P2 Media Cards vs FIRESTORE 3 hour Value price test.

PappasArts

PappasArts

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I read post from Barry Green ( Refer to bottom of page ) and it got me thinking. If FireStore 3 hours of video seems limited what would it cost to do the same with P2 media cards. So I did some figures based on the current P2 prices for fun to see what it would cost to have three hours of P2 media. Again this was done for fun..... But it's interesting though!


These are approximate figures:
Mission to obtain 3 hours as Firestore would for around $800 dollars.
P2 Media 4gig $1,700 dollars


DVCPRO HD/24P - 13min per P2-4gig card x 5 cards = 65 minutes of HD / 5 P2 cards x 3 = 15 P2 cards x $1,700 = $25,500 dollars
For 3 hours 15 minutes of 24P DVCpro HD


For those that do 60P productions for the live feel. Or the 60i feel.

DVCPRO HD/60P- 4min per P2-4gig x 15 = 60min minutes of HD / 15 P2 cards x 3 = 45 P2 cards x $1,700 = $76,500 dollars
For 3 hours of 60P DVCPRO HD


Michael Pappas
http://www.Pbase.com/ARRFILMS




Source--
BARRY GREEN WROTE:

<<Let's extend the metaphor a bit further -- what about the FireStore? I don't hear people complaining that "the Firestore is a ridiculous waste of money, because it only stores three hours -- are you kidding me? Three hours for $800? I could buy 160 hours of tape for that!" With the FireStore, people understand -- you shoot to it, you archive it, you erase it and use it again. The P2 cards are exactly like that -- shoot to it, archive it, erase it and use it again. I don't think people will be buying dozens of FireStores over the years, and I also don't think we'll be buying dozens of P2 cards.>>
 
Yes, the cost difference is there. Obviously. But there's also a cost difference between a bicycle and a Mercedes. Drop the firestore once, and see how it affects your cost ratio. Or shoot in the desert, and see what the heat and dust do to the firestore, etc.

You simply do not buy dozens of cards for the P2 camera, that's not how someone uses it. Throwing around numbers like $76,500 would probably get your post suspended over on DVInfo for spreading "F.U.D." (what Chris Hurd calls Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt).

That's just not how you work with the P2 camera.

Those numbers are about as silly as saying that a bicycle can be ridden across the country for free, whereas the Mercedes would cost $30,000,000 to drive across the country, because it can only drive for 300 miles before it's empty, and so then you need a new Mercedes to go the next 300 miles. You don't do that. You buy some cheap gas and you keep going.

I'm not arguing that hard disks aren't cheaper. What I'm saying is, people have to stop trying to think that you need a bunch of P2 cards, or you'll never be able to understand how the camera works. It is a different way of working. And what you'll likely end up doing is using hard disks as offline storage for the P2 cards. Hard disks are less expensive, but they are not nearly (not NEARLY) as rugged, indestructible, durable, reliable, and basically as bomb-proof as P2 cards are. So you don't use hard disks for acquisition. You use them for what they're excellent at -- storage and editing. You use the indestructible, reliable, never-drop-a-frame, heat-proof, cold-proof, shock-proof P2 cards for what they're good at, acquisition, and you use the hard disk for what it's good for -- cheap storage.

I would *love* to see the camera support direct firewire recording, where it could use an off-the-shelf firewire hard disk. For live event recording under controlled conditions, that might be ideal. That would beat the living snot, pricewise, out of using FireStores. A 40gb external firewire disk is, what, $60 or so, vs. $800 for the FireStore?
 
I also find it a little funny we're "testing" a camera that no one's even seen yet. :)
 
I think you're selling hard drives too short. Their durability and reliability has come a long way in recent years while their prices continue to drop. If you take care of a hard drive the same way most guys baby their expensive gear then you should be fine.

