I thought the firmware upgrade was because of the new type of SD cards in the 16GB and 32GB P2 cards... it wasn't just a size issue, so I was thinking there'd be no need for another firmware upgrade. But I, for one, will probably stop using the P2Store in the field once the 32GB cards come out, unless you can upgrade the HDD.

I don't think the 32GB P2 card will obsolete the P2Store. I think of more extending the recording time in the field. It sure beats carrying a laptop around. It is rugged, and relatively compact. If you have to film in remote locations for one month and cannot go back to base to unload the P2 card(s), even a 32GB card will get filled up as well. 32GB = 1 hour at 720p. Hence one P2Store will hold 2 hours of video. If you carry one P2 store + 2 x 32GB P2 cards, you can get 4 hours to record. I hope you see the point?

call me crazy, but if I were Panny, I'd have already programmed the 32GB fix into the 16GB firmware, especially since I had already announced the coming of the 32GB P2. seems like a much better use of non-recurring resources.

I certainly hope so too. But it takes only 15 minutes to download and update the firmware for P2store and another 10 minutes for the DVX202 - well, I won't raise a stink even if Panny were not to include the 32GB firmware inside the existing update.

The P2Store has a 60GB HDD (usable space is actually less).... that means ONE full 32GB card can fit on it. For the price, you might as well just get an extra 32GB card. Like I said... unless you can upgrade the HDD.

I believe the issue is that the P2 Store must be FAT32 which has a 4GB file size limit and a limit of 15 partitions. There is not an easy way around that. Even if you put a 160GB drive in the P2 Store, you would only get 15 4GB partitions.

If there ever is an update to P2 Store it has got to be a lot better in use and value. I would like to see a 160GB version with an LCD screen and the ability to record directly to it. You will never see that though as Panny has a vested interest in selling you more P2 cards. It would truly be a killer app though.



ash =o)

I believe Panny has a box - which comes with a LCD panel and allows you to copy P2 cards to external USB2 drives. Can't remember the model off hand. It takes the normal Panny LiON battery that you use for the P2Store too. Only problem - it does not supply power to the USB2 external drives. So - you have to carry a power source for the external USB2 drive. It does cost 2.5X the price of the P2Store. And does not have an internal HD too :-(((.

The file size limit is 4GB, but the partition limit isn't. An individual partition could be as much as 2 terabytes in size.

So if you were able to put a 160GB drive in there, you could potentially copy 10 16GB cards to it. If you're using 8GB cards, you'd run into the 15-partition limit, so you'd want to use a 120GB drive; with 16GB cards you could almost take full advantage of a 200GB drive.

But afaik nobody's ever swapped out a P2 Store drive, so this is all hypothetical.

That box is the "P2 Gear"; it's basically an HVX200 without a lens, but with a few more features, some of them kind of nice. It has two card slots, can load metadata on an SD card, and can offload to firewire drives. But it can also offload to USB drives, and supplies bus power for USB. And its monitor has a waveform monitor and a vectorscope.

No internal storage, but storage is whatever you have plugged into its USB or firewire port.

I know the partition size isnt limited but the file size is but the cards take care of that. As far as P2 gear, it is missing the internal HDD and is too expensive IMHO. At $2000 with a HDD it would make more sense. At $4000 (the price last time I checked) it is pretty silly, that is a brand new top of the line laptop, 2 16GB cards and 2 160GB external drives.



ash =o)

Barry wrote this -

But afaik nobody's ever swapped out a P2 Store drive, so this is all hypothetical.

I think the real reason why nobody has done this yet - is all the P2 Store drives are still under Panny's warranty. And opening the P2 Store drive voids that warranty. After one year have passed ... I can assure you - some enterprising folks will definitely dismantle a P2 Store and report whether the drive can be swapped out. When that day happens, we can collectively either cheer the news (yes, it can be done) or moan (no !!!).

If we don't want to wait, pass the hat around to collect $2K, and get some gurus to open it and have a report from him on whether it can be done, and how to do it .... I am sure there are more eager folks waiting for this news on the DVINFO.net ....

Many P2 Stores are long, long out of warranty. The P2 Store was introduced two years ago.

