P2 Gear - replacement for P2 Store?

Jan gave me a quick demo at Cinegear, it looks very promising and remedies many of the shortcomings of the P2 Store. It should be available in August, but the downside is that the MSRP is almost US$ 4000.00, which would buy you one heck of a laptop.
 
I also got to play with it at Broadcast Asia. The P2 Gear has some neat features (like a live waveform and vectorscope monitor) and HD-SDI output, and the ability to copy clips from one card to another. It supplies bus power to an external USB hard disk, which is very nice.

But as THoff said, at $4,000 -- well, I think the P2 Gear is one of those no-brainer purchases. If you need it, it's a no-brainer. If you don't see a need for it, it's a no-brainer. Those who need it will likely find it a great little device. But many of us will continue to use laptops and find that we don't "need" the P2 Gear. What it does can be emulated with a laptop (except for the HD-SDI out), but a laptop with drives and software is certainly a clumsier solution than the elegance of a streamlined P2 Gear. But the price... well, that'll be a dealbreaker for some, and a no-brainer for others.
 
Barry:

HD SDI out? Does it have embedded audio, I assume? No TC out/RS-422 though, right? So to use it as a "deck" for digitizing through, say, a Kona card? That could be handy in certain situations. For a year now, we have used an AJ-HD1400 deck as our P2 backup here, I guess using the P2 gear would save having to bring all of the stuff into FCP and back out through the Kona to the deck, we could just pop the cards into the P2 gear and layoff directly to the deck.

Hmm...

Dan
 
AFAIK it's embedded TC and embedded audio. Not 110% sure though, since the product's not released yet.

No RS-422 on the P2 Gear, but the P2 Mobile does have that.

See, you might be one of those guys for whom the P2 Gear is a "no brainer" -- if it solves that workflow issue for you, then it makes sense where a laptop may not.

From what I understand, yes you should be able to lay off directly from the P2 cards, through the HD-SDI and out to an AJ-HD1400. Although why you'd do it that way I'm not 100% sure; I'd assume you'd want to go through firewire to avoid a recompression stage.
 
Barry_Green said:
AFAIK it's embedded TC and embedded audio. Not 110% sure though, since the product's not released yet.

No RS-422 on the P2 Gear, but the P2 Mobile does have that.

See, you might be one of those guys for whom the P2 Gear is a "no brainer" -- if it solves that workflow issue for you, then it makes sense where a laptop may not.

From what I understand, yes you should be able to lay off directly from the P2 cards, through the HD-SDI and out to an AJ-HD1400. Although why you'd do it that way I'm not 100% sure; I'd assume you'd want to go through firewire to avoid a recompression stage.
Click to expand...

Maybe to convert to other formats?

Here in Macau/HK, the HD standard is HDCAM. Having the P2 gear (and high capacity cards) would help the conversion to other formats without the need of the 1400 deck. Connect trough HD-SDI to the other decks. (In an International TV Spot I did, I had to first put my HVX footage to dvcpro HD tape trough firewire, and then had to transfer from the dvcpro HD tape by HD-SDI to HD CAM.)
 
Hi Barry:

Thanks for the details. Yes, I guess the FW method would work just as well. We had a Quantum DLT as long term backup but with our workflow here, we constantly have to go back to tape sources so archiving to DVCProHD, even though it seems a bit of a convoluted workflow, seems to do the trick for us.

Best,

Dan
 
SPZ said:
Maybe to convert to other formats?
Click to expand...
Yes, for converting to other formats that's fine, but he specifically said he had a Panasonic 1400 deck. Going through HD-SDI would seem a wasteful way to go when you could instead go through firewire and do a direct digital transfer of the data.

For converting to HDCAM, the P2 Gear would suit that need quite well I'm sure.
 
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