P2 Media Information

Bill Anderson · March 28th, 2005, 10:57 AM

We also must consider that P2 is a bridge, albeit a sturdy one, between capture and dumping to drives. And, no matter how reliable P2 is, there comes a time when our original media is dependant on hard drives so that we might free up our cards for shooting. Unless there is something obvious I'm missing - or P2 cards are shipped in boxes of cereal and we archive on those. Or we store our finished project back to P2 type memory?
However, It all sounds awesome.
I look forward to using the DVCPROHD P2.

Barry Green · March 28th, 2005, 11:18 AM

I think you have it right. The P2 cards are not media, they are not a direct replacement for tape, etc. I think of them more like magazines for a film camera. If you were shooting a project on film, and planning on using 100 rolls of film, you wouldn't go out and buy 100 magazines for your camera. You'd have maybe three magazines total, one loaded and on the camera shooting, one loaded with fresh raw film (essentially "empty") and one in the changing bag, having the old film being unloaded and fresh film being loaded.

With the P2 camera, I see it that people will buy maybe three P2 cards EVER. Treat 'em like film magazines. When one's full, edit off it, dump it to hard disk, whatever, then erase it and keep shooting (just like re-loading a film magazine). But you won't be buying new cards for new projects, you'll buy two or three with the camera and that's it. When a new capacity comes out that you really need, you'll sell one of your old cards on ebay and put that money towards buying the new one.

The data that you record will instead live in other media. Hard disk storage is actually cheaper than HD tape -- an hour of HD on hard disk may cost about $29, vs. about $45 to $75 for DVCPRO-HD or HDCAM tape. Or you could archive a 4gb card onto a DVD-R for under $1. Or when blu-ray or HD-DVD writers hit the market, you can archive your footage on there at the rate of about 20-25gb for about $30 per disc (or whatever the actual target cost is). And then there's always tape, you can always output your footage to DVCPRO-HD tape (or, one of the mass-storage computer tape formats like SAIT).

Edwin Hernandez · April 5th, 2005, 02:02 AM

As I read last year in a DV magazine, a P2 card costs somewhere in the $4,000.
How low will they go until we can have several of them? Also, what makes me really nervous about the system is the fact that it can get lost or stolen very very easy due to its small size and compact design. I understand the analogy with the film tape, but... hey, this is thin and small!
Is Panasonic limiting the market only to filmakers and commercial production with this camera? What about live events?

-EDWIN HERNANDEZ

Luis Caffesse · April 5th, 2005, 02:06 AM

"As I read last year in a DV magazine, a P2 card costs somewhere in the $4,000."

The key part of that sentence is last year

That was the price of the 4GB P2 card a year ago.

A few months ago it was down to $2000.
Now it is down to $1700.

And keep in mind that this is with only one P2 camera on the market. And that camera is aimed at a rather small market.

The HVX200 will open the P2 market, and prices will come down. New pricing is expected to be announced at NAB.

Also, keep in mind this camera won't be out for months.
As I mentioned, the price has already dropped $300 in just a few months. With the release of more P2 cameras, and an increase in P2 users, I think we can expect to see large price drops by the end of this year.

Robert Mann Z. · April 5th, 2005, 02:29 AM

i imagine there will be a swarm of knockoff p2 cards on ebay once this cam arrives...

oem stuff is always pricey, its made to spec but its gonna cost you...i buy non oem batteries, memory cards, and have not had any regrets

lets not panic just yet...

the benifits of recording to a solid state media card out weigh any pricing concerns...i a devoted tape lover, have been converted, solid state can't get here fast enough...

Soeren Mueller · April 5th, 2005, 04:01 AM

Simply look at what standard SD cards currently cost. At least here in germany it's currently about 100EUR for a very fast (20MB/s r&w) 1GB card. The slower cards only cost around 70EUR... however with 2-6MB/s they wouldn't be fast enough for DVCHD data rates. (though when combined somehow raid like this wouldn't be a problem I guess)
So I think prices should be dropping quickly... I mean what's the point if the raw SD media for a 4 gig P2 is at 280-400EUR in total that the P2 itself should cost you over 1k USD or something. And prices are dropping further... there are already some 2GB SD cards available... (currently 8GB with 4x2GB SD cards would cost you around 800EUR)

