Beyond P2

[andybiz_2005]

Well, I've heard about holographic media technology for some time which stores bits of data in 3 dimensional space on the medium itself as oppossed to 2D as in CDs, or DVDs. But I'm sure holographic technology is still decades away from being a reality. Perhaps in the future, camcorders will have holographic drives inside them that can store hundreds of terabytes of data on them.

Andrew

 

[Jan_Crittenden]

I think what has been said is that the cost/GB would follow Moores Law. I don't dispute that. But the point at issue is whether a 16GB card (say) will remain available for a number of years with it's cost halving year on year.

Well the 16GB card will likely be here for a while, don't know that it will be as desireable when the 64s come out. Kind of like looking for the 64MB SD card, you can't find them as the industry has moved on. But I do expect that its price will fall, just as the 8GBs fell.

I've been told that is not the model for P2 development, but if you care to say differently I shall be very happy - it is what's needed.

It has not only been the model, it is pretty much what we have done. The 8 GBs came into existance in January of 06, they fell in July, I think, to 1200, after starting at 1800, then have fallen again to 700. in April 2007. While it is not exactly a year, it is a falling in price. Fully believe they will be here until after the 32GBs come in and then we will guage.

Errr.. well yes, but presumably at much higher cost than an 8GB one.........

But at which point in time. It will be introduced at the very same price point as the 8GB card did back in Jan. 2006.

But that aside, can you guarantee me that that 32GB card, that "30minute card", will remain available for a number of years to come - cost halving year on year, Moores Law?

Most of that will depend on whether the memory that makes it possible remains available but I do believe the bigger cards will have longer market spans.

Expensive..... compared to P2........!? Regarding why anyone should wish to go there, then two answers are instant archivability and the ability to hand rushes immediately to a client after shooting. No laptops, no P2 store, no downloading time. But OK, in other circumstances solid state may be a better way to go. I'm certainly not saying "disc is best", period, - rather I'd like to be able to make the "horses for courses" choice shoot by shoot.

Actually yes compared to P2, as P2 is not my storage mechanism it is a piece of equipment. My storage costs can get as low as 25 cents a GB and as time goes on Archive costs continue to go down. This number is just referencing the Quantum 600 metadata aware drive, unlike the disk that goes on the shelf at a dollar a GB. The Express card stuff will enjoy this same economy as well but disc based will continue to be as expensive as tape. My customers are handing off USB or Firewire drives with material and their clients are editing not digitizing. And again the Expess Card will enjoy this workflow as well. And lastly just because it is on the shelf does not mean you have an archive, you have a shelf of tapes or Discs because without the DataBase to manage it, it isn't an archive. It is a thing that can move or be lost and if what is on it is not logged to the outside, you will not be able to find things quickly.

So likewise is DVCProHD with it's restricted horizontal resolution (960 for 720p, cf 1280 for square pixels), and high bitrates relative to HD XDCAM. ALL Tv production systems are inevitably compromises between cost/quality/practicality, and DVCProHD is no exception. I'm not holding the HD XDCAM codecs out as "bee's knees", - the compromises are just in different places

But this is the very bottom line here. If the technology existed 4 years ago when we started down this path that would allow us to record up to 100Mbs on Disc, we may not have ever looked around the corner to see Solid State. That was a compromise we were unwilling to make. To our good fortune we didn't and so we had to make something that would have the potential to hold lots of time, have legs for the future, be robust enough to not care about the environment and provide a means to work the workflow. We did that with P2. We made a robust RAID out of 4 SD High Speed, High Quality Cards(Level 7) and because of that we were able to bring DVCPRO HD down to a $6000 camera. And trust me that limited horizontal res you reference didn't get in the way of the HPX500 kicking the Long GOP XDCAM 350's images in our booth at NAB. It was nothing more than a scene of flowing water over rocks with a simple this to that comparison. No Blockies in the river water in DVCPRO HD. It isn't just the card it is also the CODEC.

Best,

Jan

 

[Jan_Crittenden]

Which may be why over the last 10-15 years I haven't seen that many Panasonic cameras.............. Just what were the comparative sales of M2 versus Betacam, Jan?

The interesting thing about MII was that if was an outstanding format and over the course of its lifespan only improved in the quality of its output and the price of the machines came down. You could buy a $11,000 MII machine that had the same quality specs as the first $36,000 machine. The same is not true in Betacam SP. Sony dropped the color resolution and the hi-fi audio in the PVW series and in the UVW series they even dropped the luminance resolution.

But this is history, we stopped making MII machines in 1997. Here Beta SP was replaced with DVCPRO, some folks that had real big bucks to spend bought Digi-Beta.

And to answer the question on how many of these to those. Last number I heard thrown around as I really don't know was that the Beta SP hit around 375,000 machines and MII was somewhere it the !80,000s. Was it the more popular, no, but that really didn't matter to those that bought it, and to us, we learned some major lessons on how to be a broadcast manufacturer. Which is why and how DVCPRO became the defacto broadcast standard here in the US, beyond the fact that DVCPRO was an awsome format.

But this is an entirely different discussion and I do not want to hi-jack the thread to talk history.

