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At first glance, the P2 Gear looks like a big P2 Store with a screen. At second glance, it could be interpreted as "an HVX200 with the lens cut off." Then you look at the price tag: $3,995. And you start to wonder – just who is this product aimed at?
Well, that's what I did, at least. But after spending a bit of time with a P2 Gear at the Broadcast India show, I've got to say that most of my initial impressions were quite short-sighted. Yes it's like a big P2 Store with a screen, but way better in so many ways than the P2 Store ever was. And yes it does have a similar menu structure and capabilities as an MCR-only HVX200 (i.e., "an HVX200 with the lens cut off") but it does much, much more than that. It's actually a very neat product that fills in a lot of gaps in the P2 workflow. As to who the product's aimed at: look through the list of features and see if it's aimed at you. Maybe, maybe not. But after you discover all that this little box can do, it's hard to give it back.
It's not just "the new P2 Store," it's really a fill-in-the-blanks P2 do-everything tool. As a P2 Store replacement, for example, it doesn't include any built-in storage - but it does allow you to use any external USB or firewire drive as storage. So instead of being limited to the 60GB built into a P2 Store, you can pick up as many cheap USB or firewire drives as you want and have virtually unlimited storage, as well as a way to deliver final footage to a client at the end of the shoot. |
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And when in USB Host mode (i.e., offloading footage to a USB drive) it supplies bus-power too, so you're no longer reliant on battery-powered drive enclosures. And it also boosts the number of allowable partitions from 15 up to 23, so you can offload up to 23 cards on any one particular drive. So 23 cards x 32GB partitions = over 700GB of drive space that's directly accessible... quite an improvement over the P2 Store's limit of 60GB!
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And that's with 32GB cards; when 128GB cards come out you'll be able to offload about three (3) terabytes of footage to one single drive. |
It gets better too - the P2 Gear is about twice as fast at offloading than the P2 store was; it moves data at about 2GB per minute. And if you use USB mode instead of 1394 mode (and I highly recommend that you do) you get another nifty benefit - you can name the partitions on the hard disk, and those names will show up on your Mac desktop. What does that mean? NO MORE "NO NAME" volumes! The P2 Gear has a "software keyboard" that lets you type in the name of a volume, and that name shows up on the Mac desktop (although, curiously, not on the Windows desktop). So for Mac users who want to have easier data management, that sure seems like a nice little surprise bonus. |
Another nice feature is that you can browse the clips by the thumbnail on the external drive. You can't actually play the clips directly from an external drive, but it's nice to be able to browse them and see that at least they got there. So yes the P2 Gear is bigger and more expensive than the P2 Store, but it blows away the P2 Store on terms of usability. It doesn't have any built-in storage, but it uses interchangeable external disks, which is a feature P2 Store users have been asking for ever since the 8GB card came out. And it's a two-slot unit, so for those Mac users who've been using a P2 Store as a slot reader, this is now a two-slot reader (with firewire as well as USB) so - as a P2 Store replacement, it's a great P2 Store replacement.
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But it does a lot more than that. Lots of miscellaneous features - like HD pass-thru. You can now plug in an HD signal via firewire, and see the HD output on an HD monitor. This means you could use it as a viewer for FireStore FS-100 footage and finally be able to see the clips on a FireStore in HD. Can't do that from an HVX200, as the HVX200 doesn't pass a firewire HD signal through to its HD outputs, but P2 Gear can do it. You could also use this as a bridge product between your NLE and an HD monitor, meaning you wouldn't need a Kona or BlackMagic card. FCP users could now monitor their footage via firewire onto an HD monitor, this box'll do that.