So to me it sort of looks really promising... and even if Panasonic won't drastically lower their P2 prices... I guess there will be people finding a way to build their own P2 using available SD/MMC media :-)

Patrick Bower · April 5th, 2005, 07:17 AM

Presumably this camera is not intended for live events. If you want to shoot HD, each P2 card holds 1 minute of footage per gigabyte. It takes 1 minute per gigabyte to back up this footage onto a hard drive: "Expanding its P2 product line, Panasonic will also debut the AJ-PCS060, a portable hard disk that can transfer the contents of a 4 GB P2 card in about four minutes." Add to this the time to take the card out of the camera, fit it in the drive, back it up, take it out, put it back in the camera.

In other words, the back up speed is slower than shooting speed, and eventually you will find you have not finished backing up a card, before it is needed again.

I think you could get up to 24 minutes out of 3 P2 cards.
The only way of shooting indefinitely would be to have 2 hard drives, so that you could back up 8Gb in about 5 minutes

In practice, of course, the idea of trying to shoot and hot swap discs every 4 minutes is a non-starter for any single person operator.

Either we have to wait for 16 or 32Gb P2 cards, or, there has to be a hard drive solution, which does not involve hot swapping.

Patrick

Luis Caffesse · April 5th, 2005, 10:11 AM

"If you want to shoot HD, each P2 card holds 1 minute of footage per gigabyte. It takes 1 minute per gigabyte to back up this footage onto a hard drive: "

At the full 100mb/s a 4gb P2 cards should be able to hold 5 minutes of footage, not 4.

Also, don't forget that 720P24 only has a 40mb/s datarate.
So on a 4gb card you could fit up to 13 minutes.

720P30 would have a datarate of 50mb/s I assume.
So on a 4gb card you could fit up to 10 minutes.

Either scenario you look at, your transfer time is faster than real time when dumping the cards onto a hard drive.
So you shouldn't find yourself in a situation where a card is needed before it's done being backup up.

Patrick Bower · April 5th, 2005, 03:40 PM

But I wonder whether you can really hot swap a P2 card when you're actually filming, without jerking the camera.
Patrick

Luis Caffesse · April 5th, 2005, 05:30 PM

"But I wonder whether you can really hot swap a P2 card when you're actually filming, without jerking the camera."

Probably not a good idea.
I suppose if you're steady as a surgeon.

We'll just have to wait and see.

Barry Goyette · April 5th, 2005, 06:52 PM

<<<But I wonder whether you can really hot swap a P2 card when you're actually filming, without jerking the camera.
Patrick -->>>

Alfred Hitchcock figured out a way to hot swap film mags during the filming of "Rope"...just have someone walk in front of the camera.

Actually I'd be less worried about that and more worried about how I'm going to afford more than one of the blamed things in the first place.

Barry

K. Forman · April 5th, 2005, 07:06 PM

"I think you have it right. The P2 cards are not media, they are not a direct replacement for tape, etc. I think of them more like magazines for a film camera. If you were shooting a project on film, and planning on using 100 rolls of film, you wouldn't go out and buy 100 magazines for your camera. You'd have maybe three magazines total, one loaded and on the camera shooting, one loaded with fresh raw film (essentially "empty") and one in the changing bag, having the old film being unloaded and fresh film being loaded."

I still have a problem with this whole concept. If you shoot DV, you have hard copy, and at a great price. If you shoot film, you still have hard copy, albeit, not as cheap. But using these P2 cards, you have no hard copy. Who has never had a hard drive go bad? And if you say "Me!", you are either lying, or veeeeery lucky.

Now, if these cards were as cheap as say, zip disks, you could in theory, have them stacked up like DV tapes. My other problem with them, is live events don't pause every 13 or so minutes, allowing you to dump or swap.

On a side note, in this months DV magazine, Adam Wilt does a hands on test. I just haven't had a chance to read through it yet.

Aaron Koolen · April 5th, 2005, 07:34 PM

Keith, well said. I don't have enough experience to offer real solutions, or understanding of how this is going to work in the real world. But I guess we have 3 scenarios right?