Solid-state will probably be king in the long run. But it has a lot of catching up to do before it's practical/cost-effective. I'm still amazed when I think about how cheap 1 GB of RAM is today. Just ten years ago I remember paying around $40/meg. So a gig went from $40,000 to a negligible price within a decade. It's just a matter of time until the factories ramp up production and prices come down. For now though I think hard drives are a practical solution for most guys. Just my two cents...
 
Hi Barry. This was just for fun as I said.....

Every professional photographer I know had just a few CF cards because of the cost a few years ago, now they have a pocket full. There dirt cheap, no reason not to. Compared to over three years ago when I got my first DSLR when I only had two CF cards. Today I own 7 512mb and 3 1 gigs only because they got cheap.


The reason people are not going to have a lot of P2 cards isn't because they don't need them, it's because it will cost to much to have a lot of them.

Now if P2 4gigs were $100 dollars just for example, people would own 10 to 15 of them easily. I would buy 20 of them at that price. Who wouldn't.

So not having a lot of P2 media is not because there is not a need, it's because they can't, do to the high price of P2 media as of now.

I will tell you when these 4 gigs are dirt cheap, and they will be one day as all memory does, people will have a pocket full of P2 cards.

So one day years from now when Jan tells someone "" why not buy a bunch of P2 cards because there cheap" " I will have to remind her that she professed that no one needs a lot of them because you must re-think your work.

I'll make a bet that Panasonic production philosophy of you don't need a lot of P2 is convenient to back up its high price issue. When P2 cards are dirt cheap, that part of the work flow philosophy will suddenly disappear from the Panasonic mantra, and all of a sudden they will sing the song " P2 cards are cheap so buy many" a 180 from the song going on now.

Which means they really don't believe their argument, but just the make themselves believe in it right now to fit the situation. Blue pill or Red anyone.

What's funny is, the short record times can work for me, but I'm a very niche sector and I know it. I don't think others should except it just cause I can at this point.

I know two people that came back from India, 80+ hours in in two weeks of filming in Digibeta from Delhi to the tip of Trivandrum. I can site another dozen off the top of my head like this that P2 is not going to work at this current stage if they couldn't have at-least a pocket full. Rethinking your work flow is marketing/PR BS.

I like Jan, I think it's great she comes here, but I have been working production since I was Fifteen, that's been 21 years. So I happen to know a little about this industry. She is product manager. My friends at Panavision never try to tell me my needs or how things should work on a set. But when it comes to their gear I listen 110%. There is a line to respect and I respect that line.

Michael Pappas
http://www.Pbase.com/ARRFILMS

 
NoahK said:
I also find it a little funny we're "testing" a camera that no one's even seen yet. :)
Click to expand...


Hi Noah, I am not testing, I know the camera is going to be great. I owned a DVX100, I thought it was the best of the small cameras. They will do the same again, but in HD. The above was done for " fun " as i said at the begining of the post.

PS: Noah , I asked you about your film in another post, are you going to put up a trailer? I like your web site, great look and it has a good flow to it. You have some good character actors in your film like Gilborn, and Geoffrey Lewis what a face for the camera. His been around forever, his good......


Michael Pappas
http://www.pbase.com/ARRFILMS
 
Some great points Michael. One thing though, I don't think Panny is pushing the "you'll never need a bunch of P2 cards" line. They're pushing the technical advantages of solid state capture and are planning on surfing the wave of quickly dropping flash memory costs. Let's face it--if you're shooting all day with two cards, you've created a new full time position on the set--the P2 card unloader. For mid-level productions, the cost of the extra cards or the card unloader can be absorbed--it's the lower end where you have issues.

P2 costs won't be dropping quickly enough for some people and coupled with the increased hardware demands required for a DVCPRO HD NLE workstation, it's going to be a financial stretch. That's why I'm certain there's going to be a hard-disk based DTE solution, and if it were direct write to off-the shelf drives, that would be fantastic. It would certainly evaporate the P2 economics issues. Panny can work the numbers just like we can, and you can be sure they did. With Jan's Cheshire cat smile, you can be certain we'll have some options.
 
