I realize they were trying to maintain compatibility with their installed P2 infrastructure with the release of the HVX200 and planning other future P2 products, but the installed base was rather small. I also don't buy a lot of the "to maintain compatibility" claims when lately they have now thrown a lot of that thinking out of the window and are jointly working on new formats and new ways to use P2 that will be entirely incompatible with previous systems. Look at the new camcorders announced that will use multiple P2 cards in a RAID/interleaved arrangement for increased redundancy and speed. Makes perfect sense, but goes against a lot of their compatibility arguments.

As for P2 pricing, it's been hashed over so many times in the forums... It's true that Panny is using very high grade SD chips that must conform to industry standards for zero-defect claims as well as operations in extreme temperature and vibration/shock ranges. Such SD chips are available on the common market, but they're rather expensive. It's a rough guestimate, but I'd say the 8GB P2 card is selling for about double what it should right now. But with Panasonic as the only supplier, what do we do?

I remotely remember seeing a picture of 4 SD cards inside a PCMCIA form factor card for P2, if that is what you mean by Raid, I am not very impressed. Small cards have upto around 20MByte+ per second capacity, PCMCIA 32bit much much more, since the original 16 bit version I think they use an adaption of the IDE bus to transfer, so you can see the differences between the P2 and this gets smaller and smaller. I can't remember the data rate of SD, but I don't think it is slow in comparison. The data rate of DVCPROHD is around 12.5MB/s. Of course, getting individual SD cards and putting them into P2, might incur a cost based on the pre-manufactured SD card price.

Is there anybody that knows exactly what the P2 situation is from a engineering perspective?

Not that simpple meaning... the cost of making a P2 is much greater than just the cost of 4 SD cards...


ash =o)

The internals of a P2 card don't consist of 4 SD cards as we all commonly think of them. It's the same SD memory, just not in the plastic SD card shell we're all familiar with.

P2 is based on the 32bit Cardbus PCMCIA interface. This is a 33MHz, 32bit interface, which is capable of up to 1056Mbps maximum throughput or 132MB/sec. SD media has a base transfer rate of 115KB/sec, which is where we get into all those speed numbers like 133X that manufacturers like to claim. Right now, the SD chips being used in 8GB P2 cards are 2GB 133X chips. These have a maximum transfer rate of 14.9MB/s, but real-world numbers are closer to ~14MB/s read 11MB/s write from most vendors. Internally, the P2 cards are using a commonly available multichannel memory controller. The 4 SD chips are connected in interleaved fashion, just as multichannel RAM works in desktop PC systems and it's essentially the same thing as a RAID-0 hard drive setup (or striped array). But if we take the 14.9MB/s * 4 = 59.6MB/s. This is 476.8Mbps or over 4 times the data rate of DVCPROHD. A single SD chip at the 133X rating would theoretically be able to handle DVCPROHD on its own, but it may not in all circumstances, especially in extreme temperature situations. So in this respect, multiple SD chips make sense as it economically boosts capacity and performance. Also, there are 150X SD chips commonly available on the market these days and it's possible that some 8GB P2 cards are being made with 150X chips depending on availability. Samsung, as one of Panasonic's key SD suppliers, has been saying that common 4, 8 and 16 GB SD chips should be available starting this year and into end of '07 (for the 16GB) and at speeds up to 180X. Figuring 180X speeds as to how they pertain to a P2 quad-chip configuration, that yields the 640Mbps rate that Panasonic likes to claim P2 is capable of.

AFAIK, there is no specifics on how anyone must implement P2. What is being discussed thus far is how Panasonic has constructed their 2, 4 and 8GB P2 cards. Essentially, the interface must conform to the P2 standard and beyond that it could be anything the manufacturer can squeeze into the PCMCIA Cardbus form factor - be it a hard drive, WiFi device, etc.. An example would be the upcoming CinePorter from Specialized Communications. It is a P2 device, but instead of having storage inside the card, it is simply an interface card that has a cable run to an external HDD unit (capable of holding 1 or 2 drives), the P2 camera/deck/etc.. sees the CinePorter as a large capacity P2 device. So, if a major breakthrough in CF memory technology happens overnight and a 128GB CF card with 60MB/s data rates comes available, there's no reason a P2 manufacturer (Panny or 3rd party) couldn't build P2 cards around that CF chip.

Well, OK, granted, but that's not what I'm suggesting. Rather using an SD or CF card INSTEAD of P2, not building your own P2 card.

