Hoodman P2 card coming up?

[Greg Boston]

Originally Posted by Gene Crucean

Is that how they really are building the current P2's? Then why the heck don't they let us record to SD cards just like a P2 card? I'd love to be able to swap in a 2-4gb sd card for only 30-60 bones a pop.

The 4 SD cards in the P2 card are first and foremost, ZERO DEFECT spec memory cards. That adds a lot to the price right there. Secondly, the P2 enclosure is actually a mini RAID array using those four SD cards. This is necessary for the data rates required by DVCPRO HD @ 100mb.

So to answer your question, it's not a matter of Panasonic taking a few SD cards and putting them in a different enclosure just to charge a hefty premium.

-gb-

[Martin Iverson]

Something of note that I was told at the Hoodman booth is that they expect to beat Panny to market on the 32 GB cards by a few months. For prices they were hoping to be around 10 to 20 percent lower than Panasonic. (Earlier they had said 30%, but that was before Panasonic lowered their prices.)

They also told me that they were pleasantly surprised by the positive feedback coming from the Panny booth. They were actually having people directed to their booth from Panasonic's. It was encouraging to me to see Panasonic being so progressive in encouraging an open market for the P2 cards.

[Peter Gresham]

I'm not surprised that Panny is 'less than annoyed' with Hoodman - running a storage format by yourself is a big gamble, having others take up the hardware shows the maturity of the product.

It's good for Panny to have 'competitors' - I bet their hoping that others take up the P2 method - owning the design specs of a popular storage method is a good place to be.

Good for customers as well, we all win.

Hey - my first post! Hello from South Australia, everyone! :D

[Robert Lane]

Welcome to the forum, Peter!

We were all anxious to get our hands on the Hoodman version of P2, but as I mentioned earlier they weren't allowing any test samples - yet.

Although P2 is highly specialized in that is has intelligence built into the RAID controller it is in fact another form of fast re-writable storage. It was only a matter of time before somebody came to the playing field with their version however I'm "hoodwinked" (pun intended) that it didn't come from a media manufacturer first.

The big questions are: How well will Hoodmans' P2 interface with all the P2 devices and how will it affect the Panny warranty on it's equipment? It's too early to know any of this so it will be interesting how this all shakes out. Of most importance to me, is that Panny's own 16GB cards will require a firmware update in a few devices before it will communicate properly, so how has Hoodman devised a compatible communication protocol?

When the first HVX was released many of us (myself included) experimented with alternative methods for recording via the P2 slots and, the Cineporter which is designed to be a P2-only device has also been met with it's challenges in coming to market. My point being, I hope Hoodman has pulled off what nobody other than Panny has been able to accomplish - so far. If they do it can only be good things for everyone including Panny.

[Christian Calson]

I'm kind of nervous to start using a 16g card. I'm always afraid of a card freaking out on me. I guess, in some way, the 8g card kind of makes me feel that if it fails, at least I didn't lose a whole day of shooting and I'll know sooner than later. Even though the 16g and 32g sounds awesome because I'd love to shoot more 1080p24 and not have to dump to the p2 store as often.

Aren't you guys a little nervous about using a 3rd party's cards?

[Eric Peltier]

I am nervous but as always with new gears, test test and test again.
Take the card through the whole work flow, test playback in the camera and in P2 readers (P2 store, P2 drive, laptop ...) if it passes, chances are it's solid.
e.

[Christian Calson]

True. I have to admit that I'm kind of lazy and rely on these kinds of message boards for that kind of testing most of the time. There's always someone who knows more than you do, right?

[Eric Peltier]

that's true too, but when it comes to make sure something works, nothing 's better than doing it yourself.

[Jan Crittenden Livingston]

Originally Posted by James Jones

I checked out the Hoodman P2 competitor (well the info on it at the booth). It is called the RAW-H2 (or something to that effect) and will composed of a single solid state card inside instead of the Panny 4 SD cards currently inside he P2...they claim it will be faster and cheaper
JJ

Not sure how you get a single memory chip to go faster than a Raid 0 at 640Mbs. Might be cheaper but I question faster. We will only know when they deliver.

Best,

jan

[Kevin Shaw]

Originally Posted by Christian Calson

Aren't you guys a little nervous about using a 3rd party's cards?

I wouldn't be: there are millions of people all over the world using generic flash memory cards for digital photography, and we don't hear widespread horror stories of these cards failing or damaging cameras. Of course it would be sensible to test any new P2 or P2-alternative card thoroughly before doing a critical shoot.

[Christian Calson]

Good points.

[Marty Hudzik]

Originally Posted by Kevin Shaw

I wouldn't be: there are millions of people all over the world using generic flash memory cards for digital photography, and we don't hear widespread horror stories of these cards failing or damaging cameras.

Totally different market. You don't think some people end up with a digital glitches on a single photos or possibly a corrupt image every now and then? Still cameras can hold thousands of individual little files. In the video world one corrupt bit can render 10 minutes of corrupt video since it is all one file. That is the reason P2 cards have zero defect memory....there is too much at risk.

Similar scenario to domestic automobiles and race cars. I use cheap tires on my car cause I never go fast enough to reveal their defects. If you put these tires under the stress and load of a race car they would likely fall apart in no time!

[Kevin Shaw]

Originally Posted by Marty Hudzik

In the video world one corrupt bit can render 10 minutes of corrupt video since it is all one file. That is the reason P2 cards have zero defect memory....there is too much at risk.

That's an interesting point, but I doubt we'll hear many stories of corrupted video as more and more people record same to generic flash memory cards, using either still cameras or AVCHD video cams. Flash memory should pretty much either work or not; isn't that supposed to be one of the advantages compared to recording to tape? In any case, it's certainly good advice to test a P2 card before recording something critical on it -- generic or otherwise. And if you really want reliability, record simultaneously to an HDD recorder (e.g. Firestore).

[Marty Hudzik]

Originally Posted by Kevin Shaw

I doubt we'll hear many stories of corrupted video as more and more people record same to generic flash memory cards, using either still cameras or AVCHD video cams. Flash memory should pretty much either work or not; isn't that supposed to be one of the advantages compared to recording to tape? (e.g. Firestore).

It is supposed to be....but is it? Granted tape can have problems but as a general rule we all pay an extra couple bucks per tape to make sure we are using the "high quality" tape. Just like a hard drive (except no moving parts) the files are stored on the media as files. If a bit becomes corrupt or an area of memory has a glitch it can render a lot of video useless. On tape, most of a clip is still there, except for dropouts. I know I have had large files on my hard drive become corrupt. Once something goes wrong with the file system I've lost everything. Had to recapture it all. Thank god that was an option.

[TingSern Wong]

I do suffer from one or two pictures inside my Sandisk Extreme 3 8GB CF being corrupted. Camera is Nikon D2X. Granted is one or two pictures out of a few thousand pictures. But I can't go back to recapture the scenes again.

Tape - I did experience a couple of horror stories as well. Was using my Canon XL1 in Everest Base Camp - air temperature was in the minus 10 deg C region. I did my best to warm up the camera in the sun, etc ... but, still the tape got stuck to the capstan and took me 30 minutes to retrieve the contents without damaging the camera. The tape itself was shot. Happened more than once during the 4 months I was there.

So, there are NO one perfect recording media that you can have. Even if you take backups - there is no guarantee that the backup will be perfect too. The price we pay for in the digital world.