Recording Capacities of H-Series P2 Cards

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.

Maximum Recording Capacities of H-Series P2 Cards
AJ-P2C004H 4GB 16 min. 10 min. 8 min. 4 min.
AJ-P2C016H 16GB 1 hr. 4 min. 40 min. 32 min. 16 min.
*AJ-P2C064H 64GB 4 hrs. 16 min. 2 hrs. 40 min. 2 hrs. 8 min. 1 hr. 4 min.
* Speculative; not yet announced.

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.

Please direct questions to the P2 Info Net Community Forums.

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About The Author

After completing my degree in Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas, I managed a video production studio "back in the tape days" while waiting for the digital video revolution to arrive and for the internet to become mainstream. Things started to get interesting in November of 1997 when I launched The XL1 Watchdog, my first web site dedicated to digital video technology. In January of 2001, that site morphed into DV Info Net — the Digital Video Information Network. More than fifteen years later, the longevity of DV Info Net is exceeded now only by its popularity and reputation as one of the leading technology information resources in the broadcast and professional video markets.

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