If you're an existing HVX owner I grant this may not be very relevant. I'm more looking ahead to the next generation of camera, as to be honest I don't see any of the HDV offerings or the HVX as anywhere near free of significant issues. I see solid state as potentially desirable, and going for a none P2 variant a way of making it more generally viable well before P2 could be, if one just waits for P2 costs to fall.

Just going by Jeffs figures above does show that single SD or CF cards are only just capable of DVCProHD speeds. They are easily capable of 50Mbs though - just as proposed for AVC-Intra or JPEG2000 - and even 50Mbs should have better than DVCProHD performance. (Quality wise, if not in ease of editing.)

If a CF 128GB card capable of 60MBs was to come available, then rather than see a P2 card built around it, I'd rather just see a CAMERA built around it! :-)

...And it will happen too. In another 3 to 7 years, 128GB solid state chips will be commonly available. Within 10 years (and possibly in just 5 years), we'll all be buying $40 memory cards for our video cameras just like we do now for our still cameras and fitting hours worth of HD video on them. Taking 25Mbps DV/HDV into account, a 16GB SD card will have at least 3X the bandwidth needed and over 80 minutes of storage time. 16GB SD has already been demonstrated by several manufacturers like Samsung and should be available within a year, maybe 1.5 years. In 3 years or so, when they're commonly available for under $60 who would buy tapes? And it won't just be video cameras that drive the market for such high capacity chips... Portable media/music players, personal storage devices and still cameras will too. Imagine upcoming digital SLR and medium format cameras with 3xCMOS sensors @ 12 megapixels each that can capture 48bit color images in raw, uncompressed glory.... And one of those 16GB memory cards can hold 230 of those pictures. :)

The extra cost is no where near the price difference, it is small, though buying SD whole sale compared to manufacturing a self contained profit might add cost too, along with the heavy Pro sales/marketing pay structure would further suck up money. They probably do this because they don't have the volume to justify manufacturing units like they do with the units I mention here. But such a scheme is adaptable to P2. I have seen USB flash card, and I think their is a new card format in Taiwan, that is similar in size to PCMCIA, so they could do it with P2.


Jeff,

I thought they still used the IDE like PCMCIA interfaces for flash storage over the PC-Card bus?

Flash technology is due to hit a wall around 2010 or so, they are searching for replacements for years (breakthroughs pushed the wall back a few years). So, we can only expect the price to maybe quarter or so, over the units I posted here. I wonder if they need a new card standard for the new technologies, are the card voltages and inter-actions tide to flash standards?

$200 cost to manufacture 64GB flash in volume.
 

Here is another thread on the costs of manufacturing SSD's:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32336

In the end it doesn't really matter what P2 does, it becomes viable to sue this technology retro fitted to the P2, or firewire of any camera ;). Now, the P2 advantage of the HVX 200 has virtually disappeared.


An 8GB USB disk chain:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32344

If 4GB USB is 100 euro, I doubt the true cost a GB is $25US, as there last article claimed.

They could have used a USB port in a sealable slot instead of P2.

There's lots of different interfaces they could have chose. 32bit PCMCIA made perfect sense at the time it was chosen for P2 several years ago. If being chosen today, it obviously would not be the best choice. I think ExpressCard would be the best choice... Firewire and USB (even USB2 and FW800) don't have the bandwidth.

The PCMCIA form factor and interface has little to do with the cost of P2... PC cards are dirt cheap to manufacture as they are so incredibly common and simple. P2 cards are expensive for two reasons - specialized production/testing "zero-defect" SD chips and high profit margin. If P2 were based on USB2 instead, it wouldn't be any cheaper.

Many PCMCIA storage devices do work this way, but not necessarily P2. P2 doesn't act or work like a standard PCMCIA storage device... It is proprietary and requires a driver for the system to understand its interface. What is inside the card is entirely up to the manufacturer... Panasonic is using a multichannel memory controller that isn't IDE/ATA based. Not that it really matters, the memory controller is an off-the-shelf component and probably available in lots of 1000 units for $1 each. :-/