1) Filmmaking - Here, Jan proposes we work like film, and offload to hard disk after swapping in another card. So this means we could get by with 2, or maybe 3 cards and a big drive on a laptop. I could live with this, even though it's a pain.

2) News gathering. Now I don't really know how much your average cameraman grabs on an item, but it seems that it is not a huge amount, especially between "down time" where you could, again, offload. For me, when I go out and grab stuff, I shoot heaps of footage. I have the time, and also tape is cheap. Maybe I just have to choose my shots more carefully with p2 - I guess discipline isn't that bad ;)

3) Long form events - This is where p2 seems like it would fail miserably. The events I have done, require my full attention, so I can't swap cards, and start offloading one as I continue to shoot in case I miss something. I could try, but it's risky. Also, as mentioned by others, how can you swap without moving the camera. So for this one you'd need something like a Firestore, or Panasonic could release some single card adapter, that goes out into an HD. Or maybe an array of P2 cards externally; then, moving the little adapter box wouldn't move the camera...hopefully.

So it seems for me 1 and 2 are not too much to worry about, especially for me, but 3 is a little dodgy because you're using that hard drive all the time to record to. If it was just for offloading, then you could have 2 drives and make a backup.

Aaron

K. Forman · April 5th, 2005, 08:52 PM

And as it has been mentioned, all the extra goodies needed to download your footage- laptop, P2 cards- are going to run you a few grand. And this is above the original $10,000 for the camera itself. For all the added expense, and short filming duration, the footage had better look better than film. But then, I'm just a poor average Joe.

April 5th, 2005, 02:02 AM	#63
Edwin Hernandez Regular Crew Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Panama City, Panama Posts: 162	This is Frightening! As I read last year in a DV magazine, a P2 card costs somewhere in the $4,000. How low will they go until we can have several of them? Also, what makes me really nervous about the system is the fact that it can get lost or stolen very very easy due to its small size and compact design. I understand the analogy with the film tape, but... hey, this is thin and small! Is Panasonic limiting the market only to filmakers and commercial production with this camera? What about live events? -EDWIN HERNANDEZ

April 5th, 2005, 02:06 AM	#64
Luis Caffesse Major Player Join Date: Apr 2004 Location: Austin, Texas Posts: 704	"As I read last year in a DV magazine, a P2 card costs somewhere in the $4,000." The key part of that sentence is last year That was the price of the 4GB P2 card a year ago. A few months ago it was down to $2000. Now it is down to $1700. And keep in mind that this is with only one P2 camera on the market. And that camera is aimed at a rather small market. The HVX200 will open the P2 market, and prices will come down. New pricing is expected to be announced at NAB. Also, keep in mind this camera won't be out for months. As I mentioned, the price has already dropped $300 in just a few months. With the release of more P2 cameras, and an increase in P2 users, I think we can expect to see large price drops by the end of this year. __________________ Luis Caffesse Pitch Productions Austin, Texas

April 5th, 2005, 10:11 AM	#68
Luis Caffesse Major Player Join Date: Apr 2004 Location: Austin, Texas Posts: 704	"If you want to shoot HD, each P2 card holds 1 minute of footage per gigabyte. It takes 1 minute per gigabyte to back up this footage onto a hard drive: " At the full 100mb/s a 4gb P2 cards should be able to hold 5 minutes of footage, not 4. Also, don't forget that 720P24 only has a 40mb/s datarate. So on a 4gb card you could fit up to 13 minutes. 720P30 would have a datarate of 50mb/s I assume. So on a 4gb card you could fit up to 10 minutes. Either scenario you look at, your transfer time is faster than real time when dumping the cards onto a hard drive. So you shouldn't find yourself in a situation where a card is needed before it's done being backup up. __________________ Luis Caffesse Pitch Productions Austin, Texas

April 5th, 2005, 05:30 PM	#70
Luis Caffesse Major Player Join Date: Apr 2004 Location: Austin, Texas Posts: 704	"But I wonder whether you can really hot swap a P2 card when you're actually filming, without jerking the camera." Probably not a good idea. I suppose if you're steady as a surgeon. We'll just have to wait and see. __________________ Luis Caffesse Pitch Productions Austin, Texas

