updated 02 Aug 2005

 

Recording Capacities of H-Series P2 Cards
an article by Chris Hurd

What follows are guidelines, not Gospel.

P2 cards come in two flavors; there's the S-series for standard definition video which have a data transfer speed of 320mbps, and the H-Series for DVCPro HD which have a data transfer speed of 640mbps. I'm not too concerned with S-Series cards as they're not compatible with the DVCPro HD recording capabilities of the new Panasonic AG-HVX200 camcorder, so this chart details only the recording capacities of various H-Series cards.

Now I know that elsewhere on the internet, including Panasonic's own site, the recording times for a 4GB P2 card are stated as roughly 16 minutes for DV or DVCPro, eight minutes for DVCPro 50 and four minutes for DVCPro HD. However, the markings on the Panasonic H-Series 4GB P2 card indicate a slightly higher capacity. I'm aware that a good chunk of this total capacity is required for overhead and extra metadata information such as notes, timecode, etc., but I decided to work up this chart to state maximum capacities anyway.

Once I return from NAB2005, I'll have a better understanding of exactly how much room there is for raw video data on a given P2 card, so you might expect to see this chart updated significantly with slightly lower recording capacities, as mentioned at the top of this article. For now, I'm sticking with the absolute maximums stated in the chart until proven otherwise. It's most likely inaccurate, but it's a basis to go on for later changes. In short... this is a work in progress! Just a rough guideline is all. So please don't hold me to this chart, as it's highly prone to be changed in the very near future.

Left: an H-Series P2 card.    Right: an S-Series P2 card.

Some of the higher capacity cards in the chart above aren't in production yet, and won't be for quite some time. Once I can find some reliable pricing and availability information, I'll include that data on this page as well.

Thrown together by Chris Hurd.