P2 rollout and workflow question.

[Toke]

If you are going to shoot 720p24 with varicam, then you’ll have 40 mins with same format to two 8GB p2’s.
Then buy two LaCie Bigger disks with your laptop. Other one is for back up.
You’ll have to offload p2’s 2 times during shooting to get 120 mins.
You’ll get 48GB from hvx a day, making 1.5Tb total for 30 days, which just fits to Bigger Disk.

Other option is to buy 6 p2’s. Or more if you are shooting with higher framerates.

P2 CF-card adapter might be also interesting. By the time camera will ship there will be 16 GB cf’s for about $400…

[Ron Lindeboom]

Thanks, Toke, for making adding some common sense to this whole matter. ;o)

A friend of mine and I walked around NAB together for a while and he brought up some of the same tired arguments against P2 that I have seen here on this forum. He went on and on about the storage capacity and the length of recording time. I let him dig his hole real deep before asking him: “When was the last time you shot more than a minute or two in a scene? I don’t know about your work habits but I do not shoot for an hour straight with my finger on the trigger…”

He looked at me and was silent.

He had even less to say when I told him that the (to quote his words) “high priced harddrive from Panasonic” could dump the seven minutes at 5x realtime (from what I remember hearing) and that in less than a-minute-and-a-half, I could be ready for the next shot. “How fast are your actors?” I asked him.

Again, he was pretty quiet.

Personally, I like both the Z1 from Sony and the P2 from Panasonic. Let ’em duke it out, me says. ;o)

In the end, it will be the market that is the real winner when two giants scramble with ideas and solutions like these…

Thanks again, Toke. Nice to read your comments.

Greetings to Finland.

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[Chris Baldwin]

Wow, I actually have one of those PCMIA compact flash card adapters and was under the assumption that they wouldn’t work as a home made P2 card because they don’t have any intelligence to them. I wonder where I can read more about that option? To be honest its the first I’d heard of it besides my own musing.

So as far as going ahead and record onto P2’s and transfering daily to hard drive you saying go with https://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10551

So my question then would be what would the tranfer speed be of two full 8gig P2 cards onto a drive like this? And secondly if the FireStore product comes out could I transfer to it to a Bigger Disk and at what speed would that occur?

It’d be great not to have to buy these P2 cards at 8gig.

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

[Chris Baldwin]

I completely agree about the P2 working for fictional shoots, but personally I’m going to be employing the camera to work on our nature documentaries which take me into jungles where electronics are endanger of failing due to moisture and the elements of field production. We need to be equiped with media that we can record without reloading process however long or short for at least 30 minutes and frankly an hour would be better.

Realistically I can see being able to transfer once a day at a base camp and it’d be nice to have 2 hours of recording time per day trip. So I’m not rooting against P2 or the HVX200 in fact I desparately want it to be practicle to our 4 month long Varicam DVCPro HD shoots over the next year.

The last writer had an interesting suggestion of the homemade P2 cards made from the PCMIA / CF cards. Does anyone know if that will work?

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

[Deleted User]

[Ron Lindeboom] “… I let him dig his hole real deep before asking him: “When was the last time you shot more than a minute or two in a scene? I don’t know about your work habits but I do not shoot for an hour straight with my finger on the trigger…” …”

To answer your question, in my case: Last Friday, and last Thurday, and last Wednesday, and the Friday before that, and …

Sure, folks doing “films” may usually shoot short takes, and that’s All Good(TM), but some of us (including me in my corner of the corporate video world) typically shoot takes which last at least 10 minutes each, and quite often several times that long. And these are often multi-camera shoots, too. So multiply by 3 concurrently. Here’s the typical, mundane, work-a-day result (several hundred examples):
https://www.demosondemand.com

And no, on most of our shoots there’d usually be little if any time to off-load the contents of P2 cards onto hard drives, and so forth. We’re usually too busy operating cameras, setting up for the next shot, and so forth.

But of course everyone has different shooting requirements, and will use different tools, differently. As you say, let the manufacturers “duke it out” so we production folk may reap the benefits!

The above comments are in no way a knock against P2-style production. I’m sure I’ll be shooting on P2 and/or hard drives sometime, but not quite yet.

For lots of other folks, I think P2-style production will be/is a cool thing.

All the best,

– Peter

Just a friendly reminder to all: Please consider filling-in your COW user profile information so we have a better idea who you are, where you’re from, and so forth. It’s the friendly thing to do. Thanks!

[Ron Lindeboom]

Hi Peter,

I never suspected that *everyone* works the same way and I had little doubt that someone reading my comments would speak up. ;o)

I have never met any product or format that was perfect and a “one-size-fits-all” in this industry. This format, in its first roll-out at least, is not likely to find long-form shooters fighting to get to the front of the buyers line.

I see the format as first appealing to the ENG world, which is where Panasonic has targeted its first generation P2, and then fanning out from there. Long-form shooters are, as expected, further down in the “prospect pile.”

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[Toke]

I have no real experience with p2’s (like most of us here),
but I have understood that they are just fast memory without any further intelligence.

Jan once said that they tried microdrive pc-card as a replacement of p2, but I believe
that they were trying to record dvcpro50 to it and microdrive just wasn’t fast enough.
Maybe they didn’t inspect the situation more closely.

But _if_ you would like to record only 720p24 and _if_ the card does not record dupe frames,
then next generation cf-cards (16GB) should easily handle the bitrate (40Mbps = 5MBps).

If you don’t see any problem with varicam’s 46mins recording time, then 2 * 8GB p2’s 40mins
shouldn’t be a big problem. Then if you could use 2 * 16GB cf-cards the time would be 80mins!

Going to jungle depending on laptops and hard drives (which need AC) might be a bit alarming.
Even normal rugged ENG cameras can have problems with all that moisture.
(16mm film would of course be the safest.)

And with LaCie’s Bigger Disks, everybody should remember that their capasity and speed is
achieved by bundling four hdd’s in RAID-0, which means if one hdd fails, you loose everything.
So backup with bigger disks is mandatory!
Btw, lacie has a new “Biggest Disk” enclosure that can be mounted as RAID-5, so it would be
a lot safer.

[Michael Sacci]

I’m still trying to get a hold of how to shoot tapeless, and yes we shoot interviews that run for 10-20 minutes at a shoot and the p2 could work if you had an extra assistant handy. I think there is promise with a lot of re learning to do.

BUT, it is funny the new gathering is almost all that Panasonic seemed to be pushing the P2 format for.

I think a great solution will be direct to disc opinion that are bound to surface shortly after the release of the camera.

[Barry Green]

Direct to disk will likely surface before the release of the camera; Focus is already a P2 partner and apparently hard at work on an HVX-compatible FireStore. And Serious Magic is already talking with Panasonic about making DV Rack compatible with the HVX.

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