So how about that solid state recording? It is where the world is going and nothing can stop it. Find an audio guy and look at his recording device, it will be some sort of Flash memory. Walk into any newpaper in the world and find a film camera, it will likely have dust all over it. Digital stills have revolutionized the newspaper industry. Video will follow, it aways has. Digital Audio was first, video followed.

Best,

Jan

 

[harddrive]

It has not only been the model, it is pretty much what we have done. The 8 GBs came into existance in January of 06, they fell in July, I think, to 1200, after starting at 1800, then have fallen again to 700. in April 2007. While it is not exactly a year, it is a falling in price. Fully believe they will be here until after the 32GBs come in and then we will guage.

Yes, but I've heard that something like the $100 price point per card for 30 minutes is seen as when the explosion of usage will really happen. Cheap enough that editing can take place directly from the card with eventual reusage, rather than the imperative to immediately download and reuse.

Do you expect there to be 8GB $100 P2 cards available in June 2010? (Moores Law) It's not what I've been told - rather that the P2 model predicts 64GB cards for around $800. Same cost/GB, but for many users 8x 8GB cards are far more useful than a single 64GB one. My understanding is that the SxS architecture will allow you to buy either 8x8GB or a single 64GB for similar prices, as preferred, but that won't be the case with P2 pricing. Compact Flash is available at the moment here for about £10/GB - with sizes ranging from 1 to 16GB, prices from about £13 to £170 last I looked. That is the model I would like to see (and expect) SxS to follow.

My storage costs can get as low as 25 cents a GB and as time goes on Archive costs continue to go down. This number is just referencing the Quantum 600 metadata aware drive, .............

It's rather a dead horse, but that takes no account of the value of the time spent doing the archiving, or the equipment necessary to do it. Of course, the disc figures don't include the cost of putting the shelf up, or the effort of lifting the disc on to it.........

And lastly just because it is on the shelf does not mean you have an archive, you have a shelf of tapes or Discs because without the DataBase to manage it, it isn't an archive. It is a thing that can move or be lost and if what is on it is not logged to the outside, you will not be able to find things quickly.

I'd understood that project data could indeed be written on to one of the discs in a project, to provide a full project archive, not simply a media archive?

It isn't just the card it is also the CODEC.

True, but this thread is really about the hardware rather than the software. I don't want to get bogged down in codec comparisons (except to say my own experiences don't show your rivals in anything like the terrible light you paint them), but maintain that both XDCAM HD and DVCProHD are both compromises at the end of the day, albeit in different ways.

And they are both block based at that. When are either you or Sony going to be able to make the next really big advance, to something wavelet based, like JPEG2000?

Maybe, just maybe, in a few years time, there will be a common industry standard of not just a common hardware card, but a common (wavelet based) codec? Then again, pigs might fly.

 

[Barry_Green]

harddrive, this is kind of pointless. You're arguing about what may happen with a Sony product, taking a stance that's diametrically opposed to every indicator history's ever given. Versus what we can see actually *is* happening.

I know you don't think P2 is a good solution, you think it's too expensive. But what you think, isn't what's driving what's happening. What's happening is that P2 is being rapidly adopted and is trouncing XDCAM in just about every head-to-head decision. In the US, there are about 176 TV stations that have converted to a tapeless system. The scorecard as I understand it is: P2, 170. XDCAM-HD, 6.

The BBC surely knew about XDCAM and the forthcoming XDCAM-EX, and they just standardized on DVCPRO-HD. The Australian ABC has been buying Sony since day one. They just ditched it all to go with P2 systems.

In America, when stations transitioned from BetaSP to digital, some 70%+ of TV stations went DVCPRO, not DVCAM.

I know Europe's different, Panasonic gear is more expensive over there. Over here a 2/3" HPX500 is half the cost of a 1/2" XDCAM F350; over there they're about the same price. Over here it's no contest, P2's wiping the floor with XDCAM from all I've been able to gather.

You want a standard format -- we all do. We all wish that was possible, back when VHS was VHS and Beta was Beta. Even DV was largely DV. HDV isn't, there's three different variants of it with various levels of incompatibility. But SxS? Standardizing on a Sony-proprietary format? That will never happen. If you want to standardize on memory, why not CompactFlash or SD, formats that are so incredibly prevalent that they're already commodities, and not proprietary to anyone?

Here's the other thing: you talk about pricing, and how SxS will be less expensive. I don't think it's gonna happen, whether it's "conventional wisdom" or not. Why? Because Panasonic is the largest SD maker in the world, and they control every aspect of the P2 production process. They're not beholden to anyone, they didn't subcontract or farm it out anywhere. If SxS tries to undercut them, they can respond to the furthest degree possible. If they decide to get competitive on price, I doubt there's any manufacturer who could compete with them. Yes cheap commodity memory (that's not really comparable) will be cheaper, but for a comparable-level technology? I think Panasonic will be able to compete on price. Panasonic's a bigger company than Sony, they have higher sales figures than Sony, and their size isn't diluted by owning movie studios and music labels and whatever else either.