I'll believe the 2010 wall estimate when I see it... Flash tech has a LONG way to advance before it's been exhausted the way CPU tech has. In fact, CPU tech isn't really up a wall, manufacturers finally decided that it was time to really push on the multiple core approach (which it was way past time) rather than continue to scale individual architectures. 10GHz quad-core CPUs are just around the corner as far as the CPU industry goes. It will seem like a long wait and will take a few years, but that's what we all thought when we had 200MHz CPUs and were talking about breaking the 1GHz barrier. It took nearly 4 years to go from 200MHz to 1GHz and we kept hearing all about walls at 400~600MHz, blah, blah... Now we're hearing about at walls at 4GHz. Yes there's a wall, we need a new die shrink and a shift to a material other than copper. Stepping up to gold on a carbon substrate would yield dies up to 1.45 * smaller than current and potentially running up to 5 times faster/cooler. Unfortunately gold has always been ignored in the microprocessor fab process... It doesn't cooperate with the photo-lithography approach the same way aluminum, copper and other commonly used materials do. It also doesn't bond to silicon the same way, hence the need for a different base material like carbon.

There's also plenty of other technologies out there that can be implemented in a flash-like way. Many of them are in prototyping and will hit the market in the next year or two... SEIMENS has a new approach to DDR2/3 manfuacturing materials that they are testing along with a couple other chip makers that gives it non-volatile abilities. We could see PCs with 32GB of DDR3 RAM in a couple years as standard and when they go into standby mode, all the power can be 100% off because the memory works just like non-volatile FLASH memory. Portable computers can save battery power by only sending power to RAM that is being used...

PCMCIA cards have plenty of voltage, connectors, etc.. to expand for the time being. 128GB P2 cards will happen as the tech is already here. It's an issue of market demand vs. production lines being brought up to support it. Beyond that who can say... In another few years when 128GB P2 cards arrive, the PCMCIA interface will be a dinosaur and Panasonic will no doubt be shifting to a new card type based on a newer industry standard. Everything evolves, to bad it doesn't all evolve coherently.

First off I hate P2... not just because of the price but because of the destructive workflow. I much prefer XDCAMs "tapeless" solution that involves a non-destructive recording format that is its own back-up. Maybe tape is dying, and sure tapeless is the future but I just dont think back-up-less destructive media is the future. If I could record 20 minutes of 720p 24p DVCproHD to an 8GB media card that cost $20 or less, I would be fine with that. At any higher price, even for larger media, it forces you to be destructive which IMHO is not a good workflow for anything but maybe ENG stuff...



ash =o)

Jeff, maybe a was being a bit cheap in suggesting that they could have used USB as it tends to be cheaper per GB and offers a 480Mb/s interface. But of course, the cheap ones probably are not using fast flash clips.

Thanks for the advice. I know that there are replacements for flash, but the real problem with flash is they are reaching a minimum cell size that the flash technique can work at, it is not like the silicon chip industry that have lower size restrictions. Though I notice that recently they were saying that even though the circuit size on standard chips has not hit the minimum, some of the insulation between the circuit parts are a few atoms thick (maybe that were tens of atoms, nearly 5 am here, can't remember) which causes it to leak like a sieve. New directions will make more speed possible, and even 10 Ghz, but big changes are needed to go forwards.

...And while I agree to some extent, there are workable backup options that can be a lot cheaper than shooting XDCAM, thus making the "destructive" workflow somewhat manageable.

Ironically, even with XD mdeia pricing being cheaper than a lot of pro tape formats, Sony still markets XDCAM as a destructive workflow with XD media that can be re-used 1000 or more times. I think they're just extremely proud of their re-writable media capabilities vs. tape solutions. Bun in the case of XDCAM, destructive workflow isn't all bad... Granted, we still need some form of master storage and archival just like with P2. But owning a shoebox full of XD media to shoot with isn't a big deal like it would be to try and own a shoebox full of 8GB P2 cards.

I'm not really trying to promote P2, but I do think it is a step in the right direction and where the industry is ultimately headed -- robust solid-state media. XD media is "tapeless", but is still based off of moving parts in the form of a spinning disc. I can think of several extreme shooting situations where I would trust a P2 based camcorder far more than an XD based one. There are other advantages and disadvantages to each type of media too beyond price and availability. P2 has XD media beat in terms of bandwidth for acquisition and production environments, for example. It's all the little things that make up a whole. P2 has plenty of shortcomings, but I still prefer it to working with tape and HDV and the HVX200 with 2 4GB P2s and 2 8GB P2s fit my new camera budget like a glove. ...I still curse a lot of issues with P2. Like how when I buy my next notebook PC/Mac, I won't be able to simply insert the P2 card into the computer.... I'd whine about cost of P2 cards (and I have done this), but my HVX package paid for itself with the first job I used it on... So it's a matter of perspective when considering the price and often the cost of P2 is subjective or even trivial in the grand scheme of all things if you have a proper backup/archival system in place to properly make use of it.

