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NO p2 for me! Forget it!
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I read it its cool, but not yet there as far as long form for me.
SD Memory is about $100/gig. I’m not sure why p2 is $1700 for 4gigs.
And this is really far away from 128gigs. We’re talking huge drop in price of flash memory to make 128gig cards logical.
To me that size card is the only logical competitor to tape at the moment, performance cost etc. 4 and 8gig are way too small.Even at $100/gig that’s $13k for a 128gig 90min hd card. It would have to drop into the $2k range to be competitive. Are SD memory prices going to drop from 13k to 2k in the next year or so? We’ll see. I can’t see buying a camera for $5k and paying $13k for a card to make it workable. When I can buy an HDV system with tape at $20/hr.
They write some sillyness on there about having a crew sit around while we download P2 cards, its like reloading film. Come on.
Film comes in 400ft 16mm or 1000ft 35mm loads 10min loads. And those of us who have been shooting HD for years now, don’t expect or need to wait for load changes. You want my crew to wait around for a new P2 system, you know how much they eat.
I don’t know about you but on a low end camcorder you’re likely to do a lot of family/vacation stuff with it p2 doesn’t work at all there. I have a book of SD cards for my digital camera and I’m always running out of space on holidays. Bye Grandma you’re a little too out of focus in that shot. Bye cousins in law don’t remember your names anyhow. -
Serge, it’s wonderful to hear a strong, doubting voice in a product-specific forum! “Doubt breeds caution.” And in this case, caution is a good thing.
Even though it’ll take several years for P2 and other solid-state media to replace tape, in the meantime it’ll be possible to use P2-style media successfully, cost-effectively and safely.
But only if P2-style media users, like all electronic/electromagnetic media users, execise appropriate caution.
When P2-style media becomes as inexpensive as videotape (how soon this occurs is subject to debate, but it’ll happen), some of the following become moot. When P2-style media is inexpensive enough to not need to be erased after every use and considered an expendable like videotape, then only one backup (or “capture”) needs to be made, verified, and secured — just like videotape.
While we await that happy day, the following is one possible P2-style media production (as opposed to post-production) workflow. However, I’m sure there will be other approaches.
Every few or several minutes, as a P2-style media card fills up with video data, the user will make at least two backup copies of the data onto separate backup media such as a hard drive, optical disk, datatape, and so forth.
The transfer time is typically cumulative, with one transfer for each backup. A Qualified Person In Charge will perform, directly supervise or otherwise be responible for the backups, so this requires a certain amount of time away from this person’s other responsibilities.
The backups will be “eyeball-verified” in _realtime_ in addition to being electronically verified during the backup/transfer. The eyeball verification should be done by a Qualified Person In Charge to insure data integrity. Don’t entrust the quality of the only copies of your video to a computer system or a lowly production assistant. Since eyeballing the video is done in realtime, this task is somewhat time consuming but unavoidable.
As soon as possible, at least one of the backup copies should be moved off-site to prevent loss from disaster such as fire, theft, and other hazards. This task is not P2-style media specific, just a normal data backup practice.
And of course, _all_ of the above should occur _before_ a P2-style media card is erased.
In short: Backup (at least twice), eyeball verify (at least twice), and secure (at least once) before erasing an original recording.
As a result, a P2-style media workflow — like any workflow which routinely requires destroying original data — might not end up saving time or money compared to using videotape. This is not to say P2-style media is inherently unsustainable, but only that its advantages may lie elsewhere.
People once thought office computers would reduce paper use and save time. Neither claim has proven true. However, I’d be the last person to recommend against using computers, since there are so many good uses for them. Likewise, P2-style media is unlikely to reduce the use of consumables or save time.
It’s important to note that “backup” is _not_ equal to “preservation”.
This is not a matter of semantics. No matter what the subject of a particular video production, the recording is history and a cultural artifact. The issues raised by this are not a new phenom, but it’s relatively new in the video world, at least in the sense of a P2-style workflow, because a P2-style workflow routinely requires destroying original recordings.
The tasks described above must be performed to insure that the only copies of the original recording are in fact 100% good. These tasks require supervision by highly-qualified humans, which means time, work, and money. Hardware & software can’t magically make this expense go away.
When you shoot real film, you don’t usually destroy the original film after production. Likewise with videotape, you don’t typically destroy the original tape after production. Same with physical 2D artwork; it typically gets preserved. And with pure digital origination, like computer 3D animation or digital photography, you should follow a backup/verify/secure process as described above.
In _any_ situation where valuable original data is planned to be routinely destroyed, extra man-hours & money must be spent to insure that investment is not lost. In the case of P2-style media usage, we’re talking about risking many thousands of dollars worth of data or more — or non-repeatable events — on each P2-style media card.
