Upgraded P2 5 slot Media drive announcement

Jarred Land

Jarred Land

President/Founder
Staff member
Panasonic announced that at NAB 2006 it will unveil the all new AJ-PCD20
a new five-slot P2 solid-state memory drive. The P2 internal/external drive is designed for high-speed file
transfer of 25Mbps DVCPRO or 50Mbps DVCPRO50 video into nonlinear editing systems and servers.
With the AJ-PCD20, a user can mount five 8 GB P2 cards (containing up to 160 minutes of recordings
in DVCPRO, 80 minutes in DVCPRO50 and 40 minutes in DVCPRO HD) at the same time and have access
to the contents on all five cards for continuous editing of recorded clips in sequence. With the AJ-PCD20,
digitizing is eliminated, so that material can be accessed almost instantaneously.
AJ-PCD20-P2-drive.JPG


As an internal drive, the AJ-PCD20 installs in a standard PC type 5.25" bay drive enclosure, and through its
high-speed USB 2.0 or IEEE 1394b interfaces, connects to the host computer, and through that computer to
a television station’s local area network (LAN). For in-the-field use, the AJ-PCD20 serves as a stand-alone
external drive and teams with a notebook PC or Mac PowerBook for editing and playback. The drive offers
Windows 2000/XP and Mac OS X compatibility.

The AJ-PCD20 card drive will be available inJuly.
 
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not yet.. im hoping it will be a little less than the last one.. we all know its not just a shell but still that old price was pretty insane.
 
"have access to the contents on all five cards for continuous editing of recorded clips in sequence. With the AJ-PCD20, digitizing is eliminated, so that material can be accessed almost instantaneously."


As it stands now, you cannot edit natively with MXF on FCP without ingesting the footage first. I wonder if NAB has something new for FCP users? Hmmmm... Jan was hinting at something for NAB.
 
OK,

Now can someone tell me just what does this new P2 Drive do that the current one does not? Or is Panny just re-announcing it since nobody in their right mind would buy the current one for $2500?
 
Jarred Land said:
The P2 internal/external drive is designed for high-speed file
transfer of 25Mbps DVCPRO or 50Mbps DVCPRO50 video into nonlinear editing systems and servers.
Click to expand...

Hmmm... why no mention of DVCProHD here?
 
I'm going to guess that there will be an update to the P2 Store with more hard disk space and an addition of Firewire.
 
bgundu said:
It's also Mac compatible now.
Click to expand...

The AJ-PCD10 is Mac compatible already... Or at least it has been shown in pictures on Panny's site connected to a Mac and it was originally advertised that way. I have the PCD10 PDF brochure from about 5 months ago that shows it connected to a G5 and speaks of its virtues for both Mac and PC systems. Looking over the announcement and info tidbits available for the new PCD20 and comparing to the current model, it seems Firewire is the only new feature.
 
ullanta said:
Hmmm... why no mention of DVCProHD here?
Click to expand...

Because they are talking about high speed transfer and you will not get high speed transfer of DVCPro100, yet. The cards are designed with enough speed for a 100 Mbps, real-time transfer and there is probably not enough headroom to transfer signficantly higher than real-time. With DVCPro50 or 25, the situation is obviously different, with realistic transfer speeds of 2x or 4x possible, and that is what is described in the announcement. It makes sense, given the state of the technology, today.

cheers,
crc
 
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