A few questions about P2 in the future...

withuk

withuk

Active member
A few questions about P2 in the future...
  • With P2 cards being the size and shape they are, does anyone know or can speculate as to what would be the maximum capacity that they will be able to reach in the future?
  • As the P2 cards capacity increases year on year, will the one's with the largest capacity always have a MSRP of around $1,650? (Of course not taking inflation into account)
  • I have heard about the Hoodman 3rd party P2 card but is this a reality and will it be ever be fully working? and if so any details or a release date?
  • There always seems to be a shortage of P2 cards, are there any plans to have them more mass produced?
 
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I dropped my crystal ball on my toe this AM, so really can't give too clear an insight into the future. However, what I can say is that you are referring to the Hoodman variant of P2 cards. So far, we have heard nothing more from Hoodman. Alas as Spec Comm found out, sometimes one has all the right intentions and believes all the right technology and marketing-- but getting that product to market proves a little more difficult.

Ned Soltz
 
The roadmap I have heard of listed P2 cards up to 128GB. Of course, not to say that they won't go higher but if they do, it won't be for a while. Mmmm....I am imagining 336 minutes of 720 24PN per card and it will be sweet.

Dan
 
I wouldn't expect much to come from the Hoodman cards.

The sky is the limit I think with the future of P2 storage capacity, but ask yourself this....how long do you want to wait for a card to offload. Even at great speeds like 2 gigs per minute a 128 would still take an hour to offload. I'll be happy with a few 32's.
 
shorelinedigital said:
The sky is the limit I think with the future of P2 storage capacity, but ask yourself this....how long do you want to wait for a card to offload. Even at great speeds like 2 gigs per minute a 128 would still take an hour to offload. I'll be happy with a few 32's.
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The time to offload is relative to how much you shoot, increased P2 card capacities don't penalize you with longer offload times.

With some tools you can edit (or start to edit) right off the cards. Edius for example will let you work with the card contents almost immediately while the clips are being transferred to the hard disk in the background, and when the transfer is complete your project is updated to refer to the clips in the new location. The ability to preview clips before you even bother to offload them is also invaluable: no more two-pass tape batch captures.

P2 is such a huge improvement over tape-based workflows and realtime transfers, it's not even funny.
 
withuk said:
With P2 cards being the size and shape they are, does anyone know or can speculate as to what would be the maximum capacity that they will be able to reach in the future?
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At least 128GB. There may not be a practical limit as to how large they can grow; look at microSD cards -- you could fit a lot of those inside a P2 shell. So maybe someday they'll be a terabyte, but we know they'll go to a minimum of 128GB.
  • As the P2 cards capacity increases year on year, will the one's with the largest capacity always have a MSRP of around $1,650? (Of course not taking inflation into account)
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No, that'll always be coming down. The 8GB card had an announced price tag of $2750. It came down to $2200 by the time it was actually shipping. So with the 32GB card debuting at $1650, that's already much less than the initial price of the 8GB, so there's no reason to think that $1650 (or any other number) will always be a prevailing introductory price. The prevailing introductory price has moved steadily downward so far.
  • I have heard about the Hoodman 3rd party P2 card but is this a reality and will it be ever be fully working? and if so any details or a release date?
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Nobody knows anything yet.
  • There always seems to be a shortage of P2 cards, are there any plans to have them more mass produced?
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We can hope. The factory's increasing capacity, but they're also having great success in landing P2 into large broadcasters, so additional capacity is being sucked up by additional huge customers. That's good for pricing for us, but not good for availability. As card size increases, though, users will need (not want, but need) less of them, so hopefully by the time the 32's are out (or at least the 64's) they can start to get ahead of the supply/demand curve.
 
shorelinedigital said:
I wouldn't expect much to come from the Hoodman cards.

The sky is the limit I think with the future of P2 storage capacity, but ask yourself this....how long do you want to wait for a card to offload. Even at great speeds like 2 gigs per minute a 128 would still take an hour to offload. I'll be happy with a few 32's.
Click to expand...

If you had a 512 GB card, you could shoot all day and offload overnight. Sign me up! In a couple of years, P2 will be THE format for run & gun documentary simply because you can just choose to never stop rolling.
 
Yea and if a HVX like camera starts to have an AVC-HD 25mbps variant...... Ooooooo, such delicious long record times......
 
mrWr0ng said:
If you had a 512 GB card, you could shoot all day and offload overnight. Sign me up! In a couple of years, P2 will be THE format for run & gun documentary simply because you can just choose to never stop rolling.
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At some point the battery could become the stopper....
 
these are crystal ball questions that have little bearing on reality. can we look at history and specs and predict the winner of the 2011 superbowl? - CERTAINLY and it will be pretty accurate until unforseen variables come into play...

same logic applies to this question. i paid $1300 for an 8gig card less than a year ago. now you can get a card double that size for $300 more. this kind of logic has always applied to everything in technology. and will continue to do so. unless of course some unforseen new tech revolution changes things - and sometimes it does!

dont waste your time worrying about the price or size of whats around the corner. a 16gig card will pay for itself in a day or two of work. and there isnt much on the horizon thats going to suddenly make it obsolete.

buy one and get shooting ; )
 
wgzn said:
i paid $1300 for an 8gig card less than a year ago. now you can get a card double that size for $300 more.)
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Not sure the math works on that one. You could get a card 4x the size for $300 more, or you could get a card double the size for $400 less. :thumbsup:
 
im basing that math on cards that i can actually put my hands on currently on an on demand basis ; )
 
wgzn said:
dont waste your time worrying about the price or size of whats around the corner. a 16gig card will pay for itself in a day or two of work. and there isnt much on the horizon thats going to suddenly make it obsolete.
Click to expand...

I wasn't worrying, I was just asking a few questions and am interested in the answers.

wgzn said:
buy one and get shooting ; )
Click to expand...

I already own a HVX, 2 x 16Gb cards and am in production of several projects
 
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