Homemade P2 card?

[Noah Kadner]

There’s in theory no roadblock here except for performance. Remember to record DVCPROHD you need to hit and sustain 14 MB/second. Most of the CF cards won’t cut it.

Noah

[Emery]

Speed is often given as a multiplier, such as 4x, 24x, 40x and 80x.

12x is about the slowest you see and 80x is the fastest. An 80x card should be able to write at a speed of 12 MB/s, a 40x at 6 MB/s and a 20x at 3 MB/s. Read speeds are usually similar.

The cards are only getting faster, so id imagine that by the time the camera is released there will be compact flash cards that will write a sustained data rate of 12MB/s with a little head room on top of that.

Emery

[Emery]

Also, whats stopping people from connecting a hard drive to a PC adapter?

Maybe you need a “smart drive” if your comming out of the firewire port, but if the camera thinks its writing to a P2 card you could attatch the hardrive to it. Why use the firewire port at all?

Im not an engineer but does this not sound simple to anyone else?

Emery

[Chris Baldwin]

The more I look into it the more it seems like Panasonic actually did their forecasting homework here and priced their P2’s competively.I think the Conpact flash cards will be out in larger size first but much more exspensively.

The one thing I don’t understand about this is why don’t the homemade p2 cards need some kind of firmware like the Firestore hard drive recorders?

What’s the difference? Aren’t they both just mounted hard drives? Why would the Firestore need software and not the P2 or homemade P2?

Chris Baldwin
Shoulder High Productions
Media of the World; For the World!
https://www.shoulderhigh.com
newsletters@shoulderhigh.com

[Eleventy]

[Chris Baldwin] “The one thing I don’t understand about this is why don’t the homemade p2 cards need some kind of firmware like the Firestore hard drive recorders?

What’s the difference? Aren’t they both just mounted hard drives? Why would the Firestore need software and not the P2 or homemade P2?
“

The stuff that comes out of the firewire port is just a DV-stream. You need some kind of intelligence on the receiving end to deal with it ( ie write it to disk)

The P2-card on the other end, is seen as a mounted drive by the camera’s filesystem. Therefore, the actual writing to disk is handled by the camera’s OS. So, technically, it wouldn’t make much difference if the PCMCIA-card was a flashcard or a miniature Harddisk, or even a S-ATA adapter, as all these are under control of the camera’s OS.

Incidentally, as I have heard, the camera runs on Linux embedded. So all that is required for new hardware to work is a firmware upgrade.

eLeventy

[Toke]

[Emery] “Also, whats stopping people from connecting a hard drive to a PC adapter?”

Maybe one restrainer might be that fast enough hdd is 3.5″ sized and it needs AC.

Firestore for HD might be raiding couple of 2.5″ or 1.8″ hdd’s to be albe to work with batteries.

[Jan Crittenden livingston]

Keep in mind that the transfer rate on the SD cards in the P2 is 60X and that there is a Zero Defect Tolerance. Anything less, is less and should not be expected to work flawlessly, and that is our expectation from P2. And if dropped can withstand a G force of 15Gs.

Best,

Jan

Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems

[Toke]

[Jan Crittenden Livingston] “Zero Defect Tolerance”

All digital memory is usually Zero Defect Tolerance.
Otherwise programs in computers would crash.
For absolute certainty you would need ECC memory (used in servers).

[Eleventy]

[toke lahti] “All digital memory is usually Zero Defect Tolerance.
Otherwise programs in computers would crash.
For absolute certainty you would need ECC memory (used in servers).”

I don’t know about your computer, but mine does crash occasionally. And although I don’t like it, I can live with it as long as I don’t loose too much work( given that I don’t loose ANY mediadata I’m working on).

Media-wise, it’s a different story. Here you have to have Zero Defect Tolerance, so there is no risk of losing any data. And here’s where the P2-cards come in to play: they are VERY robust, compared to harddisks, tape and even optical disks like the XDCam for use in the field. It has to be there, no chance for a reshoot ( certainly in news). Afterwards, in post, you add robustness to your media on HDD’s by adding redundancy, RAID, fail-over systems, …

eLeventy

[Toke]

Mine crashes too, but problems are in software.
If there would be defect memory _all_ software would crash _all_ the time, when they would try to use that defected portion.
How does pro still photographers cope with cf-memory, if that is somehow less “Zero Defect Tolerance”?