How many P2 cards will you buy? How about 50!

Cavemandude

Cavemandude

Well-known member
Six News Now in Sarasota, FL, a New York Times Company property, will convert its news operations and commercial production to the Panasonic DVCPRO P2 solid-state memory recording system.

Located within the newsroom of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune newspaper, SNN6 is a convergence operation, sharing staff with the newspaper to serve communities throughout southwest Florida with 24-hour coverage of news and specialized local programming. The network’s P2 purchase includes seven AJ-SPX800 cameras, seven AJ-PCD10 drives and 50 2GB P2 cards.

More than 60 U.S. TV stations have adopted DVCPRO P2 series products to date. The DVCPRO P2 offers nonlinear acquisition and instant access to material, high-speed file transfer, laptop field editing without requirement for proxy videos, and compatibility with off-the-shelf data storage drives for archiving, while eliminating traditional digitizing and ingesting operations.

Cavemandude
 
Yes! :beer:I hate the American media, but they're gonna drive the price down on these babies. Sweet.
 
I hate the American media, but they're gonna drive the price down on these babies. Sweet.

I would bet that the news organizations are saying the same thing about us right now.
The market for the SPX800 is much MUCH smaller than the market Panasonic is hoping to grab with the HVX at the end of the year. If the HVX is anywhere near as popular as the DVX has been, all these news stations can look forward to a plummeting P2 pricetag thanks to the legions of prosumers wanting to move up to DVCPro50 & HD.

If that one station bought 50 cards, and it's estimated around 60 stations have switched over to P2 in the past year...if that stations purchase is any indication of an average then that would mean about 3000 P2 cards out there at news organizations.

I would guess that the HVX will sell in the tens of thousands of units within the first year (if Sony Z1 sales are any indication of how badly people want low cost HD). And I for one expect the HVX to sell better than the Z1 has been doing.

Imagine that, the vast majority of HVX owners will buy two P2 cards. Some will only buy one, and a few may not buy any for a while. But, you're looking at the potential for Panasonic to sell roughly 20 times as many P2 cards in the next year as they did in the past year (3,000 cards vs maybe around 60,000 cards, assuming anywhere from 30-40 thousand HVX's sold).

That is what will drop the price of these cards....and the TV stations will thank us for it by telling us that they can't take our DVCPro50 or DVCProHD spots unless we dub them over to BetaSP.
:)

obviously my numbers are just a very very rough guess based on one stations purchase and shouldn't be taken as any sort of fact...but you see what I'm getting at.
 
"and the TV stations will thank us for it by telling us that they can't take our DVCPro50 or DVCProHD spots unless we dub them over to BetaSP."

For TV stations that have P2 capability, why not just give the TV station your spots on a 2GB P2 card and they can transfer it to any format they need to for broadcast? Just pick up the P2 after they transfer it. This would reduce generation loss and maintain the highest quality possible.

Maybe Panasonic should come out with smaller and cheaper P2 cards that hold just a 30-second or 1-minute spot. How much is a 2GB P2 card anyways?

Cavemandude
 
Someday in the future, maybe you would just include a digital master in the appropriate format as just an ordinary file on a DVD, which holds 4.5 (or 8) GB of data. I don't know how much P2 cards are, but they probably won't beat a few cents each. :grin:
 
For TV stations that have P2 capability, why not just give the TV station your spots on a 2GB P2 card and they can transfer it to any format they need to for broadcast?

I was just joking
:)
The local stations here won't take a DV master because they are convinced that DV isn't 'broadcast quality' (even though the spots I've done on the DVX blow away the spots they do in house). So, I have to dub my spots over to BetaSP, and they don't give me any problems....
 
Wish analog BetaSP would just disappear already. I'm currently using DVCAM gear and have to this point avoided investing in any BetaSP gear because of the high price, even for used decks and watch out for repair costs, and certainly don't want to purchase a DVCPRO50 or DVCPRO-HD deck for the same reasons. If I need a BetaSP master, I use a friendly production company with a BetaSP deck to do those pesky TV station masters. Of course, after getting to the TV station those BetaSP masters go down another one or two generations before hitting the air and it's usually no longer in the BetaSp format when aired.

One of the three local networks here accept DV and that's DV not DVCAM. Cox Cable is the only one that will accept programming on DVCAM only after I let them know that they could play the DVCAM format on their DVCPRO deck. They were surprised how clean it looked on air. Go figure.

There has to be a better workflow if you have P2 and the TV station has P2. Why would BetaSp, an analog tape format, still be involved in this type of situation?Maybe Jan can explain that one. I mean geez, does the TV station that shoots with P2 and edits with P2 then go and make a BetaSP master of that spot or program only to have it go down another generation or two to some other format, usually digital of some form, and then broadcasted?

If Panasonic is getting all these TV station to convert to P2, they should also make that P2 technology work for outside production companies using P2 that give masters of programming or spots to these TV stations.

Jan, if a master of a TV spot had to be given to a TV station from an outside production company, what would be the ideal workflow given that the TV station and the production company both have P2?

Cavemandude
 
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