Sure, not everyone practices this level of data protection and preservation, but that doesn’t excuse irresponsible business practice. And a big hardware vendor’s marketing campaign can’t make all this magically unneccessary.
It’s the order of magnitude of this “shift” which gives me pause, and should give everyone pause. The simple fact of thousands of original recordings being erased every day worldwide is a big deal, any way you look at it, backups or no backups.
Therefore, I hope our much-vaunted backup systems really do work as well as we believe — no lightning-strikes-twice backup hardware/software failures or device driver software conflicts or multi-vendor finger-pointing blame-games — because worldwide these systems will need to be nearly 100% reliable for millions or billions of frames-worth of video every day.
Having said all this, for some reason I think P2-style media can be a great tool when used wisely. I guess that makes me an optimist?
Just my opinion; I could be wrong. However, I haven’t heard a compelling case against what I’ve said yet.
All the best,
– Peter DeCrescenzo
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Say you backup the P2 media to tape. Why would you subject the process to much more stringent control and over-sight than what a cameraman would do shooting direct to tape?? If it were unreliable to dump a P2 to tape, surely it would be unreliable to shoot tape in the first place??
This all reminds me very much of the introlduction of the NLE, where nobody could afford the many gigabytes of hard disk space needed, and, of course, the NLE never took off as tape to tape is just so much cheaper, quicker, easier etc.
Also, what about CRT monitors? Sony, of all people, no longer manufacture CRTs. Think about it. What they’ve got left is stockpile only. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.
In the audio industry, Quantegy, the last tape manufacturer of analogue professional audio tape shut down. This gave the industry quite a fright until they managed to find someone new, but in the meantime they were worried. That’s because the mainstream audio industry records direct to hard disk now.
And yes, stills photographers! They’ve moved to digital, recording on memory cards, no doubt backing up in the field to the hard drive of their laptop, burning a CD, wiping the memory card then starting again. I see that they’ve got their workflow sorted, and it won’t be long before video people get their workflow sorted too.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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As a stills photographer gone digital – does the memory “go wrong” and loose your pictures? It’s certainly not happened here. As for XDCAM – it’s neither tape nor solid state. It’s an optical disc that would be quite fragile out of it’s little carrier. It’s nearly as mechanical as tape, and to me, looks reasonably suited for standard definition archiving, as it doesn’t have the data rate for HD archiving. But why put one in a camera over tape?? It’s advantages are slim at best. It’s just a new way for Sony to sell a new “tape”. It’s not a format designed for aquisition, but a distribution format (blu ray) turned into something else by putting it in a caddy.
Carrying 30 or 40 of this XDCAM disks with you is hardly trivial. They only store, what is it, how many gigabytes? Hard drives are more compact, tape is more compact. Hard drives are faster, tape slower. XDCAM is not one thing or another, but a small stepping stone to “tapeless” acquisition. Why not go the whole way instead of putting your toe in the water??
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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[Graeme Nattress] “Say you backup the P2 media to tape. Why would you subject the process to much more stringent control and over-sight than what a cameraman would do shooting direct to tape?? If it were unreliable to dump a P2 to tape, surely it would be unreliable to shoot tape in the first place?? …”
Hi Graeme: My point is, if you shoot on videotape or film, or draw with pen or pencil, or create with almost anything other than pure-digital origination (digital photography, computer graphics & animation, digital music, and so forth), you almost never destroy the original tape, film, drawing, what-have-you. And you’d almost never destroy the original artifact every day, time after time, hundreds of thousands or millions of images-worth as standard practice. Not even the busiest pro digital still photographer creates & deletes anywhere near that many images every day!
So, no, shooting on P2-style media is not like most other media. Because it’ll remain so darn expensive for awhile, and so must _plan_ to reuse it, you must plan to stringently backup each recording at least twice, stringently verify the backups with your own eyes & ears, and insure (as in any good backup procedure) you secure at least one copy off-site.
It’s not that P2-style media or backup systems are unreliable, it’s that when the original recording is gone, it’s gone, and the image volume is enormous! That’s the whole issue. Our backup procedures must be near 100% reliable to insure any hope a good copy exists. This is different than a workflow where you preserve (meaning: don’t erase/destroy) the original. An original is 100% perfect in the sense that it “don’t get no better” than whatever got originally recorded, warts and all. A backup copy can’t be guaranteed 100% perfect, but a human being can verify (by eye & by ear) that it’s at least “acceptable”. And that means man-hours.
I wouldn’t be so concerned if it weren’t for the scale of this inevitable change.
