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Future of P2 Cards


Rob Featherstone

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You know, honestly I doubt there is much technically preventing panasonic from recording to P2 cards in mostly any camera. After-all, the original codec they were designed for was a uch higher bitate than the current implementations they have going (DVCProHD V ACVHD). However, what may be limiting P2, and Sony's SxS Cards are economies of scale. They both are highly specialized and proprietary products, which I can see remaining for professional applications, much like the XDCam Discs (a blu ray really), but it may be more economically feasible to allow other manufacturers to make the cards (with the R&D and Marketing and Manufacturing necessary) in order to lower the prices of the cameras themselves, even if only marginally, to compete not only with their own products, in Panasonic's case people who may be more prone to just pick up a GH2, or those from other manufacturers.

That all being said, I don't see why you couldn't just marry an external P2 recorder to any camera with a SDI output. Again, this is all just my take on things, and I'll admit, I wouldn't mind not spending so much on tapeless media, perhaps getting eventually to the point where you treat the cards just as you would a miniDV tape-- e.g. not taping over it and moving the data backup and storage off-set.

 

my 2 cents.

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  • 4 weeks later...
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P2 was always a turkey.

 

It was hopelessly expensive, much more expensive than similarly-performing flash devices in other formats. The codec was nothing to write home about and the filesystem choices and use of MXF were an absolute disaster. I wrote a couple of scathing articles on it at the time and had a very long argument with a Panasonic rep on this very forum, during which it was made abundantly clear that Panasonic didn't really understand what they'd created or why.

 

OK, it works, it is reliable, and it does suffer perhaps a little unfairly from being ahead of its time. It's married to some very nice cameras (though I've always been underwhelmed with the HVX200). It's very nice in newsgathering situations and similar circumstances. The problem is that none of these are things that couldn't have been done, and have since been done, on compactflash cards or any other manner of media.

 

 

 

P

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