16gb P2

Just saw a Fry's ad today touting 4 gb SD cards. That means that they are starting to hit the streets. So, end of year sounds good for 16 gb P2 cards considering the low yields of the zero-defect SD cards. But, to add some controversy to the thread, in just a brief time working with P2, I much prefer working with more smaller cards than fewer larger cards. In other words, I'd prefer 4x 4gb cards over 1 16gb.

Ned Soltz
 
nsoltz said:
But, to add some controversy to the thread, in just a brief time working with P2, I much prefer working with more smaller cards than fewer larger cards. In other words, I'd prefer 4x 4gb cards over 1 16gb.
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Thanks for the post. I hadn't thought about what benefits one would loose by going to higher sized P2 cards. Do you mean the smaller cards are easier and quicker to offload - thus making production faster? Are there any other benefits with smaller cards?
 
Like Barry I'm betting on the end of this year, maybe a bit before that (Oct ish...).

The 8 gigs are still hard to find, they're selling real fast and there's a great demand for them. As soon as we have 16 gigs available the price on the 8gigs will have to come down.

Jan already explained how delicate and precise the production of these cards has to be.
So, for technical and financial reasons Panasonic is not in a hurry to unload a new P2 card yet.
 
My reasoning is simply that 4 gb of data will transfer faster than 16 gb of data and you can keep a quicker rotation of cards. And it also means you could potentially preview a shot more quickly.

Ned
 
nsoltz said:
My reasoning is simply that 4 gb of data will transfer faster than 16 gb of data and you can keep a quicker rotation of cards. And it also means you could potentially preview a shot more quickly.

Ned
Click to expand...


At the same time, you will be playing shuffle constantly.
8 gig cards gives me a little more of a break between shuffle.
 
There's probably a happy medium going to happen somewhere around the 32gb card mark. With a 32gb card I don't expect to be swapping cards at all. Actually with two 16gb cards that's probably enough to not need to swap at all, all day, when shooting dramatic narrative.

Swapping the larger cards will result in lengthy offload times, but if you only have to offload once, after the workday's over, it's a lot less of an issue. With two 128gb cards you'd have 10 hours of 720/24pN, or 4 hours of 1080 footage onboard at once, so card shuffling becomes a thing of the past.

So while we have to shuffle, shuffling smaller cards does have some advantages (they offload quicker and they cost less per gigabyte than the larger cards do). But with the 16's, we're approaching the point where you don't really have to shuffle at all anymore.
 
This does not answer the question when, but I find it interesting:

http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Item(1856)-SDCFX3-8192-SanDisk_Extreme_III_CompactFlash_8GB.aspx


I don't think the 8GB Compact Clash cards are out yet, but the fact that they are being shown on the SamDisk WEB page says, it's soon. Last year, the cool thing was seeing 4GB Compact Flash cards. This points to larger sizes and more price drops.

Last year the 4GB Compact Flash cards were around $500, today they appear to be around $250.

http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Catalog(1024)-SanDisk_Extreme_III_CompactFlash.aspx


Now to the point of the 16GB P2, no date yet, but soon this year or maybe by next year. When it comes, expect price drops in 8GB P2 cards...


Bob Diaz
 
If I had it my way I would have 10 x 4 gig cards. That way I can collect footage/arrange/re-shoot/etc... whenever I want because the cards are shuffeled, but there is no downtime between shots (unless you want it).
 
For months it was by the end of this year.

For a while it was October of 2006.

Now is early 2007...(at least this one is official coming form Jan)

A VERY long wait!

:-(
 
I think there is going to be a point where by going to larger cards, we're just kicking it down the road. With 4 g cards the offload to a p2 store in verify mode is 6 minutes and some seconds, double that for 8 g cards.

Waiting for a 4 G card to copy is no big deal, there is almost always a few loose minutes on set that can be used to download a card. When the card copy time jumps from 6 minutes and change to 26 minutes( 4 gig vs 16 gig) , that will change the dynamic. So while everyone wants longer run times, the trade off wll become how do you keep up? Bigger the cards get, the greater the liklihood that off loading get pushed more towards the end of the day. Then it becomes a question of how long do you want to spend waiting around while cards get copied at teh end of the day...
 
There comes a point where you just don't offload anymore, at all. Capture, preview, and edit from the card. Start offloading overnight while you sleep. I rarely shoot more than an hour of footage during a production day, so two 16gb cards (in 720/24pn) or two 32gb cards (in 1080 mode) would pretty much get us to that point.
 
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