P2 will never be a consumer format. It's not really going to be the prosumer format either, that's what AVC-HD is for. It's a professional format, and among professional customers it's blowing XDCAM-HD away. If you really wanted an interchangeable standardized format, ask why Sony didn't go with the established format that's already in use by over 300 broadcast entities worldwide? I mean, as long as we've got to standardize on one or the other, why not go with the one that's got four years' history?

With all that said, good luck to Sony and their XDCAM-EX system. It can only serve to bring P2 prices down faster.

 

[Jan_Crittenden]

Yes, but I've heard that something like the $100 price point per card for 30 minutes is seen as when the explosion of usage will really happen. Cheap enough that editing can take place directly from the card with eventual reusage, rather than the imperative to immediately download and reuse.

The larger the card the less the need for offloading. Right now we can't handle the explosion of usage that we are experiencing. I mean this point would be entertaininng if I was sitting here with a warehouse of product I couldn't sell, but that is far from the case.

Do you expect there to be 8GB $100 P2 cards available in June 2010? (Moores Law) It's not what I've been told - rather that the P2 model predicts 64GB cards for around $800.

The 64GB card will come in probably where all of the other cards have initially come in, and will go down from there. Don't know if the 8GBs wil still be available as the 2 GB memory that we used to make them has been difficult to get virtually from day one. And Moore's law does not say that new memory will come in at a reduced price. It says that memory will double every year and the prices will fall. i.e. a 256MB flash card will come in initially at a price and will drop in price over its time in the market. The 576MB card that comes in later comes in at it price and falls over time. It is not required to come in at the 256 card's current price, but as Moore's law works the program it will eventually get there. That is the model here.

That is the model I would like to see (and expect) SxS to follow.

We shall see when they have a product.

It's rather a dead horse, but that takes no account of the value of the time spent doing the archiving, or the equipment necessary to do it. Of course, the disc figures don't include the cost of putting the shelf up, or the effort of lifting the disc on to it.........

However you are negleting to remember that in order for the Disc stuff to be used, it has to be transferred into a system, that is the same time as that used in the initial work on P2. And you could off load the P2 to the final edit disks is you want, and run the backup at the same timelike with the new Webetech Mini-Raid.

I'd understood that project data could indeed be written on to one of the discs in a project, to provide a full project archive, not simply a media archive?

You can work the data anyway you want to.

True, but this thread is really about the hardware rather than the software. I don't want to get bogged down in codec comparisons (except to say my own experiences don't show your rivals in anything like the terrible light you paint them), but maintain that both XDCAM HD and DVCProHD are both compromises at the end of the day, albeit in different ways.

You should have been at NAB.

And they are both block based at that. When are either you or Sony going to be able to make the next really big advance, to something wavelet based, like JPEG2000?

Yes they are but the key difference is that my blocks are not dependent on the previous frames blocks. I think that AVC-I is a the next big thing, it is itraframe predicitve which gives it a low bit rate and high quality. Wavelet is a little old and dated.

Maybe, just maybe, in a few years time, there will be a common industry standard of not just a common hardware card, but a common (wavelet based) codec? Then again, pigs might fly.

I think those days are long gone because now we are working at data level. I agree pigs will fly first. I actually own a T-Shirt with flying pigs on it and love it.

Best,

Jan

 

[Jim Carswell]

Barry,
Well said and on point.
Jim (a former Sony Beta SX user turned P2 user)

 

[harddrive]

OK, I think pretty much everything that can be said about this at the moment has been said, and it's now time to sit back and wait with interest for facts. But just a comment about two matters.

You want a standard format -- we all do. .......... But SxS? Standardizing on a Sony-proprietary format? That will never happen. If you want to standardize on memory, why not CompactFlash or SD, formats that are so incredibly prevalent that they're already commodities, and not proprietary to anyone?

I fully agree Compact Flash would be a very good idea, with maybe SD for smaller cameras, I've absolutely no disagreement there. But is SxS Sony proprietry? I thought it was a joint initiative between Sandisk and Sony, and hence usable by others than Sony? The original press release was at http://www.sandisk.com/Corporate/PressRoom/PressReleases/PressRelease.aspx?ID=3770 .

The BBC surely knew about XDCAM and the forthcoming XDCAM-EX, and they just standardized on DVCPRO-HD.

It's not quite as simple as that. The BBC certainly gave it's backing to solid state over disc in a big way in PRINCIPLE some time ago, but AFAIK they haven't yet committed to ANY tapeless camera format. Most production here is still SD - mainly Digibeta and DVCAM - though an increasing amount of top end work (drama and high end documentary) is being made in HD for overseas sales and the future, and that applies to the BBC as well at the moment.

What I did see announced was that the BBCs Factual Studios was specifying DVCProHD (tape, the HDX900) as an interim step for big projects that required to be made in HD NOW, and for the reasons above. See http://www.tvbeurope.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=585&Itemid=46 . There is obviously then an expectation that there will then be a migration to P2 for Factual at least, but at the moment the BBC as a whole doesn't seem to have made a firm public commitment to any tapeless format. I gather their drama output is currently being produced with a wide range of cameras, including the Viper.

If you are aware of any more recent announcements regarding their plans, I would be very grateful if you could provide a link.