Today's good flash cards cost ~$40-60/GB and the article referenced says Samsung expects prices to fall 40% per year. That means in 3 years it should be about $15-20/GB or ~$300 for a 16GB card which could hold slightly more than an hour of HDV or as little as 16 minutes of DVCProHD. If you think of that as reusable it may start to make sense compared to tape at that price, but then you still have to pay for some form of permanent storage for your master footage. Everyone has to draw their own conclusions about when flash-based recording becomes cost-effective for video work, but my target would be closer to $50 per hour of flash memory than $300-1200 per hour. Let's see how things look in another 3-4 years when there are more flash-based video cameras around.

you can't use recording time as a future basis for comparing how much it'll cost per hour to record video footage, because more efficient codecs like h.264 will blow the equation right out of the water.

in other words, instead of it being a 16GB card which could hold slightly more than an hour of HDV, it might be a 16GB card which could hold slightly more than 2 hours of hi-def h.264.

Yep.

And we also can't look at memory cards or P2 as it costing $1350 for 20 minutes of HD recording (8GB card). So many people make this comparision and that isn't the case... True, the cards cost that much, but they're a transport medium and nothing more. The end cost of shooting/archiving the footage is in the final storage media. There are plenty of HDD and tape solutions available (or combinations thereof) that are actually cheaper to archive to than miniDV tape. I've shot close to 300 hours of video with my HVX200 so far and it is proving to be far more convenientand capable with a faster workflow than shooting DV tape with my DVX100. I've already sold my DVX100 as my second camera and will be buying another HVX, I'm just holding off until I actually need it before I do. Perhaps a new revision will arrive before then.

Looking at the cost of P2 memory as it relates to the camera and workflow, it's a cost of the camera. It's like adding RAM to your computer, enabling you to do more before you have to swap to disk. I've got ~$10K in my HVX200 setup and that's everything right down to the Pelican case, Vocas/Century mattebox, filters, P2s, etc.. The whole setup was cheaper than an XLH1 with a soft bag and a box of tapes. I shoot with the camera, ingest the video from the P2 cards right onto our redundant SAN and wipe the cards clean. Once it's in our SAN, the backups/archiving are mostly automated and approximately the same price as if I was shooting miniDV tape with that XLH1 and simply throwing my master copy tapes into a closet.

YMMV... But we're seeing all the same arguments now that we saw 8~10 years ago with memory cards and digital still cameras. The ones that were affordable were just a toy and paying $750 for a 512MB CF card seemed ludicrous to most.

To stay more focused on the discussion instead of yammering over P2 and it's merits or downfalls... I guess what I was trying to say is that given the standards that the chips inside a P2 card must meet, production yields are low. Price is quite a bit higher than a run-of-the-mill SD card. I do think that Panasonic is charging a hefty premium, but comparing potential pricing to consumer-grade Sandisk SD cards that sell for < $50 per GB is foolish. A different interface like USB2 or Firewire wouldn't have any effect on P2 pricing if they had chose that rather than PCMCIA... PCMCIA is very common as a standard and dirt cheap to manufacture, all the cost is in the SD chips being used inside the cards and in Panasonic's mark-up.

Upcoming flash drives or other solid state media will continue to get a lot cheaper as it increases in capacity. But devices like P2 that are targeted primarily at a professional industry like broadcasting / ENG, are going to be held to higher standards than consumer grade junk. They have to meet higher manufacturing standards and tolerances and this greatly increases the price. We can hope that third-party manufacturers get involved and start shipping their own P2 cards. This will help drive down prices some, maybe as much as 25%. But to think that a device like P2 will be as cheap as the consumer SD card equivalent or a handful of USB keychain drives is pretty naive.

OTOH, with so many casual users and independents/hobbyists buying cameras like the HVX200, perhaps Panasonic or other manufacturers could offer a "consumer grade" version of P2 for a lot less money, using consumer grade memory chips. I'd probably buy a handful of them for a lot of my shooting needs. But when it comes to an important paying gig with one-time shot opportunities, I'd still pay up for the commercial cards and if that's not an option, I can always rent them.

Sorry I dont agree with the codec argument... IMHO that is for consumer acquistion and delivery. HDV and DVCproHD both fall apart pretty fast in any heavy post, especially HDV. Most post houses are finishing uncompressed. Right now, it is ALL about storage, or lackthereof that is driving the acquisition codecs. Why does HDV exist? Because it was the cheapest way to get HD to already existing cheap tape drive mechanisms. XDCAM HD is 35mb because that is the most BR can burn right now in real time consistently.

