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Reader SurveyHave You Hugged Your Metadata Today? Part 1
Mar 10, 2008 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer
About P2
I’ll describe P2 technology within the concept of the AG-HVX200 camcorder, which can record DV as well as DVCPRO, DVCPRO 50, or DVCPRO HD to P2 cards installed in the slots in the back beneath the viewfinder. P2 cards themselves consist of four high-speed SD memory cards configured as a RAID array with an LSI controller, all packed into a PC Card (formerly PCMCIA).
If you have the right slot on your laptop—as I do on my HP Compaq 8710w—and the right drivers from Panasonic, you can pop the P2 card from the camera and insert it into your notebook and start editing. Or you can connect the camera to your computer via a FireWire cable and start editing.
The HVX200 has two P2 slots (some camcorders have as many as five). P2 cards are formatted to FAT 32, which any video gray hair will tell you means that files can’t exceed 4GB in size. During recording, the HVX200 will record one 4GB file, then blithely move on to the next. The camcorder will similarly jump from card 1 to card to 2 after filling up the first card with video data. At maximum current capacities of 32GB per card and 100Mbps for DVCPRO HD, this means a shooting duration of slightly more than 64 minutes. Of course, you can store any format to the P2 card, so at DV rates, you could store more than 4 hours of video on the same cards.
P2 cards are expensive, with the 32GB cards costing $1,549.95 at B&H Photo Video as I write this article. (Obviously, the cards are reusable, and prices have dropped pretty quickly in all fairness to Panasonic.) In contrast, the Sony Premium DV tapes I use for my HDV camcorders cost less than $3 in bulk. In this regard, if your average shot lasts 60 minutes rather than 60 seconds, P2 has historically made little sense.
While everyone but Panasonic wishes that P2 cards were cheaper, the markets primarily served by P2 obviously found the overall economics of the device highly cost effective. For example, in the electronic news-gathering market, where velocity and throughput are key, the ability to hand a P2 card to an editor and have them immediately productive, as opposed to cueing and capturing a tape and then finding the right scene, is obviously alluring.
Similarly, filmmakers typically shoot in very short intervals, and are used to delays relating to loading and unloading film, not to mention the film development time. Dumping the contents of a P2 card to disc where it could be immediately viewed is a huge advantage over true film-based workflows.
None of this even considers the potential economic value of the metadata that accompanies the video stored on P2. Let’s have quick look at the MXF format and then return to the metadata.