Hi Mike,

I know you're doing this in fun, so let me run with it as well:

know two people that came back from India, 80+ hours in in two weeks of filming in Digibeta
Click to expand...

80 hours of DigiBeta? That's $2800 of tape stock! At the cheap B&H price, too. Let's shoot that on the P2 camera instead:

DigiBeta camera rental: $850/day, two weeks at a four-day week, $6800 rental cost
80 hours of tape: $2800
DigiBeta deck rental for digitizing: $550/day, assume four-day week plus three days: $2650
Total cost: $12,250

P2 camera purchase: $10,000 (includes lens, power, P2 cards, etc)
Laptop computer: $600
Hard disk storage for 80 hours of DVCPRO50 data: 2.5 terabytes, $2200
Sell the P2 camera on ebay when done: -$7,000
Total cost: $5800.

So, having shot on P2 cards, you would end up costing less than half of what you spent on Digital Betacam. You wouldn't have the camera at the end of the shoot, but then again you wouldn't have it if you'd rented the DigiBeta either. And, you also now own a laptop computer and $2200 worth of reusable hard disk storage, instead of having $2800 worth of tapes stuffed away on a shelf.

And, of course, you could have shot it on high-definition instead of DigiBeta-caliber DVCPRO50. That would mean another $2,000 of hard disk storage, but now you have HD instead of SD -- and still at about 35% less than the cost of using DigiBeta.

Any way you slice it, the P2 cam wins! :D

(oh, and regarding your original comparison, you can't compare FireStore's "3 hour" capacity against P2, because that's comparing DV against HD. If you wanted 3 hours of FireStore storage in HD, that'd cost more like $3200 per hour -- if it even existed, which it doesn't).
 
Hi Barry, i agree with you.

For me P2 works, but some of the talk here and there like People including Jan keep saying filmmakers are used to 4 minute loads. That's such bull%*$#

Everyone I know hate's the limited magazine loads, but it's physics. You can only jam so much film in a mag. Panavision has spent a ton on R&D over the years to build larger mag loads, but it's a matter of physics in the end and not because people like to have short run times. Reloading sucks.

The one thing everyone loves in Hollywood about HD is the large record times even if they hate HD imagery, it's always "" I like the long record times and quick and easy change out ".

Panasonic/Jan uses a film mag issue that people have no choice but to live with in film industry to justify another bad issue of limited P2 Media size. This is and never would be a plus....


Michael Pappas
http://www.Pbase.com/ARRFILMS




QUOTE=Barry_Green]Hi Mike,

I know you're doing this in fun, so let me run with it as well:



80 hours of DigiBeta? That's $2800 of tape stock! At the cheap B&H price, too. Let's shoot that on the P2 camera instead:

DigiBeta camera rental: $850/day, two weeks at a four-day week, $6800 rental cost
80 hours of tape: $2800
DigiBeta deck rental for digitizing: $550/day, assume four-day week plus three days: $2650
Total cost: $12,250

P2 camera purchase: $10,000 (includes lens, power, P2 cards, etc)
Laptop computer: $600
Hard disk storage for 80 hours of DVCPRO50 data: 2.5 terabytes, $2200
Sell the P2 camera on ebay when done: -$7,000
Total cost: $5800.

So, having shot on P2 cards, you would end up costing less than half of what you spent on Digital Betacam. You wouldn't have the camera at the end of the shoot, but then again you wouldn't have it if you'd rented the DigiBeta either. And, you also now own a laptop computer and $2200 worth of reusable hard disk storage, instead of having $2800 worth of tapes stuffed away on a shelf.

And, of course, you could have shot it on high-definition instead of DigiBeta-caliber DVCPRO50. That would mean another $2,000 of hard disk storage, but now you have HD instead of SD -- and still at about 35% less than the cost of using DigiBeta.

Any way you slice it, the P2 cam wins! :D

(oh, and regarding your original comparison, you can't compare FireStore's "3 hour" capacity against P2, because that's comparing DV against HD. If you wanted 3 hours of FireStore storage in HD, that'd cost more like $3200 per hour -- if it even existed, which it doesn't).[/QUOTE]
 
The great thing about tape is its ability to be quickly and reliably archived.

