P2 limited / patented to panasonic or 3rd party offers possible ?

[Toke]

It’s amazing how pro still photographers have managed to shoot millions of pictures without any dropout problems.

[Graeme Nattress]

Don’t bet on it. I had a “dropout” on a cheaper CF card the other week.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[Kyle Self]

I don’t think most pro photographers use the cheapest cards. I also think recording a continous video stream would be more taxing on the card than even a burst of 3 to 5 pics.

Thonk about it this way, you can buy cheap ram for your computer which has a greater number of errors. Problems, your coomputer hangs and crashes more often. You can buy more expensive ram without the errors and have fewer problems. You can buy cheap DVD’s which record more errors and have more problems when you record to them, or you can stick with more expensive ones that woprk better.

Do you really want to trust your footage to something you rigged together with the cheapest cards you can find?

Kyle

[Toke]

Most expensive and robust and errorless cf or sd is dirt cheap compared to p2.
And I don’t see any differences in saving videostream or still pictures to flash memory.
It does not choke or heat or anything. It just saves the data or there’s a corrupted bit, which memory should notice and save that bit to somewhere else.
If all back-up areas for “bad sectors” are used then drop-outs start appearing and then so big part of a memory is damaged that is should be replaced immediately.

Some flash memory propably works better in extreme weather and more years or 200 000 cycles compared to 100 000, but they all work fine until “bad sectors” start to show up. After that none of them works.

[Steve Freebairn]

Toke, I think the difference between 3-5 pictures and a video stream is huge. The Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II will do 11 pictures in the raw format which is 11 x 14.6 megabytes of data = 160.6MB It will do that at 4 fps, so in almost 3 seconds you can shoot 160.6 MB of data, I’ll admit that is a higher stream than DVCPROHD, but, that is its max and then it has to stop and clear it buffer and then once it is clear you can start shooting again. At DVCPROHD’s data stream which is 12.5 MB/sec (100 MBit/sec/8bits per byte) you could record about 13 seconds of DVCPROHD footage, but then it would max out (assuming the same buffer size) The point is that no one wants a videocamera that records to solid state memory that will hit the limit, stop and clear the buffer, and then is ready to record again a few seconds later. Just because a CF card says it can sustain a certain data rate it doesn’t necessarily mean that it always will. That is why they have put 4 sd cards into one p2 card with a Raid 0 setup. So that you never have to worry if you’re dropping frames. (and so that you can transfer faster than real time to your computer if it is fast enough 🙂 Anyway, we all know that the price of p2 cards will drop, if not use the firestore drive. P2 cards are Cutting edge technology (PCMCIA card sized drive that contains a 4 drive raid 0 setup!) of course they are going to cost thousands.

[Toke]

I think that’s just a datarate issue.
When p2 came to market there wasn’t fast enough options.
Now there is.
You can’t “hurt” the memory by using it in its upper bitrate limit.
If it works, it just works. If it can’t sustain the datarate, the next model in half a year can.

And for the robustness, if I would go to shoot in Antarktis surely I’d just use p2.
If I’m going to shoot low budget music video in my home town and offload memorycards at coffee break, I’d use something cheaper.
And to which of these enviroments $6k cameras are usually targeted?