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Speaking of HD-SDI, the P2 Gear has an HD-SDI output so you can dub directly from P2 cards (or firewire input) to an HD-SDI monitor or deck. For those whose clients insist on receiving a tape master, you could use the P2 Gear to play footage out to an HDCAM deck through HD-SDI, or to a DVCPRO-HD deck (through either firewire or HD-SDI). |
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You could also use it as a way to connect a live HD-SDI monitor to your HVX200; plug the firewire from the HVX into the P2 Gear, and the HD-SDI output to the monitor, and it'll do a live transcode to HD-SDI for you. |
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What else? How about using it as a duplicate/safety recorder, or as a director's monitor, or as a DIT station? You can connect P2 Gear to your DVCPRO-HD camera's firewire output and record on its internal P2 slots. That means you can record on the camera's internal cards and simultaneously record on the P2 gear's cards, for duplicate recording. And the firewire video image is live, so the director (or someone else) can
be monitoring the footage on the P2 Gear, remotely. And the P2 Gear has a high-resolution waveform monitor built in, its waveform monitor is much higher resolution than the ones found in the Panasonic 17" and 26" monitors. |
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And it also has a vectorscope! So in some ways you could even use the P2 Gear as sort of a "lite" version of DV Rack/OnLocation (many readers will recognize that I'm a huge fan of DV Rack; the P2 Gear gives you the most-important features of DV Rack built-in including the waveform, vectorscope, monitoring and recording). I mean, sure it's not meant to be a replacement for DV Rack/OnLocation, but hey, it sure beats not having a waveform or vectorscope. And the P2 Gear is utterly silent, with no moving parts and no fan, so the constant whirr of a laptop's cooling fan is not an issue when using the P2 Gear.
The Firewire recording capability means that the P2 Gear could also be used to convert a tape camera into a P2 camera (I'm thinking specifically of the HDX900 here; if you wanted to integrate an HDX900 into a P2 shoot, the P2 Gear could facilitate that.)
It's also multi-standard, supporting both PAL and NTSC. The unit doesn't convert from one standard to the other, but it can be used in either standard so it's a nice companion to a multi-standard HPX500, for example. |
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Another neat feature of the P2 Gear is text-memo subclipping. This is a feature found on the top-of-the-line P2 equipment such as the HPX2000 and HPX3000. Basically, you can set text memos in your footage just like you can on an HVX200 or HPX500, but on the P2 Gear you can take it a step further. On the HPX500/HVX200, a text memo is simply a marker in the footage, a place where you can later go in (using P2CMS or P2 Viewer) and add a text message. But on the P2 Gear (or HPX2000/HPX3000) those text memos can be used to mark sub-clips in a larger clip, and you can then extract those sub-clips and create new clips from them. So, let's say you record a half-hour interview, but you want to extract sound bites from that interview. |
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As you're reviewing the footage, you press the "TEXT MEMO" button at the start and end of any pertinent sections that you want to extract. Then you tell the P2 Gear to create new clips of those sections, and it'll export those subclips as their own clips on a new card. This way you can pre-edit the footage in the field and prepare for the real edit. You can also extract only the pertinent sections from a long clip and then delete the long clip freeing up space in the field. |
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For digital signage usage or presentations, the P2 Gear can be set in a repeat-play mode so it'll continuously play all footage on its cards, looping automatically. And for 35mm adapter users who want an upside-down monitoring solution, the P2 Gear's |
LCD can be set to automatically reverse the footage. This is useful for live monitoring, but it's also handy for playback, in that even though your adapter's footage may have been recorded upside down, you can play it back right-side up. |
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| Overall, the P2 Gear has enough handy features to make it a great companion to an HVX200 or HPX500 shooter. The unlimited bus-powered storage capacity alone would make it worth it to a lot of users. But do you need it? Only you can answer that question. Some people will take one look at it and say "of course I need that" and others will look at it and say "well, yeah, but I can do all that stuff on a laptop computer." (Other than HD-SDI output, and the silent operation). The price tag is not insignificant, at US $3995.00. I'm not sure I need it enough to justify the price tag, but for many others I'm sure it's a no-brainer decision. One thing is for sure: whether you can afford it or not, it's an addictive little box that's hard to give up! |
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