In the professional realm, as the tech advances in both computers and cameras you will see the move toward RAW and uncompressed. Same thing happened in the digital still and digital audio worlds. The trend is for ACQUISITION to become LESS compressed over time as the tech can handle it. I firmly believe cameras will be seperated in class not just by features, but by codecs...



ash =o)

I figured that might come up, which is why I said let's wait to see what cameras are available a few years from now. But even at $300 for two hours of recording capacity that's not particularly compelling compared to tape, especially after you figure in the cost of archiving your master footage. Maybe at that point we'll all be buying tapeless cameras because it's just the thing to do, but I'm not convinced we'll save any money compared to shooting on tape as a result.

Jeff makes the point that we should consider the cost of flash memory part of the cost of the camera, and there again we each have to do our own cost/benefit analysis. If I need $10K worth of memory on a $5K camera just to record a wedding without having to stop to transfer footage, that makes it a $15K camera for me -- and there will be some interesting choices for that kind of money soon. I'd rather have a $10K camera which only needs $5K worth of media than vice-versa.

The argument that P2 memory lives up to a higher standard seems dubious when you can buy standard flash memory for less than half the price which is guaranteed to deliver a corresponding level of performance. If you believe P2 is less likely to fail due to better QC then maybe it still makes sense, but I'd question whether a complex RAID of flash memory cards will be more reliable than simple one-chip products. And if you're worried about flash memory cards failing during a critical shoot you might try simultaneously recording to some other type of media - like maybe videotape? :-)

No doubt we're moving toward a tapeless video camera future, but I'm not holding my breath. And P2 looks doomed to me for cost reasons now that standard flash memory has caught up to it in terms of performance, so bring on the HVX200B!

been there done that with dv tape, it cost me over $1k in lost income, and nearly $400 to replace the heads... and that'll happen to everyone sooner or later, it's just a question of when... right now the heads are shot on my little grd-1000 tape deck, and the old xl1 is sitting on the shelf because the heads are worn out.

one big dividing line here is whether or not you do long-form or short-form work... for your weddings, tape or hdd recording is the only option, but a lot of people out here don't have that limitation.

as for comparing p2 to standard flash memory, i'd suggest that you go out and compare the sustained write times of different solid state recording formats/media to get an idea of what the limits really are.

Also, the cost of P2 is more than just the cost of P2. The money you eventually save on buying tapes is eaten up by the cost of adequate redundant back-ups, additional HDDs, raids, etc. etc. etc.

Also, P2 does not save you time... by the time you back everything up it is a wash, it DOES however get you working faster by design. In theory you could do absolutely the same thing with tape. With verify on, P2 dumps to disk in virtually real time. You could just as easily take a DV deck or anther camera and dump one tape while you shoot another... then you leave your shoot with everything on a HDD AND everything backed up on tape...

I have done this in the past with projects that required a fast turn around. I used 30 minute tapes. When the tape was full, I ejected, put it into another camera (cheap JVC DV cam) hit play, then capture now on FCP. Wash, rinse repeat...


ash =o)

The SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash cards are certified for 20 MB/sec sustained read/write speed, which just happens to be what the Panasonic engineers said they need for the HVX200 when they talked to us at WEVA last August. Those cards are currently $220 for 4GB at B&H, compared to $600 for 4GB of P2. That's enough of a price difference to make P2 irrelevant in the long run for widespread use, unless it proves to be significantly more reliable. Hopefully the HVX200 will be the last popular camera to use such an expensive proprietary memory solution, and future mainstream HD cameras will either use AVCHD or XDCAM HD, or something similar on high-end standard flash cards.

Agreed that there's currently a gap between long-form and short-form work with P2. Close that gap and you'll have a solution which sells to a lot more people.

True that...

As I'm approaching the 400 hour mark of video shot with P2 on my HVX, I'm finding two things regarding price. 1> The cost of the 24GB worth of P2 media that I own is now trivial as the hardware has paid for itself several times over and I plan to buy more P2 cards when the 16GB ones arrive. 2> A good backup/archival system when properly implemented will work out to about the same cost per minute of video saved to HDD/tape vs. DV/HDV saved to miniDV tape. Once again, each person will have to do their own cost analysis and YMMV... Most backup solutions are big money up front and then pennies per gigabyte from there on out until the backup drive is worn out or the first RAID box is expended.