If I knew what I was doing... I'd take my P2Store apart. I'll probably do it after I get a few 16GB or 32GB cards. It'd be nice to have a 1TB P2Store.

I wonder whether it is technically impossible to swap out a P2 Store HD? What is so special about this 2.5" HD then? Has anybody tried? The lack of news here indicates that this task can't be done (at least for a layman).

Or even worse, if Panny's firmware on the P2Store restricts the size of HD or checks for some signatures on the HD after powering up - then we are out of luck.

Yeah - yes ... yes ... Jon please go ahead - tell the rest of the world whether it is possible ... hee hee!

I suspect the drives have a custom controller board and cant be swapped out.



ash =o)

Ah ... custom controller card? Might this be one that has accelerometers builtin? One that allows the h/w to sense if the unit is falling - and parks the read write heads before the unit hits the ground? All IBM Thinkpads HDs come with that feature.

Three possibilities here -
1. The custom controller card is physically part of the HD itself - which I doubt - as putting the ASIC interface (EIDE or SATA) card to control the HD is major undertaking that few OEMs want to undo. And all HDs feature the same ASIC interface from the same manufacturer - so I doubt Panny would go for this route.
2. The custom controller card is a separate board connected to the HD via proprietary connections. Again - unlikely.
3. The custom controller card is another board that connects to the HD via some industry standard protocol (EIDE or SATA)?

If (1) or (2) - we can forget about swapping out the HD then. If (3) - we still stand a chance.

In IBM Thinkpad case, the accelerometers are not on the HD - but part of the motherboard. Make sense - otherwise changing HDs will be extremely expensive.

Again, all these discussions are theoretical unless someone actually opens his/her P2 store and take a look what is inside.

TS

When talking to the Spec-Comm guys about the now defunct Cineporter, they divulged that in order to maintain consistency they had to flash every drive with a custom firmware. Since the P2 store isnt recording on the fly, you might be able to get away with it but I doubt it is as easy as swapping out a drive.



ash =o)

Hoodman P2?
 

I remember seeing Hoodman at NAB saying that they were going to be making their own P2 cards. Did this project die? I can't seem to find anything on their website.

I believe that has been discussed in several threads already. Hoodman is putting the project on hold - I think they are having problems matching the functionality of the P2 card.

Where have you read that Hoodman is putting the project on hold?

Never have seen that.

Hi David,

My Apologies ... I misread some of the forum's mails. Hoodman's P2 should be out by end of summer 07 - which is basically now. If we haven't heard from Hoodman, we can assume they must have ran into some technical problems then.

With Pany lowering their prices of P2 cards - I think (I think only) Hoodman might have a hard time trying to catch up on pricing in this aspect. Pany already announced (and maybe released) their 32GB P2 cards - though the prices are pretty steep at this moment. 2X the price of the existing 16GB cards - hence, it would make little sense to get their 32GB P2 cards right now.

What's interesting is that the CF cards for the Red One is about $200 for an 8-gigabyte card.

I know the underlying technology is different.

Still, seeing how a 4k camera can store similar amounts of data at a fraction of the cost makes one stop and think that there must be a better way for Panasonic to do the same thing.

When Panasonic created the P2 concept, I don't think this ever comes into the picture at that time. I think it is now too late for Panasonic to go back and redesign the concept.

Jan has stated that the price of the P2 cards is more than just the 4 SD cards + the RAID controller. There are functionalities in that card that folks don't think about ... such as - the overflow manager .. When I plug in two cards and one card is full, how does the data gets carried forward from the full card to the next card?

I would have to say that with the RED use of CF cards and the Covergent Designs use of CF cards, the P2 cost & design look like yesterday's expensive technology.

If the Covergent Designs box can record the SDI signal up to 160mb/s, then why does P2 need a raid to record a more compressed stream?

Hi,

May I refer you folks to another thread in this forum titled ... " Will Panasonic stick with P2?". You can read all the pros and cons that have been discussed about the P2 concept.

One must realise that product cycles are long. Once you have designed and manufactured a product - especially for professional use - such as P2 - you can't change it on the fly just because a superior technology now appear.

P2 concept was conceived at the time when no high speed CF / SxS / ExpressCard was in sight. And I doubt anybody could predict what next year's improvements will be like.

