dumping P2

[brianluce]

How long will it take to dump a 8gig P2 into a 3.2 GHZ desktop? in hd mode....

[mmm]

Depends on your hard drive's speed. The P2 can transfer at 640Mbps so that is unlikely to be the weakest link in the chain. I would expect you to get a little over realtime transfer with a SATA drive. Would you be transfering straight from the camera?

[Jan_Crittenden]

Not sure of the transfer rate of the computer but if you look for that spec you you be able to figure it out. I know it takes about 2-3 minutes to dump the 4 gig card. On the p2 store it is the slowest, 1 min per gig. Everything else is faster.

Hope that helps,

Jan

[eLeventy]

Mmh,

First of all, HD 1080i, 720p, DV25, ... makes no difference. It's filetransfer, a 8 GB file of HD takes as long as a 8GB SD file. You only get less minutes of footage per minute transfer.


Theoretically, a P2 Card does 640Mbps, which is 80 MB per second ( megabit - megabyte), which is 4.8GB per minute. So, that would mean a 8GB card is transferred in 1.6 minutes.

The P2 Store apparantly does 4GB in 4 minutes to its internal 2.5" Hard disk.
The lower speed is explained by a) slower 2.5" disks and b) overhead. So a transfer speed of 1GB/min seems more realistic.

However. ( there always seems to be an 'however') Although the P2 card itself is capable of 640Mbps, a USB connection is maxed out at 480Mbps( burst or 'peak', not sustained) and a firewire at 400Mbps( sustained). This gives a transfer speed of 50MBps or 3GB per minute. That's the theory. In practice, probably around 2GB per minute.

You should be able to bump it up by bypassing the firewire or USB2.0 connection, and using a PCMCIA Cardbus connection. A laptop has this, but it's drives are way to slow. You can buy PCI Cardbus adapters for a workstation. And even then you need some pretty fast harddrives ( actualy RAID0 or RAID5 storage) to be able to accept a sustained 80MBps dataflow. ( a typical off the shelf HD only does 50MBps)

This is all theory. Next 2 weeks we will be testing various P2 hardware. One of the tests will be transfer speeds in a variety of setups. I'll post some results as we get them.

[robroysyd]

Can someone explain to me why these P2 cards are so expensive, this really smacks of a total ripoff when one can buy the same capacity and speed as Compact Flash for a fraction of the price and one can buy a reader in any computer store?
And before anyone tries to tell us there's anything special about P2 cards that CF doesn't offer, Grass Valley / Thompson seems to think them good enough for their latest cameras.
Just to be fair I'd ask the same question of Sony and their BluRay write once/ XDCAM concept when again Grass Valley can achieve the same result with rewritable Rev disks from Iomega.
Grass Valley have shown the way forward, let's get rid of these proprietary formats, be they from Sony or Panasonic. Just looking at the price of a BluRay disks over the life of a XDCAM and it'd pay for another camera, I'd bet Panasonic are hoping for a matching cash cow out of lost / stolen P2 cards as well.
I suspect Panasonic knew the P2 card was a bad idea from day one, why else did one have to sign a NDA just to find out what they were going to cost.
Now Panasonic could easily change the HVX200 to use CF cards instead of P2 or if it's too late / not enough money to be made doing that then I don't think it'll take someone in China too long to make a P2 to CF adaptor.

[wigby]

Can someone explain to me why these P2 cards are so expensive, this really smacks of a total ripoff when one can buy the same capacity and speed as Compact Flash for a fraction of the price and one can buy a reader in any computer store?

they might be a ripoff but not a total ripoff. they do offer high raid speeds and reliability that a straight cf or sd cannot. i'm sure panasonic planned on inflated p2 card prices to subsidize the r&d of this and other cams that use them. i think they should have spent more time developing reliable and cost effective media for this cam but only the market will tell.

[Pluimer]

I'll bump, instead of making a new thread...

I'm dumping the P2 cards onto my Compaq laptop through the PCMCIA slot. It's a P4 2.3(ish...cant remember the exact speed), with 512 RAM and a standard laptop 60gb drive.

It's taking anywhere from 18-25 minutes to dump a full 4GB card. I'm dragging and copying the P2 folders onto folders on my hard drive.

Any idea what could be causing this slow down? When played in the P2 Viewer program, I can play it back in real time, but when it comes to copying it to the HD, it slows down terribly. Think this is just due to a slow laptop HDD?

Or maybe something else? Any feedback or advice is much appreciated. Thanks.

[Barry_Green]

Something's seriously wrong; I can copy a 4gb card on my Dell in about 3 minutes. I don't know if your laptop hard drive is slow; can you try copying to an external firewire drive and see what kind of performance you get?

[n8ture]

How much room do you have left on your hard drive? I know when mine gets a little to full, it bogs down quite a bit.
It should only take like 3 minutes or so to dump a 4 gig card max.

P2 cards are expensive for a couple reasons. One, Panasonic is the only company making them. Two, they use zero error chips which are the cream of the crop and thus more expensive.

I've never had a dropout on the cards once. For the work I do a single dropout could be a disaster. I can't afford it. So, I'll gladly pay to ensure they work the first time, everytime.

[Pluimer]

Something's seriously wrong; I can copy a 4gb card on my Dell in about 3 minutes. I don't know if your laptop hard drive is slow; can you try copying to an external firewire drive and see what kind of performance you get?

Hey Barry,

Yeah, when I transfer it straight to an external USB2.0 drive, it takes about 5 minutes. So, anything that involves my laptop's HDD slows everything down tremendously. I've updated all the drivers, so I think I might just try a fresh WinXP install and see if that helps.

Any other ideas? I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

[ozduc]

8 GB card takes 5 1/2 mins to dump from the PCMCIA slot of a G4 1.5ghz powerbook to a G-Raid via FW800. When on location I use an Acomdata FW400 bus powered 5400rpm drive and it takes about 6 1/2 to 7 mins.

[Pluimer]

Well, I never really figured out what the problem was, but I did a total reformat on my HDD and a fresh WinXP install and that seems to have done the trick.

I love my P2 at full speed.