April 5th, 2005, 07:06 PM	#72
K. Forman Capt. Quirk Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Middle of the woods in Georgia Posts: 3,596	"I think you have it right. The P2 cards are not media, they are not a direct replacement for tape, etc. I think of them more like magazines for a film camera. If you were shooting a project on film, and planning on using 100 rolls of film, you wouldn't go out and buy 100 magazines for your camera. You'd have maybe three magazines total, one loaded and on the camera shooting, one loaded with fresh raw film (essentially "empty") and one in the changing bag, having the old film being unloaded and fresh film being loaded." I still have a problem with this whole concept. If you shoot DV, you have hard copy, and at a great price. If you shoot film, you still have hard copy, albeit, not as cheap. But using these P2 cards, you have no hard copy. Who has never had a hard drive go bad? And if you say "Me!", you are either lying, or veeeeery lucky. Now, if these cards were as cheap as say, zip disks, you could in theory, have them stacked up like DV tapes. My other problem with them, is live events don't pause every 13 or so minutes, allowing you to dump or swap. On a side note, in this months DV magazine, Adam Wilt does a hands on test. I just haven't had a chance to read through it yet. __________________ www.SmokeWagonLeather.us

March 28th, 2005, 10:57 AM	#61
Bill Anderson Regular Crew Join Date: Jul 2004 Location: Ottawa. Canada Posts: 163	We also must consider that P2 is a bridge, albeit a sturdy one, between capture and dumping to drives. And, no matter how reliable P2 is, there comes a time when our original media is dependant on hard drives so that we might free up our cards for shooting. Unless there is something obvious I'm missing - or P2 cards are shipped in boxes of cereal and we archive on those. Or we store our finished project back to P2 type memory? However, It all sounds awesome. I look forward to using the DVCPROHD P2.

March 28th, 2005, 11:18 AM	#62
Barry Green Barry Wan Kenobi Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: North Carolina Posts: 3,863	I think you have it right. The P2 cards are not media, they are not a direct replacement for tape, etc. I think of them more like magazines for a film camera. If you were shooting a project on film, and planning on using 100 rolls of film, you wouldn't go out and buy 100 magazines for your camera. You'd have maybe three magazines total, one loaded and on the camera shooting, one loaded with fresh raw film (essentially "empty") and one in the changing bag, having the old film being unloaded and fresh film being loaded. With the P2 camera, I see it that people will buy maybe three P2 cards EVER. Treat 'em like film magazines. When one's full, edit off it, dump it to hard disk, whatever, then erase it and keep shooting (just like re-loading a film magazine). But you won't be buying new cards for new projects, you'll buy two or three with the camera and that's it. When a new capacity comes out that you really need, you'll sell one of your old cards on ebay and put that money towards buying the new one. The data that you record will instead live in other media. Hard disk storage is actually cheaper than HD tape -- an hour of HD on hard disk may cost about $29, vs. about $45 to $75 for DVCPRO-HD or HDCAM tape. Or you could archive a 4gb card onto a DVD-R for under $1. Or when blu-ray or HD-DVD writers hit the market, you can archive your footage on there at the rate of about 20-25gb for about $30 per disc (or whatever the actual target cost is). And then there's always tape, you can always output your footage to DVCPRO-HD tape (or, one of the mass-storage computer tape formats like SAIT).

April 5th, 2005, 02:29 AM	#65
Robert Mann Z. Skyonic New York Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: NYC Posts: 614	i imagine there will be a swarm of knockoff p2 cards on ebay once this cam arrives... oem stuff is always pricey, its made to spec but its gonna cost you...i buy non oem batteries, memory cards, and have not had any regrets lets not panic just yet... the benifits of recording to a solid state media card out weigh any pricing concerns...i a devoted tape lover, have been converted, solid state can't get here fast enough...