Now this is workflow dependent and also dependent on the systems/hardware in use. P2 only ingests at near realtime on slower systems with slower HDDs like the 5400rpm drives in older PowerBooks or the 60GB HDD in the P2 Store drive unit from Panasonic. On a fast workstation, P2 can be ingested as fast as the systems can transfer it from the P2 card. I'm getting about 4.2X realtime for 4GB cards and just under 5X realtime on the 8GB cards. All my other backups are automated and handled by the SAN and the only intervention needed from a human is the approximately once a week swap of a few archival tapes, which I'm notified by the system when it's time and it takes only about 5 minutes. Also factor in that these times are for full DVCPROHD 100Mbps. At 40Mbps 720p24n it's much faster. I can ingest all 25 minutes of 720p24 stored on an 8GB card in just over 2 minutes and drop it right into the NLE.

However, you do have a valid point... So many HVX200 users, or people looking to buy such a camera, are in tougher situations. They are going to be importing P2 via FCP to a PowerBook or trying to pull it from a dog-slow P2 store drive over to their system at 1.125X realtime. Ouch. And when so many people in the forums are rather bull-headed about backup solutions that they can't see beyond using anything other than hard drives or DVD-R or waiting for recordable HD-DVD and/or BluRay... They're not really making any sense. Hard drives are practical storage and work fine in the role of redundant, storage networks that evolve over time. This is how most large datacenters do it, they don't archive to HDDs or RAID boxes and then put them in storage as so many people in the forums are talking about doing. The worst thing you can do to a hard drive (other than run it constantly) is to let it sit on a shelf. The most practical solutions I've seen yet for a low cost archival system are the VXA2 tape systems... Less than $1200 to set one up with about 10 tapes and it will store 2.5 hours of DVCPROHD-100 on one tape. At the 250 hours of stored video marker, VXA2 becomes cheaper than archiving on $3 miniDV tapes and cheaper per GB than HDDs and (believe it or not) it's more reliable/robust. With decent software and a little forethought, the backups can be very automated and only requiring a 30 second tape swap when the tape is full.

I can quote other options, but this one seems to be on of the most attractive for those looking into a $1K archival system that works and the media itself is as reliable as reliable gets.

With a proper P2 editing setup, the time from initial "capture" to start of edit is a lot faster. Waiting for real-time ingest of DV/HDV is a drain on a productive workflow. Now I wonder, given your example above, how would P2 not be beneficial in that situation? You used 30 minute tapes and as you swapped tapes you load the just-used tape into another camera/deck and started the capture? OK... If you're shooting 720p24n, you can shoot 26 minutes to an 8GB card and place the 8GB card in a notebook PC or powerbook and ingest the footage.

Different strokes for different folks, I guess... But from what I'm reading here, it seems that you, like many, are letting the price tag hold you back and you're firing off different reasons why you don't like P2, but many of them are unfounded or naysayer fud that was being spread prior to the HVX200 release (and is still lingering). In that 30min tapes with immediate capture situation, I could see where P2 could be a huge advantage. Rotating 3 cards, either 3 8GB cards or two 8's and a 4, you would have more options about when you break for card swaps. You could shoot 2 minutes to a card, then 20 minutes to another card and 7 minutes to the next card, but ingestion of the data into a capable system is fast enough that all the cards would be coming back in time for the next swap interval which will serve you and not a 30minute tape limit. When using tape, even if you have enough, if you start taking 15 minutes for one tape and then using an opportune moment to swap, and you end up with randomized lenghts of video on a tape, you could fall behind in your swap/capture routine. Example being you start capture of one 30 minute tape and shoot 20 minutes on the next tape. The first tape isn't done caputring so tape #2 has to wait while you go shoot tape #3. #3 is 28 minutes and is now in line behind #2, which you just started capturing and you go off to shoot #4, and so on...

Anyway, this thread has got so far off the original topic, it probably should just go away. All this stuff has been hashed over to the point of a dead horse now beat to lump of goo. The HVX200 and/or a P2 based workflow either fits your needs or it doesn't. I don't buy the long-form vs. short-form argument, it's a matter of adapting workflows to meet the tools available. For years, long-form productions were shot on film cans that couldn't handle more than 15 to 20 minutes of footage per reel. Even shooting DV, we're limited to 1 hour (sometimes 80 minutes or so with the few cameras that can use extended capacity tapes). So at some point there is a media change... It's only been very, very recently that devices like FireStore have come about to offer truly uninterrupted DV recording over an extended period.