If I understand what P2 can do - the present DVCProHD data stream hardly approaches the limit of P2 recording - which is about 600Mbits/sec write.

Hence Panasonic can introduce - say DVCProHD 200 (as opposed to current 100) - and the P2 card will still be able to cope without breaking into sweat.

I've spoken with Hoodman a few times about thier "H2" P2 card project; initially they had planned on an early summer release however when Panny introduced new firmware for many P2 devices this setback their engineering and they had to re-tool.

Also at issue is that their original design concept was to use a single flash-RAM module in the PCMCIA housing; they realized (as we had suspected) that this doesn't communicate properly, so they too are now also using a 4-module RAID design configuration.

Currently they are planning a Q1 '08 release of the H2-P2 cards; no word on pricing or what sizes will be available.

I'll be one of the beta-testers for the cards so I'll keep the forum updated on progress.

Hoodman P2 Cancelled
 

I just received an email today from Hoodman stating they have officially dropped their Hoodman P2 card project. That leaves Fuji as the sole third-party provider of P2 media - assuming that comes to fruition as planned this year.

P2 has a huge disadvantage now and that's being saddled with the moniker of "proprietary". These days manufactures are finally seeing that ubiquity trumps proprietary and consumers are rewarding them for that. I honestly think that part of the success of HDV was the fact that you could use a proven, cheap, buy it anywhere medium of DV tapes to record to. I hope the manufactures don't miss this fact.
The only reason Panny's P2 technology didn't wither on the vine was that the HVX was a superb camera and people were more than willing to travel down the P2 road to have a wonderful tool in their arsenal.
That's my take on the situation.

While opinions abound, the above is short-sighted.

If P2 were a proprietary tape-based format then yes, it would be a distinct disadvantage. However, comparing HDV which is a solely tape-based format to P2 which is tapeless is moot.

In point of fact, Sony has released it's own version of P2, the SxS cards for the EX1; they share the same workflow and cost (almost to the dollar) as Panny's P2. This "huge disadvantage" may apply to those who simply don't want a tapeless workflow - because it is drastically different than tape - but clearly the hundreds of millions invested by both commercial production companies, post houses and major broadcasters such as FOX in P2 shows that not only is tapeless valid but it is wave of the future.

It's important to point out, that P2 cut it's teeth on broadcast SD and very high-end military-grade security cameras *first* far ahead of the release of the HVX200 which brought P2 to the masses.

It's a short time before we'll have a tapeless Varicam and HDCAM body, so if you're in love with tape and ever plan on moving up to the major broadcast formats then you'll eventually be forced into that workflow.

I hope Panasonic is working to develop a more efficient codec. It would go a long way toward improving recording times and storage concerns.

From what Red has come up with, it's evident that it's possible to encode just as much or more information into a given data stream than with the P2 codec.

While Red's codec uses twice as much data than the P2 system, the image has almost six times more pixels and much greater depth. It's also visually lossless and was proven to be as effective as RED's uncompressed codec. As a result of testing with some of the best industry experts, RED decided to abandon the uncompressed format as being superfluous.

It's a good example of more not always being better.

Sony's EX1 codec uses three times less data than P2. Although it's a long-GOP codec, it's image quality is proving to be very appealing to many DP's and producers.

Robert,
To re-state my opinion, it was the familiar and low cost medium (just so happened to be tape) that helped HDV do so well. It definitely wasn't due to higher picture quality, better color space or easier workflow... so it had to be something and I'm saying it was the recording medium being cheap and effective.. and established.

I'm not making this a P2 vs tape argument, I completely understand that tape is a dying format. I'm just saying that if the major camera companies could just standardize on one or two cards (CF or SD) that it would drive media prices down leaving us with a lot more cash to toss around on more of their products.
I get way more excited about buying $1600 worth of accessories or another whole camera than buying $1600 worth of media. If I can get away with not buying the extra media by cutting a few corners then I will, but if I can take the same amount of $$ and buy something to make my audio better, or image wider, or shot more stable then I'm much more likely to spend that money.
See where I'm going here? I'm not a great persuasive speaker, and never will win a debate, but hopefully I'm making some sense here.