April 5th, 2005, 04:01 AM	#66
Soeren Mueller Regular Crew Join Date: Mar 2004 Location: Düsseldorf, Germany / Denver, CO Posts: 137	Simply look at what standard SD cards currently cost. At least here in germany it's currently about 100EUR for a very fast (20MB/s r&w) 1GB card. The slower cards only cost around 70EUR... however with 2-6MB/s they wouldn't be fast enough for DVCHD data rates. (though when combined somehow raid like this wouldn't be a problem I guess) So I think prices should be dropping quickly... I mean what's the point if the raw SD media for a 4 gig P2 is at 280-400EUR in total that the P2 itself should cost you over 1k USD or something. And prices are dropping further... there are already some 2GB SD cards available... (currently 8GB with 4x2GB SD cards would cost you around 800EUR) So to me it sort of looks really promising... and even if Panasonic won't drastically lower their P2 prices... I guess there will be people finding a way to build their own P2 using available SD/MMC media :-)

April 5th, 2005, 07:17 AM	#67
Patrick Bower Regular Crew Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: London, England Posts: 126	Presumably this camera is not intended for live events. If you want to shoot HD, each P2 card holds 1 minute of footage per gigabyte. It takes 1 minute per gigabyte to back up this footage onto a hard drive: "Expanding its P2 product line, Panasonic will also debut the AJ-PCS060, a portable hard disk that can transfer the contents of a 4 GB P2 card in about four minutes." Add to this the time to take the card out of the camera, fit it in the drive, back it up, take it out, put it back in the camera. In other words, the back up speed is slower than shooting speed, and eventually you will find you have not finished backing up a card, before it is needed again. I think you could get up to 24 minutes out of 3 P2 cards. The only way of shooting indefinitely would be to have 2 hard drives, so that you could back up 8Gb in about 5 minutes In practice, of course, the idea of trying to shoot and hot swap discs every 4 minutes is a non-starter for any single person operator. Either we have to wait for 16 or 32Gb P2 cards, or, there has to be a hard drive solution, which does not involve hot swapping. Patrick

April 5th, 2005, 03:40 PM	#69
Patrick Bower Regular Crew Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: London, England Posts: 126	But I wonder whether you can really hot swap a P2 card when you're actually filming, without jerking the camera. Patrick

April 5th, 2005, 06:52 PM	#71
Barry Goyette Trustee Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: San Luis Obispo CA Posts: 1,195	<<<But I wonder whether you can really hot swap a P2 card when you're actually filming, without jerking the camera. Patrick -->>> Alfred Hitchcock figured out a way to hot swap film mags during the filming of "Rope"...just have someone walk in front of the camera. Actually I'd be less worried about that and more worried about how I'm going to afford more than one of the blamed things in the first place. Barry

April 5th, 2005, 07:34 PM	#73
Aaron Koolen Trustee Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Auckland, New Zealand Posts: 1,727	Keith, well said. I don't have enough experience to offer real solutions, or understanding of how this is going to work in the real world. But I guess we have 3 scenarios right? 1) Filmmaking - Here, Jan proposes we work like film, and offload to hard disk after swapping in another card. So this means we could get by with 2, or maybe 3 cards and a big drive on a laptop. I could live with this, even though it's a pain. 2) News gathering. Now I don't really know how much your average cameraman grabs on an item, but it seems that it is not a huge amount, especially between "down time" where you could, again, offload. For me, when I go out and grab stuff, I shoot heaps of footage. I have the time, and also tape is cheap. Maybe I just have to choose my shots more carefully with p2 - I guess discipline isn't that bad ;) 3) Long form events - This is where p2 seems like it would fail miserably. The events I have done, require my full attention, so I can't swap cards, and start offloading one as I continue to shoot in case I miss something. I could try, but it's risky. Also, as mentioned by others, how can you swap without moving the camera. So for this one you'd need something like a Firestore, or Panasonic could release some single card adapter, that goes out into an HD. Or maybe an array of P2 cards externally; then, moving the little adapter box wouldn't move the camera...hopefully. So it seems for me 1 and 2 are not too much to worry about, especially for me, but 3 is a little dodgy because you're using that hard drive all the time to record to. If it was just for offloading, then you could have 2 drives and make a backup. Aaron __________________ My Website Meat Free Media

April 5th, 2005, 08:52 PM	#74
K. Forman Capt. Quirk Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Middle of the woods in Georgia Posts: 3,596	And as it has been mentioned, all the extra goodies needed to download your footage- laptop, P2 cards- are going to run you a few grand. And this is above the original $10,000 for the camera itself. For all the added expense, and short filming duration, the footage had better look better than film. But then, I'm just a poor average Joe. __________________ www.SmokeWagonLeather.us