On that note, I think I'm done with this thread because this thread is more than done.

But then there are IT workflow solutions for DV and HDV, so that's not really a point in P2's favor. What this ultimately comes down to is using what works for you and your customers today, and keep an eye out for what may be coming in the future. Improvements in the cost and capacity of flash memory should benefit everyone including P2 users, and eventually lead to a wider selection of video cameras using less expensive flash memory.

20 MB/sec to record 1080i dvcproHD?

i suspect that your cf card is no match for a p2 card, so it's really not a basis for comparison:

"Basically, four SD Memory cards are packaged together to create a single P2 card. This gives the P2 card four times the capacity and four times the transfer speed of a single SD Memory card."
https://eww.pavc.panasonic.co.jp/pro...ard/index.html

"The P2 card is essentially a RAID of SD memory cards with an LSI controller tightly packaged in a die-cast PCMCIA enclosure, so data transfer rate increases as memory capacity increases." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P2_(storage_media)

If that's a query, then yes, it should easily manage it. 20MB/s = 160Mb/s, so 1.6x the data rate of DVCProHD. Which seems a reasonable safety margin, given these are certified sustained speeds. And don't forget we're looking ahead a little, with the next generation of pro cameras, let alone consumer, expected to have data rates around 50-75Mbs with more advanced codecs - JPEG2000 or AVC.
The above sentence is (I believe) from a fact sheet put out by Panasonic in the early days of P2. It's still factually true, but is from an era when SD cards were typically 512MB - 1GB at most - and much slower speed, nowhere near enough for DVCProHD, and possibly not even DVCPro50. But times move on, capacities and speeds improve, and the whole reasoning behind P2 falls away. If Panasonic were developing a solid state recording camera NOW, I doubt they would be working on a P2 approach. Just consider the conclusions that the Grass Valley design team came to, starting from a green field approach!

THEORETICALLY an 8GB P2 card should still have an advantage in that theoretically it will download at much faster than real time, and much faster than a CF card. Practically, for average users, the limiting factor is more likely to be the computer and peripherals and the performance of each is likely to be not as different as the figures suggest - that is certainly my experience.

So I disagree that CF and P2 aren't a valid comparison. For the 8GB version (say), we're talking about same capacity, both fast enough to record DVCProHD, both downloading at similar speeds (potential of P2 limited), so.... what is the real difference to the average user? Apart from one being several times the price of the other!! :-)

the link you are referencing is indeed copyrighted 2003, but it also states:

"The H-Series P2 cards also support DVCPRO HD recording with the new AG-HVX200 HD P2 handheld camera-recorder." ...so how could it be from the early days of p2?

the 4gb p2 card in that link is rated at a theoretical 640 Mbps data transfer speed, vs. the 160 Mbps that you listed? i do realize that we are also talking about possible burst vs. sustained data rates here, which may minimize that difference... but either i'm missing something here, or the p2 is going to be a heck of a lot quicker at downloading the video to an editing system.

i have not looked into the design of a cf card, does it have a raid controller in it? even if you ignore those engineering differences, and just base it on the access speeds alone, it appears to me that you cannot compare a cf card to a p2 card.

I think it's fundamentally a document from early P2 days, with updates. It's all factually true AFAIK, just doesn't point out that the hi-tech approach is not really needed now, thanks to technology advances! (If anyone from Panasonic cares to chip in here and prove me wrong, please do!)
Yes, I think you are missing something. I actually believe the figures quoted are all sustained figures, but as I stated before "Practically, for average users, the limiting factor is more likely to be the computer and peripherals........." - so although the P2 card may be capable of 640Mbs, the average user is very unlikely to ever be able to exploit it. A bit like comparing an MPV to a top end sports car costing many times more, but fitted with a speed limiter so it can't break the speed limit!!!