Let's hope we have another manufacturer for P2 - not for the price ... but to prove to the naysayers that P2 media is here to stay ... otherwise, having only one source (Panasonic) is not that good for publicity.

Ethan,

CF - is fine. I won't go for SD or SDHC ... the media is just too thin - not rugged enough for field use. And too small. Ever tried to insert a SD card wearing gloves? CF media is bigger, and is more rugged. Get it?

Ethan, you've completely missed one of the major benefits of a tapeless system: You eliminate recurring media costs.

What I would suggest is running some numbers on your own production costs; figure out how much you spend a year on buying HDV tape, then how much time it takes for you to capture all that footage (1 hour of footage = 1 hour of capture). When you look at both the lack of recurring media costs and the time saved in not having to capture, a tapeless format ends up paying for itself in usually 1 or 2 jobs - depending on your work.

100% agree with that, Robert. A lot of folks mused about the high costs of P2 cards (and SxS for that matter) - but, they don't realised that you only need to pay Once ... and no more after that.

Robert,
Once again, maybe I didn't make myself clear here.
I'm NOT saying tape media is better than tapeless. Anyone else get that from my post? If so, then I'm just horrible at making a point.
I'm saying the cost of P2 (or SxS) is too high considering there are cheaper alternatives out there such as CF cards and we as consumers would be much better off if the major camera companies could just agree to use these off the shelf media in their tapeless cameras. THAT is the cost savings I was talking about not the cost of tape over P2 but the cost of other available flash media over P2. Would there not be a benefit to us as consumers if this would happen? Could we not then spend less money on media and more money on additional tools that can actually have an impact on the quality of our work?

Can a fast CF card handle DVCProHD data rates? If not, then I have no point, but if so, why not just use them?

My whole point in this is that proprietary technology is bad for the consumer and I'd love to see the industry move away from that mindset of proprietary.

The idea of paying once for the media is a benefit for the manufacturer more than the consumer.

For example, in researching an HPX-500, the camera body body is going for ~$10,200.

The package at B&H with 4 16gb cards is $13,999. That's almost $4,000 for the media.

Large format DV tapes which record for the same length as 4 P2 cards in SD (4 1/2 hours) cost $20.00 each and on advice from a Panasonic tech, can be reused until the tape breaks.

So the consumer is paying up front for roughly 190 tapes worth of storage not counting any re-using.

If anything, I see it as an equal trade, tapes=cheaper P2=convenience

It is too bad that third party is not playing that large of a role like the Hoodman products, but proprietary goods have a higher margin, therfore they will always be setup by producers.

"....on advice from a Panasonic tech, can be reused until the tape breaks."

MUHAHAHAhahahahahaa...... OMG....... lmao....

Excuse me.... I have to wipe the tears out of my eyes.

That is total BS. I've worked with videotape for 25+ years. You **DO NOT REUSE TAPE, EVER**. The oxide flakes and abrades off the backing starting with the 1st pass. Anyone telling you otherwise is uneducated. Always, always, use fresh tape for every shoot. (I'm not saying that there isn't a good chance the tape will be just fine if reused a # of times, but WHY? Fresh tape is the cheapest insurance there is.)

The other issue you're neglecting is that many of us aren't interested in replacing DV tape - we're replacing BetaSP, DigiBeta & HD tape .

Good point on the higher priced tapes.


I always use a fresh tape for important work, but I often use the large format tapes 3 or 4 times and the output is the same. Not until the tape breaks, but enough to save some money.

When shooting a multicam event, I will put old tapes on the second or third camera. over the year, this saves a bit on expenses.

I know where you're coming from on expenses.... sometimes the client's budget only goes so far, and the rest is out of your pocket. That's when my "never, ever recycle tape" isn't set in stone (though I might let the client know they're not paying enough for the job to warrant fresh tape). Or if you're internal production, you do what you have to do! My reply was really aimed at shooting for a paying client. And to diss whatever Pana tech said that comment.

Received this morning from Hoodman USA:

----------------------------------------

Could you please let your P2 forum know the following information:

Hoodman Corporation has cancelled its P2 card project.
Our apologies go out to all who were interested.

Sincerely,
Lou Schmidt
VP Marketing
Hoodman Corporation