Cineporter CP3 officially declared DEAD

"excuse"??? why would they have to justify anything with an excuse? if they choose not to produce a product - thats their business.

given the current market, id say its a pretty smart decision
 
tlorenzo said:
"Due to lack of market interest"... sounds like a bad excuse to me.
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Bad excuse? Sorry, it's an accurate reflection of what happened. At NAB 2007 they showed up with a prototype and everyone I know and everyone I talked to said "wow, cool, this is it really? neat, but now that Panasonic's announced 32GB P2 cards I think I'll just go with those."

The people at Spec-Comm were very disappointed, but the fact of the matter is the market shifted out from under 'em. When 8GB cards were introduced for $2200, the CinePorter made sense. When 16GB cards were introduced for $900, cutting the price per gigabyte in almost 1/6th, the CinePorter made a lot less sense. When 32GB cards come out in a couple of months, the CinePorter makes almost no sense for most customers, and I expect the FireStore to disappear as well.

The Spec-Comm folks took a huge red-ink bath on the CinePorter project; they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in development and ended up having to walk away from all of it.

Fact is, hard disk recording makes little to no sense anyway, and now that solid state is becoming more affordable per gig, everyone's going with it. Every major manufacturer is now offering solid-state recording. Sony, Panasonic, Ikegami, Thomson, and RED. I mean, look at RED: initially it seemed like people thought the way to go was a $1,000 320gB RAID disk (how would that make any sense, I don't know, I don't trust recording on hard disk and I doubly don't trust recording on a RAID 0!), but the RED guys are recording everything on 8GB CompactFlash -- and loving it.

As solid state gets bigger and cheaper, hard disk makes less and less sense. I would no more invest in a hard disk recording solution (or company that makes them) than I would want to invest in a new film processing laboratory. Yes I know there are some people who need to justify the cost-per-gig and ultimate size right now, today, but in a few weeks that argument all but disappears. With an HPX500 and four 32GB cards, you're recording six hours in-camera without ever swapping a card. Why do you need a hard disk recorder? The HVX200 will do three hours in-camera.

Hard disk recording was an interim solution whose day is rapidly drawing to a close.
 
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Panasonic's plans to release larger P2 cards has been publicly known ever since the HVX200 came to market. We're actually "behind" according to their initial release plan:

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Everyone knows that size goes up and prices drop - that's just the terms of being in this business. So this couldn't have come as a surprise to Spec-Comm. What I do think has come as a surprise to them is just how hard it is to make a product like the Cineporter. That's why the line "due to lack of market interest" sounds like somewhat of an excuse to me. We've been supporting them from the beginning and I know that A LOT of people (myself including) that were ready to buy the product when they were supposed to have delivered it. They've just been pushing the delivery date for this product many times.

I'm not in any way trying to bash Spec-Comm for trying to bring a more affordable recording solution to the market - lord knows they must have spent a serious amount of money and brainpower trying to get this thing built. I think (!) the problem is that they just haven't been able to get this thing working properly. So it seems kind of convenient to "blame it on the market".

Someone should be looking into a P2 Card -> CompactFlash adapter instead - or maybe just even more affordable P2 Cards now that CompactFlash is fast enough for DVCProHD. But ... for some kinds of shoots the Cineporter still makes sense. If only it was available.

Maybe I'm just sad I can't buy one now.
 
I've asked them to make that product (P2->CompactFlash) or a CheaP2 product.

What wasn't expected was the price; having the 16GB card debut at half the anticipated price is what really threw things for a loop. Yes it took a long time to get it developed, but the ground truth out there is that most of us lost interest when we saw that the cards were going to be a viable longform alternative.
 
Untrue that they were unable to get the product working properly.... They were just about to start a beta testing program for it, and were gearing up for an eminent release.

It's the P2 card forecast announced at NAB that killed demand for the product. Period.

Personally, I think the CP still could have been a great alternative to the p2 store. Tons of storage space. Competitive price, and likely other features and faster offload options than the p2 store. Take that dual card interface and make one a slot where you can put a p2 card in to offload, and the other a "P2 card" slot that you can stick in a laptop to offload all of your footage.

They've got great groundwork and tons of R&D laid from the Cineporter... There are several good products that could come out of that. I hope that they announce some of those products soon.

Jason
 
tlorenzo said:
"Due to lack of market interest"... sounds like a bad excuse to me.
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Hardly.

The company had no interest at all during NAB2007 following the price decreases for 16 GB cards and the expectation for 32 GB cards later this year.

Not an excuse, but a very difficult and costly but wise market decision.
 
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