For some unknown period of time, millions and then billions of original motion picture frames will be routinely destroyed every day once P2-style production becomes popular. Backups or no backups, the magnitude of that fact is stunning.
But as long as people are extra-careful with their data, I guess we’ll be OK.
All watched over by machines of loving grace, indeed!
All the best,
– Peter
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I want my Panasonic 24p HD camcorder under $10k hopefully under $5k and I want it to record on TAPE…. If its on 4gig P2 cards its just a toy to me, not a functioning real world device – too bad.
Let the ishuffle, and digital camera guys drive the price of SD flashcards down and then come out with 128gig P2’s for under $2k. I’d still be terrified about zapping the card to put new data on it.
All this confidence in Hard Drives as an archive format is nutty too. Has anyone had a hard drive sitting on their shelf for ten years and then tried to boot it up again. I mean what was I using ten years ago SCSI, I don’t even have SCSI cards and connections anymore. I have a 3/4 inch tape from 1980 that I just put in a deck and it was fine. That tape is 25 years old. Getting over to optical makes sense but so little data on a DVD. At the end of a show I easily have a terabyte or more of material, that’s what a million DVD’s. Currently I have tape source, my final output is to tape, I archive the drives hoping that maybe I’ll be able to access them again in the future, but not with a lot of confidence. There’s so many moving parts in a drive. Tape is so smart,cheap and simple.
If I have to take all the P2’s and put them on tape… well that’s just dumb, you’re making 10 times more work.
I wish panasonic would make a workable camcorder and not a toy… I think its a big error…. unfortunate.
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Serge, I must point out several mistakes you make: a 4 GB card will hold more than 5 minutes of DVCPROHD. For that matter, 8GB cards will be availble very soon. Downloading the data from a 8GB card to a P2 store will be faster than real time, so You don’t have any downtime. All your footage is ready to be edited – no capturing time. Archiving – you can use DVD discs where you put the raw data (not dvd compression, to make it clear). because it’s a fast and nonlinear process, you can archive only the useful stuff, not everything. Major savings there – instead of puttting a $20 tape on the shelf, you put 4-5 discs worth 75c each. They are far more reliable and small and archiving can be done with a laptop these days – no need for expensive decks. Also, I don’t think a statement from Sony is a valid argument – WHAT would you expect them to say, that P2 is a serious threat for their new round tape format?.. Blu-ray is an archiving/delivery format, not an aquisition one. Other than being non linear, there are no other advantages – you still have to capture, you can’t free up space other than by erasing the whole disc, it’s slow when you want to access anything ele than the proxy, no IT integration, expensive peripherials (players/decks). With P2 all you need is a laptop in the field and maybe a raid1 firewire/usb2 external hdd box, if you don’t trust the p2 store. What you really need is to try and think out of the square and forget that the P2 card is your media. It deservs the same consideration as the memory in your PC – things come and go through there, it only happens that we take it out sometimes (NOT every 5 minutes).
Gabriel Costache
Sales Engineer
Panasonic NZ Ltd -
There is no doubt in my mind that solid state recording is the future, the only debate is at what point you get on the train for the journey.
serge may join us at the last stop !Serge you moan about the cost of P2 yet your shooting on a Varicam, need a deck in the edit and need to pay for digitizing costs.
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[Noah Kadner] “They’re both shooting HDV which is 4x as compressed as DVCPROHD and with less color depth”
More efficient codec means less loss in the compression for the same data rate. Then, with a lower colour space you don’t need the same data rate. I’m not here saying HDV is as good as DVCPRO HD at all, but I strongly argue agains a factor of 4x in the compression which is not so, as you are only basing your comparison on the pure bit rates.Although probably correct, the JVC may shoot higher bit rate or colour space than HDV, it is after all discribed as also ProHD compatible, which is as yet not specifically defined.
[Noah Kadner] “If you think that level of MPEG-2 type compression is going to endure 30 years on a mini DV tape with no dropouts you could be in for an unpleasant surprise or two. “
So your planning on archiving your P2 recorded footage on P2 media are you?[Noah Kadner] “And neither shoots 24p at 1080 like the HVX”
But you don’t know how the HVX shoots 24p/1080 either. Is it a 1280x720p CCD block with a software upres (in which case it is really no more capable than the JVC anyway)? Who knows, don’t assume you’ve got a 1920x1080p CCD block just yet.All I am thinking here is the points you are making are pretty flawed at the moment. It’s no time to can P2, but it also no time to sing the glory of P2.
[Noah Kadner] “And P2’s prices can only go down while capacities go up.”
Lucky for Panasonic of few of us could afford to even consider it. Then again who wants to spend a lot of money on a product that depreciates so quickly in price? “If I just wait a bit longer the price will drop some more”…
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