I work at a company that has hundreds of hours of material in an AVID Unity server but they always back everything up on DigiBeta to be archived by a company that specializes in archiving. Our multi-million dollar AVID architecture and storage system goes down way more than one would expect. It's SO easy to throw in a Digibeta tape when that happens. I cannot place 100% trust into backing up my material only onto a hard drive.

I fully agree with Michael. Panny will market P2 as a solution that can easily be archived to hard disk until P2 cards become nearly as cheap as tape. But right now, as far as I'm concerned, expensive P2 cards are a little bit of pain. However, it's just a matter of time until P2 cards become cheap enough to be archivable. Until that time Panny will not get P2 to become a part of workflow of some highly desireable clients.
 
who knows.. maybe one day P2 will be cheap and big enough to be used for archiving.. :) now that's going to be cool. but meanwhile, it's nothing we should even consider. P2 are just a way to physically transfer data from the camera to a hard drive. cable free and reliable than ever.
 
I'll probably just put up with the crappy record times as I'm more of a serious hobbyist than a pro. But I'm still hoping they stick a tape mechanism in there, so when I am shooting events, I can just record DVCPRo and 50.
 
You need at least 3 P2 cards and someone to do the data transfer to your nle or disc, than you can have a near continuous workflow with 3 cards.

Btw. P2 card are just a temporally solution and going to die within 3 years is my guess. Or... maybe it will give you 100 times the capacity for the same cost. Who knows... Polymer ram is the next step and Intl, Opc and others has good results in research.
 
The P2 "Problem"

The P2 "Problem"

Just my own paranoia -

Apart from capacity / single-take recording time, what bothers me most about the potential P2 workflow is archiving and storage. I've had hard drives go bad - I'll warrant we all have. I've had tapes go bad... but often remain at least partially salvageable. You can splice tape, cut off a problem piece, and go on merrily using it. If there's a problem during a take (especially a long one), often the whole take is lost when recording to HD (or P2?), while the tape has everything up to the problem point safely down. By their random-access nature, hard drives are a bit different and more complete-failure-prone. Further, they are not a good archiving medium - hard drives sitting unused for long periods of time develop mechanical problems.

So yes, this could be a commercial for P2 when the cards are cheap enough to use for archiving, and capacities are high enough. But for now, it's the hard drive part, with no full-quality backup on tape, that bothers me. The Firestore does not get this complaint because you can record simultaneously to tape (and miniDV tape is pretty cheap).

Now, I know there is no cheap solution for HD tape backup (except, I guess, simultaneous HDV to miniDV, with all its associated processing/resource demands). But I think it's the hard drives, rather than the P2, that are at the heart of a lot of uneasiness....

-Barry
 
We've had this argument before

We've had this argument before

P2 still doesn't make sense for me. Its cool, but the cost/benefit ratio still isn't there.

I capture events, which means that swapping P2 cards every 4-8 minutes just doesn't cut it. When I shoot feature footage, I sometimes like to run takes that go for 10 minutes at a time, Cary Grant-style. Those of you who have said that you can't imagine anyone who would have more than a 4-minute take are saying that because you are used to working with the limitations of film mags. Look... a camera which costs $10K but makes you swap cards every 10 minutes or less is really a $10K camera plus the cost of the P2 wrangler, and the hardware to support that operation. No thank you.

Barry- you are saying that P2 cards are the only viable solution for desert, high-G, cold, or whatever other hostile environment you can think of. Fine, but most of us don't shoot in those kinds of situations. Or, if we do, at that point we budget so that we can have assurance that our capture is going to happen.

P2 cards, at current prices, don't offer the benefit that a Firestore would.
 
speedbump said:
P2 still doesn't make sense for me. Its cool, but the cost/benefit ratio still isn't there.

