DV Info Net - Understanding P2 workflow

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I'm not Jan, but I do know some answers to some of these questions:

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Or P2 to hard drive, and back to P2. Perhaps with a little firewire port so you can just plug your own drive in, remove it when it's done and plug that drive into your NLE.

This has already been announced. They have a tiny portable hard disk with a P2 slot in it. You put the card in, the drive sucks the data off the card and then ejects it. You can then use that drive as an external USB2 (or firewire?) hard disk in your NLE. It's kind of like using a FireStore, but without having to be tethered to the camera.

They also have a five-card-slot "P2 Drive" device, which mounts in a 5 1/4" bay in a desktop computer and acts as a hard disk, you can manipulate up to five cards in it.

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I can see that there could be a lot of "card swapping" as you record on the camera, taking those cards to a laptop or the above devices for backup to a more permanent media. Is there ideas of how this could be done wirelessly, so that the card does not need to be removed from the camera, or via, say, an ethernet cable, or firewire cable into the external device, or even a small hard drive array on the back of the camera?

You can actually use the camera itself as basically an external hard disk. Leave the cards in the camera, but plug the camera into the computer via firewire or USB2 (I think the SPX800 uses USB2). The computer will see the camera as if it was an external hard disk, the contents of which would be whatever P2 cards were currently plugged in.

The SPX also has a wireless option, but I believe it doesn't transmit the actual contents of the card, but rather MPEG-4 proxies of the data (due to bandwidth issues). Jan'll have to fill us in more on that.

Thanks Barry. I don't quite like the idea of USB2 hard drives for editing though.... That's not what USB was designed for, firewire being much preferable, especially as I'm mac based.

Any ideas on P2 to archive optical disc type products??

Graeme

I'd rather use firewire as well. I don't remember if the SPX uses both, but I think it uses USB2. Hopefully in the new camera they'll provide the same functionality, and provide both USB2 and firewire ports.

As for optical backup, I don't know what they've got planned. Clearly since P2 is regular computer-readable memory, you could use it in conjunction with any computer-based optical disc writer, such as DVD-R, or forthcoming blu-ray or HD-DVD-ROM. Jan's been mentioning DLT or SAIT tape as well. But as to whether there's a specific Panasonic product for backing up to those types of media, I don't know of any, that's a good question for Jan.

Barry:

<< I don't remember if the SPX uses both, but I think it uses USB2. >>

SPX can have SDI, 6-pin FireWire and USB 2 onboard all at the same time, although they're listed as optional extras.

I'm assuming that Panny's HDD back-up option will be something similar to this...

CompactDrive PD7X.

If it is, it seems like a simpler solution than the laptop everybody seems so anxious about "dragging around." With two P2 cards, it would probably be a very simple workflow. With one you'd just have to swap HD data every 8 minutes (?). That would be easy to do in between lighting setups.