When P2 was being developed, the rationale was to design a card that could even work at around 160Mbs, which no single SD or CF card could do AT THAT TIME. Hence the raid controller. In the last four/five years, technology has improved to the point where a CF card doesn't need a raid controller to be as effective as a P2 card when first developed - so why waste a lot of money on it?

i agree with you about the copyright year not being updated along with the document, but since it's all factually true, how is the age of the document relevant? as near as i can tell, it doesn't say anything about early p2 performance... although you can see from the numbers that the speed increases drastically with the bigger cards, i wonder if there is a limit to that?

i believe that the first p2 camera hit the market in 2004, so it's a very young format.

your point that we shouldn't care about p2 performance because most computers can't currently match it does not take into account how fast computers will be in the future... why be limited to the far slower cf card platform?

and what if a future vendor does use slower, more conventional sd cards inside the p2? it'll only make 'em cheaper... one thing that i'd be looking for with the raid controller is the ability to mask off dead cells in the memory structure, which you'll never be able to do with tape... i believe that there are mil-spec flash drives that are capable of doing that?

I know I said I was done with this thread, but...

The memory controller in the P2 cards (or at least in the current models) is a quad-channel interleaving controller. This means it has a RAID-like striping or interleaving approach. But it's not something that should necessarily be eliminated just because the newer forms of FLASH memory can operate at speeds capable of DVCPROHD recording. This extra circuitry is added to a P2 at hardly any cost... We're talking less than $1 per P2 card manufacture cost for this "RAID" memory controller. On top of that, P2 cards like the current 8GB ones as well as the upcoming 16GB ones are using faster SD chips (ones that are capable of 20+ MB/s write speeds. There's more to P2 than simply being able to sustain the minimums (which is all that current FLASH memory will really do, maybe up to 75% increase over minimum rate).

I don't know about you guys, but I think the multi-channel memory controller is here to stay. While there are people who complain that they have to buy two matched sticks of RAM for their computer to get full performance, most people welcome this technology in their desktops. Why not embrace it in the case of FLASH memory devices? Right now, to get the maximum capacities available, multiple memory chips must be used. And since this is the case, why not interleave them in a RAID style implementation? We gain the extra capacity along with nearly 4X the bandwidth. Hmmm... Because, unlike some people in this discussion, I guess I would like to log my video several times faster than real-time.

What I really want to know is what's the bloody holdup on the 16GB cards? Although Panny did say that it would be sometime later this year, whatever that means. But we should see a price drop on the 4 and 8 GB cards when the 16s arrive.

Yeah, this would make much cheaper P2 cards, but then again, I'm not sure I'd buy them for anything other than casual use or non-critical work. They would be the "prosumer" and home movie version of P2.

And yes, a controller can be implemented to mask off erroneous memory locations, just as better HDDs and controllers can for hard drives/arrays. But just like with drive systems, the bad cells of a FLASH device would have to be identified first and they often tend to go bad during a critical write. This introduces more areas of consideration. Now we need some form of buffer and a faster controller/processor that can deal with such issues on the fly. Probably cheaper to stick with the better memory...

OTOH, as I've said before, it would be nice if someone would make a cheaper P2 type -- like a consumer grade and market them as such. I'd buy a bunch to use on those non-critical jobs where pulling another take is no big deal or for just most casual shooting purposes.

It's relevant because what may be true and definitive when written, may be irrelevant as time passes. You may find a report from a few decades ago stating that for safety and reliability reasons it is absolutely essential for aircraft on transoceanic flights to have at least four engines, and detailing exactly why this should be so. Now transatlantic flights by twin engined planes are routine - does this mean the original document was wrong? No, times change, and jet engine reliability improvements mean that the recommendations of yesterday may not be valid today.

P2 made a lot of sense when conceived. It was ahead of it's time, technically if not practically, but now the time for solid state seems near, P2s complexity seems unnecessary and there are cheaper ways to achieve the same end result. Although the first camera may have hit the market in 2004, the concept and design goes back much further.
Quite simply cost, and whilst computers may indeed get much faster, do you think that solid state memory won't!? If a P2 card and a CF card of the same capacity were the same price, I'd be inclined to go for the P2 option. But the price differential is so huge that the benefits of P2 seem far outweighed by the cost factor. Even the P2 store can't begin to take advantage of the performance of the card, so why pay such a huge premium for this (potential) performance?

don't you think that p2 cards will get cheaper once other vendors get in the game!? p2 is a young format, and it's a professional format designed for video... cf cards were never designed to record professional hd video, it's a still photo format.

i also don't agree with your assumption that the raid controller on p2 cards is there strictly as a crutch for slow sd cards... i think that it is a good idea for a pro format like p2, and it's just as viable now as it was when p2 first came out... who wouldn't want 4x ingest speeds??

as for memory cells dying during critical write times, i'll take those odds over the potential for tape dropout any day... i'd also think that losing one memory cell is going to be a lot less noticeable than a tape dropout.