Alternative to P2 Cards!?!?

[the_producer]

I keep reading how the P2 card will only hold a few minutes of HD and cost at least a grand. Well, it just seems useless to me until it can hold an hour of HD.

So what about Hard drive recording. Like what you can currently use for the DVX. Now I realize that the transfer rate is about 100 mbps (correct me if I am wrong, I am guessing), so you would need a raid of 4 hard drives. I would think that you could raid together 4 2.5 inch, 80 to 100 gig, 4200 laptop HD's, that that would give you around 1/3 a terabyte which is a few hours of HD.

Power would be another problem. The unit would already be big. Mabey microdrives. Like the 5gig one from seagate. Put 4 together. That is about 1 hour of HD video. Very small case, until you add the battery, but still about the size of a normal unit now. I think it could be produced a sold for about 1500. The price of a P2 card but with an hour of video.

What do you guys think?

[xander76]

So what about Hard drive recording. *Like what you can currently use for the DVX. *Now I realize that the transfer rate is about 100 mbps (correct me if I am wrong, I am guessing), so you would need a raid of 4 hard drives.

I don't think you would need a RAID. First off, 720p DVCPROHD's data rate depends on the frame rate, so 24p should only be 40Mbps and 30p should be 50Mbps. (We don't actually have confirmation that the new camera will record it at 40/50Mbps, but indications are pretty good.) A 2.5 inch laptop hard drive can handle 40-50Mbps no problem and might be able to handle 100Mbps. For example, the standalone hard drive reader for P2 cards that Panasonic just announced has a transfer rate of about 1GB/minute, which is about 130Mbps.

That being said, there is no indication that Panasonic intends to create such a device. They might, though, as might any one of a number of companies.

[Flintstone]

Let's be careful, there is a distinction between Mpbs and MBps. b = bits, and B = bytes. A standard 2.5" laptop hard drive (5400RPM), should be able to transfer a single stream of 100Mbps video as a dedicated task. It goes without saying that lower bit rates should be a breeze.

[Zig_Zigman]

They said there was a tape drive in the camera, so if you don't want to record onto p2 drives, use the tape drive.


Or build your own *L*, which seems to be a viable alternative these days.

[Zig_Zigman]

think of it as shooting film - you only get 11 minutes on a 400ft 16mm roll before you have to change. So 8 or 10 or 12 mins on a p2 card isn't so bad. Might make you more judicious in your shot selection. Plus storage times will go up and prices down in the next few years.

And in this case, you can slip the p2 drive out, offload the data into a hard drive in 4 mins, and slip the p2 card back in the cam.

Shooting a doc? Get two p2 cards. Too expensive? You bought the wrong cam, go back and get the dvx100a.