Is P2 dying out?

[Richard Herd]

Return on Capital Employed (ROCE) is a great way to account for your investment. A CPA can offer a way better calculation than I can.

Regardless, P2 ain’t dead. I imagined P2 would be faster than tape, and it is. But there is still a significant Log and Transfer process. Keeping track of files has been rather tedious.

You aren’t without relevant tape options: HDCAM for example. But wow, that would take longer to recoup the ROCE. But it might open up new markets, like rentals.

[Mike Cohen]

While we are currently shooting HDV (I could not imagine doing a typical two-day 3-camera run and gun shoot where we come home with upwards of 20 hours of tape) using P2 or SxS. We’d need an extra person just to wrangle the data not to mention the media costs. Yeah, I know you pay for the time to capture the tape, but that goes on mostly in the background on a dedicated capture station.

Our next camera will likely be P2 or XDCAM EX.

Mike Cohen

[Mark Suszko]

I was shooting the bull with another ENG shooter at a news event today, while we waited for the event to begin. He was on a small P2 camera system. said he liked P2 all right, liked the workflow, found the cards highly reliable. But he hated the camera, because he felt it was it was too fragile (his engineers told him not to shoot in rain or snow with it) and mostly because he wanted a shoulder-riding camera, not a form factor you hold in front of your chest like a football.

The information I found most interesting though, was when he told me the shooters at his station don’t actually shoot HD with the P2, they only shoot SD in 16:9. When I asked why, he said that in HD mode the P2 only gave him about 15 minutes of running time, whereas in SD, he could run all day on one pair.

This gets back to my cost issue with P2 cards vs. SDHC cards. The cheaper SDHC cards enable you to own enough card capacity that you don’t ever feel pressured to trade run time for resolution.

[Mike Cohen]

[Mark Suszko] “The information I found most interesting though, was when he told me the shooters at his station don’t actually shoot HD with the P2, they only shoot SD in 16:9. When I asked why, he said that in HD mode the P2 only gave him about 15 minutes of running time, whereas in SD, he could run all day on one pair.”

We run into this issue in hospitals (not with P2 but with limited record times). Many operating rooms have $50K+ recording devices attached to their HD medical scopes. However the included tiny hard drives only hold 30 minutes of HD video, so they use high def cameras and then record SD 4:3 MPG2 and burn to a DVD or copy to memory stick. Some newer models let you plug in a USB hard drive but it is the same concept – sort of.

Mike Cohen

[Paul Kakert]

I just purchased an HPX250 to replace my HVX200 (which I used for years and loved). It’s a huge step up and well worth it. For much of my work, it’s a great fit. But for some work, I’ve been looking at the AF-100. I am curious why it was not designed to use P2 cards. It also made me wonder about the future of P2 and if the direction was going to go towards other cards. Any insights into why P2 was not used for the AF-100?

Paul Kakert
EDPvideo.com

[Shannon Baker]

Mike, we have been using P2 cards for several years now (have the original HVX and HVX A’s as well). It takes a little getting use to, but once you have a work flow, you’ll never want to go back to tape! It will be scary at first as you don’t have a physical tape to hold onto (its just bits on a hard drive), but you get use to it, and the time savings is amazing. We offload everything in the field. With small dell netbooks with PCMCIA slots, and an automated program called P2 Forge, all we have to do is insert it into the slot, and it does all the rest. Come back a half and hour later with the next card and swap them out. At the end of the day, all of our footage is logged and ready to edit. All we have to do is mount the hard drive to the editing computer.

We found two ways of doing this effectively in multi-cam shots. One way is that we have a laptop for each shooter and each person offloads sequentially onto their own system. Second way is to have someone in charge of offloading. Everyone gives her the cards and she copies and organizes them individually. Now that we’ve been shooting P2, I can’t imagine going back. Here’s to hoping a P2 AF100 comes out soon!

[Mark Suszko]

Am I the only person who sees an ironic sort of hypocrisy in claiming P2 is small and takes up no space… while conveniently ignoring the fact that now I have to haul an entire laptop computer and/or hard drive unit along with the camera rig, just to make the card system work, where with tape, my tapes were smaller than cigarette packs already, but I didn’t have to bring another 12-pound dongle along with them into the field? My tapes run out, I eject them, drop in another cheap one, keep going. What P2 guys are doing in the field is like me stopping shooting to make a tape-to-tape transfer in the field, so I can re-use the first tape I shot with.

P2 is nice and all, but not the end of the evolution, by far.

[Shannon Baker]

I don’t think its selling point is that its smaller. Its selling point is that its extremely reliable, fast, and can hold bit rates higher than a lot of other formats (especially for its size). Its certainly not the only solution. Its not quite as bad as making another tape though in the field. We use small dell netbooks for the offload. Our monitors are about as big as this netbook. Our whole system is automated which means, we have everything logged and organized before ever getting back to the editing room. Then, we don’t have to log anything! Meaning, instantly ready to edit. We have the same workflow with AVCHD but with slower transfer speeds, a less reliable medium, and a codec we feel isn’t quite as good as DVCPro HD (although please note, I’m not calling it bad either). Like I said, it was daunting several years ago when we went all digital onto the solid state media…but now that I have, I wouldn’t have it any other way. The advantages have outnumbered the disadvantage of bringing along a netbook. At least for us it has. But once again, the advantage isn’t its size, rather its the quality, speed, and higher possible bit rates in my opinion.