how to p2 on documentary..manpower

[Bob Flood]

thanx shane and all others

“P2 may not be for all situations”

I cna see that now, so why doesnt panasonic market the cameras so they can betape or tapeless?

like when beta first came out you got a deck that attached to the camera, allowing you to shoot with sony but record with pana, or whatever?

“I like video because its so fast!”

Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc.

[Barry Green]

Short recording times are a temporary limitation. As the cards become bigger, recording time issues diminish.

As an example, when the HVX200 first came out, people said there was no way to use it underwater; 8 minutes of recording time just wasn’t enough, you’d have to surface and change out the cards and etc.

But today, with two 16GB cards, you can have 80 minutes in-camera. Now the recording time will last longer than any tape, and it’ll last longer than your air tank will. So the appearance of 16GB cards opened up that market.

32’s are due in a few months. An HPX500 with four 32GB cards can record five and a half hours of footage, without ever swapping cards. That’s going to be possible in just a few months… so is there really a big reason to put a tape in there? You can offload the cards at night while you sleep and be ready for the next 5.5-hour shoot day in the morning.

Next year when the 64GB cards come out, that number jumps to 11 hours. And about two years from now the 128GB cards come out, and that pushes the HPX500’s record time capability to 22 hours — all without ever swapping a single card. If you have more cards and can swap, that increases the recording time infinitely.

Short recording times are a temporary inconvenience.

—————–
Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db)

[Rennie Klymyk]

I just posted a link to an article that deals with this very topic. It is in the thread 4 posts up and it’s a worthwhile read.

“everything is broken”

[Bob Flood]

barry

thanx

yeah i hear ya!

its just that we want it now Now NOW!!! 🙂

I had heard that the way the P2 connects with the camera is kinda old technology (PCMCIA?)

and that in order for the cards to be competitiive with other tapeless media, thety would have to upgrade the way data is transfereed betwixt camera and card,

so i wonder if the 16 or 32gb cards are actualy going to be incompatible with existing cameras?

now again this is just an argument i heard, but one of the benefits of a faster card camera connection wojld be higher native frame rates, like 120 fps or 180 ie real slo mo!

just yakkin

bee eph

“I like video because its so fast!”

Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc.

[Barry Green]

PCMCIA’s been around for quite a while, and it’s plenty fast. The P2 card is fast enough to support six streams of HD simultaneously, streaming off the card. And the PCMCIA bus is almost twice as fast as the maximum speed of a P2 card. PCMCIA’s capable of 133 megabytes per second. The “other” storage you’re hearing about uses ExpressCard (which is a faster interface, true) but the underlying memory doesn’t even exceed the speed of a PCMCIA card. The SxS cards are pegged to run at 800mbps (or 100 megabytes) per second, which would easily fit within the PCMCIA specification; they certainly didn’t need to go to ExpressCard for that.

The P2 card has the potential to be much faster than it currently is, but still be 100% backwards compatible. Right now they make the cards by RAIDing together four SD cards. I would guess that as technology advances, they’d be able to RAID together six SD cards and get a 50% speed boost, or even RAID 8 cards together and get the speed all the way up to the PCMCIA maximum of 133 megabytes per second. Don’t know when or if they’ll do that, but one thing you can count on is that new cards will be backward compatible with old equipment.

Keep in mind Panasonic’s been offering this format for around four years now. They’ve got massive customers out there like NDTV (hundreds of cameras) and the Fox network and the Australian Broadcasting Company, and it’s highly anticipated that the BBC’s going to go with P2 as well. They wouldn’t/couldn’t make it backwards-incompatible even if they wanted to, at this point.

—————–
Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db)

[Christopher Wright]

Bob,

Once again you miss the obvious. Use FS-100s for 254 minutes of HD footage on one drive. Back up to your laptop or external drive at night (or during shooting breaks). (Either P2 or FS-100 workflow requires backup of the same amount of data!). With the FS-100 you don’t have to hire the P2 monkey. I travel and shoot all the time with this workflow. Using P2 for long shoots and documentary coverage is just plain foolish. Convince your producer and save time, energy, money and hassles.

[Bob Flood]

cool!

thanx barry!

“I like video because its so fast!”

Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc.

[Bob Flood]

cristopher

doood! i see the obvious! my producer is a freakin dinosaur! 🙂

his biggest fear is that the “hard drive will get dropped” and he will lose all the stuff he shot

(like there was never a fear of a film can opening? or a light leak in the magazine?) or a vtr jamming? or a head clog?

adn sicne the fs100 is a “hard drive” he would be that much more averse to using it as a primary capture medium, instead of the P2 cards

I love p2,or fs100, and cannot wait for bigger cards!! the media is so easy to log and import, no freakin time code breaks, and i only need a 600 dollar card reader,(if that much) not a 14,000 dollar vtr.

honestly, thanx for your reply.

and just so all of you know, we actually have decided to stay with the camera we have, a sony Z1U, and spend the money on more storage.

thanx again to all who responded

bee “i remeber lugging around a ‘portable’ 2″ video recorder” eph

“I like video because its so fast!”

Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc.