Another alternative P2 card
 

Has anyone tried this? Haha. Does anyone know what actually prevents it from working? I'm guessing Panasonic is pulling a "Sony Style" on the internals of P2 cards.

I know this seems like I might be kidding but wouldn't it be nice to be able to swap extremely cheap 4gb SD cards? Two sd to pcmcia card readers and a truck load of 150x 4gb (30-40 bones at newegg) to do the superbowl shuffle.

Speed wise 150x sd cards write/read at 22.5MB/s which is about twice the bandwidth needed. 100mbit/s dvcpro HD equals about 12.5MB/s.

Sorry, won't work, as the HVX200 won't recognize it as a P2 card.

Right. If you look at the LCD you'll see that it doesn't work.

Why though?

When the HVX was first released P2 cards were a precious commodity and very hard to get, so creative crazies like myself tried multiple methods of "home grown" P2 to no avail.

Unlike simple RAM, P2 cards actually have an on-board RAID controller built into the card - because P2 is in fact (4) SD-RAM modules in a RAID-0 array. Hence, the cameras software is specifically looking for communication protocols coming from the P2 card itself, which is something simple RAM does not provide. That's one of the reasons 3rd party P2 devices like the Cineporter and now Hoodman's version of P2 has taken so long to come to market, they've got to be sure the card and camera communicate properly.

Trust me, the notion of cheaper, easier-to-get media for the P2 cameras has been pondered, tested, and been the subject of philosophical debate ever since the 200 was released. "It is what it is" seems to fit.