Those of you who have said that you can't imagine anyone who would have more than a 4-minute take are saying that because you are used to working with the limitations of film mags. Look... a camera which costs $10K but makes you swap cards every 10 minutes or less is really a $10K camera plus the cost of the P2 wrangler, and the hardware to support that operation. No thank you.
Click to expand...

Its not a film mag issue.. most dramatic productions rarely shoot over 4 minutes per take, its not a limitation of the cameras but a limitation of the talent :(

Im not sure I get the "10k but makes you swap cards every 10 minutes" argument.. it sounds like you are comparing things to film, but with film your camera is gonna cost you 100k and your still gonna need a loader and change film every 10 minutes.
 
..yeah realistically for dramatic production you could shoot all day off one card. and simply dump to an attached HDD between takes. I mean .. how long is an average shot.. apx 10 - 20 sec. so yo could dump it in apx 7-15 secs or somthing.. like its some huge inconvenience..? it takes longer just to reset the props or the dolly or let the actors run it through in their head or blah blah blah between takes.. and who cares if you shoot 10 takes in a row with no wait..even a 4 GB card holds enough time to do that. and again between steups youve got plenty of time to dump to your attached HDD. P2 isnt what you store the data on. saying youd ever need more than 2-3 cards is like saying youd need more than one glass of water to drink 50 glasses of water from your faucet. because for some reason after you drink the water in a glass.. you have to get a new one to drink out of instead of just filling the same one up again. .and with that, the whole cost copmparison for P2 is silly. its not a correct workflow to begin with, but its also not using the most cost effective P2 solution.. cause an 8 GB card is only 2000. as compared to 4 GB right now at 1700. thats 2x the space for not near 2x the price. you couldve just figured the comparison with one singel 8 GB card and cut the price nearly in half even using that rediculous theorhetical workflow. whether the post is for fun or not, its rediculous.
 
I agree 100% with you natob2 and Michael.
Right now, P2 is OK for controlled environment.
I mean, if you have time to download P2 data to a portable computer during the shooting, then it's fine.
Otherwise, good luck...$$$ but only for now.

But P2 cost WILL go down very rapidly, i think.
And he Hard Drive acquisition is then a good temporary solution, but it has to be small, simple and lightweight (convenience).

But dont forget, If you use the camcorder in DV mode, it does not cost a lot more than other good DV camcorders.
AND ou have access to high quality formats DVCPro50 and DVCProHD...quite impressive...no ?

I think (I am sure) there must be a lot of people working right now to find a "lightweight" acquisition solution.
That's why i will buy the HVX200.
 
PappasArts said:
For me P2 works, but some of the talk here and there like People including Jan keep saying filmmakers are used to 4 minute loads. That's such bull%*$#

Everyone I know hate's the limited magazine loads, but it's physics. You can only jam so much film in a mag. Panavision has spent a ton on R&D over the years to build larger mag loads, but it's a matter of physics in the end and not because people like to have short run times.
Click to expand...
I agree. The argument that you reuse P2 and it requires a different mindset, workflow, etc, doesn't answer the principal complaint against it: for some situations, shooting durations are way too short. Samsung's 16-GB CF-based solid-state drive doesn't appear to solve the problem (it's the same as two 8-GB P2 cards), but its rumored price ($1,000) is about a quarter of the P2 solution's. Maybe multiple Samsung drives could be ganged into a RAID configuration.
 
to me.. 400 foot loads are great. I like the break you get when you gotta reload film, specially doing handheld with a big Arri holding the thing gets real old real fast. maybe Im just lazy, but in a 12 hour shooting day taking a break every once in awhile is good.. and it give a chance for everyone to tweak the production to make it better.. Director can school the talent, makeup can do touch ups, DP can tweak some lights etc. Video in my opinion actually deteriorated the quality of production, as shooting 60 minutes you tend to get a little weak on the quality control. With film, and hopefully P2 cards, you will be careful to shoot the good stuff, take time to compose your shots and get the best performance from the actors.
 
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