Rumors of $1000 US for 8Gig P2 cards

[Blub06]

Gee, if that

[Ron Shook]

Blub,

[Blub] “If 8meg or other P2 cards drop to half your assumed price it would still be mind blowing and unaffordable. All this talk of P2 cards dropping in price

[Accountclosedduetopolicyviolations]

Well if people need workflow and they get PAID decent rates,then cost of Storage like P2,Flash MC,Iomega REV and others will be no problem.
Please do not forget you are saving money on camera recorder and deck.
If true HD cameras and the cost associated is too much,then maybe HDV
is an answer for other productions.
There is camera and format out there for everybody.
Cost of High End gear is way down.

[Ron Shook] “If the HGX-200 becomes my camera of choice, it isn’t gonna be with P2 cards”
Well Ron,do not waste money on Pana200 if You can afford to shoot DV only.
I make a bet with You in 2 years you will look back and think differently.
Regards-jiri

[Pierre]

Shoot on DV or HDV then.

[Ron Shook]

Jiri,

[jiri vrozina] “Well if people need workflow and they get PAID decent rates,then cost of Storage like P2,Flash MC,Iomega REV and others will be no problem.”

That’s non-sensical. If I use use a cost of $500/ 8 GB memory card, it cost $2000 to equal the capacity of a $70 REV Pro cartridge or a $40 REV cartridge, i.e., solid state memory will be equal to 30-50 times the cost of this hard drive solution, i.e. again, REV is no problem, but P2 is a monster problem for a $6k camcorder.

[jiri vrozina] “I make a bet with You in 2 years you will look back and think differently.”

Of course, in 2 or 3 years when solid state memory prices can approach the cost of hard drive storage, I’ll feel differently, but it’s no solution now, for me, and I very much doubt for you either.

The Firestore drive, if it proves to be self-contained, is a step in the right direction and a solution for some types of production with the HGX-200 or other P2 camcorders. Imagine, however, a Firestore that used REV hard drive Cartridges. I’m not sure if they would be fast enough, but it wouldn’t have to be REV to use a hard drive cartridge system. The technology is here today to use 100 GB transportable drives in a caddie/cartridge system of a Firestore like on board storage device where the drives could be popped in and out of such a device like changing a tape, and those drive caddie/cartridges could be hooked to your NLE as external drives with a firewire cable and power supply, either for direct editing or ingest into the NLE. An Asian factory could churn these out for $150-200 a pop, and you’d have something to put into the hot little hands of your client if the workflow called for that.

Now, if the Firestore drive proves to have such a system, which I doubt, all of my workflow issues with P2 camcorders would dissolve in a wink.

Ron Shook

[Ron Shook]

Michael,

[Michael] “Shoot on DV or HDV then.”

That’s not a solution for me or Panasonic. I want to shoot shoot on DVCProHD not HDV, and I assume that Panasonic wants me to do so as well. (g)

The solution for me to do so is so relatively simple. See my reply to Jiri on this thread.

Ron Shook

[Karl Holt]

Ron,

I’m paraphrasing, but Jan stated on another forum that she didnt really trust Iomega or their products. All her Jazz and Zip drives she had bought have now broken down and I heard a bad review of the stability of the Rev drive too from a user. She wouldnt touch the Rev technology. Of course with Grass Valley involved with Iomega they may have come up with a very robust system for the Rev Pro drive – but don’t expect Panasonic to be developing partners with Iomega anytime soon.

It’s a debatable point but the reason P2 costs so much is because they want it to be flawless and to operate at speeds which are futureproof. The Rev can only sustain a Data rate of 100Mbits/s or thereabouts – which is fast enough for HD recording but not so good for offload or any future developments/improvements.

I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, and Rev are so cheap you probably wouldn’t need to offload in a hurry – but 100mbps is a real-time offload – so no quicker than a tape capture…..I’m just giving you the Pansonic logic. They dont want to use a technology that even has a slight change of failing during a shoot and they want to make sure it can cope with higher data rates as that’s one of the main benefits of the time-saving solid state technology.

Also I think people forget that P2 isnt being designed for the HVX; it’s going to be Panasonics new format for capture across the board; I assume the new Varicam and their high end broadcast cameras will be using it; so it has to be designed to be able to cope with the most demanding proffessional applications and maybe for an even higher data rate on a future varicam?!?

Personally I think the infinity camrea sounds awesome, but the whole unit is just out of my price range. I will probably go the HVX/firestore route too, at least until the capacity of P2 can store about an hour of HD.

If anything Panasonic are just a few years too early…..Its actually nice for once for a company to be ahead of the game, rather than some other manufacturers who seem to be content with delivering minor improvements each year. The HVX really is revolutionary and whether P2 takes off or not it’s certainly going to change the way camcorders are made from now on; but there is a price or workaround to pay for pushing techniology to it’s limit.

[Ron Shook]

Karl,

First, let me say that you put the P2 rational very succinctly and clearly.

[Karl] “It’s a debatable point but the reason P2 costs so much is because they want it to be flawless and to operate at speeds which are futureproof. The Rev can only sustain a Data rate of 100Mbits/s or thereabouts – which is fast enough for HD recording but not so good for offload or any future developments/improvements.”

I think that P2 is a beautiful design and technological achievement and I’m very high on it several years down the road and if any camcorder I purchase today is able to use that technology several years down the road, all the better, assuming the camcorder is still viable several years down the road. However it is what works today that must be the guage for whatever camcorder I purchase today, and P2 just isn’t working today (and misses by a very wide mark) from a cost standpoint for anyone who must shoot a lot of video under ever decreasing or at best stagnant budgets. Since tape transports for DVCPro50 & 100 are too complex and costly for under $10k camcorders, only hard drives of one stripe or another fit the bill, and for a lot of us, on camera hard disk recorders without some sort of cartridge system don’t quite make it either because there is nothing for a client to walk away with.

BTW, the offload argument doesn’t work one whit today, although that should change dramatically over the next year. As far as I know there isn’t a single NLE in existence that can work directly with native DVCPro P2 MXF files. Only FCP comes close but that involves transcoding the files to QT, an extra time consuming step that can’t be significantly faster than realtime. All other solutions at this time that I’m aware of involve capturing DVCPro in realtime from camera or deck via Firewire.

[Karl] “If anything Panasonic are just a few years too early…..Its actually nice for once for a company to be ahead of the game”

It’s Panasonic’s job to supply and sell products that put their clients ahead of the game, otherwise they won’t sell many products and it won’t matter how far ahead of the game they are.

Ron Shook

[Graeme Nattress]

MXF doesn’t get transcodec to Quicktime. Both MXF and Quicktime are “wrappers’ for the very same underlying DV/DV50/DV100 codec data, so any such conversion should be very rapid.

Graeme

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

[Luis Caffesse]

[Ron Shook] “BTW, the offload argument doesn’t work one whit today, although that should change dramatically over the next year. As far as I know there isn’t a single NLE in existence that can work directly with native DVCPro P2 MXF files. Only FCP comes close but that involves transcoding the files to QT, an extra time consuming step that can’t be significantly faster than realtime. All other solutions at this time that I’m aware of involve capturing DVCPro in realtime from camera or deck via Firewire.”

It was my understanding that Avid works directly with native DVCPro P2 MXF files.
And the FCP solution, while not a ‘directy’ path, is definitely faster than capturing in realtime.