P2 Portable Deck available now

Jarred Land

Jarred Land

President/Founder
Staff member
PANASONIC ANNOUNCES AVAILABILITY OF RUGGED AJ-PCS060
DVCPRO P2 STORE DRIVE FOR RAPID TRANSFER OF P2 CONTENT
SECAUCUS, NJ (August 10, 2005) – Panasonic Broadcast has announced the availability of the AJ-PCS060 P2 Store Drive, an ultra-rugged, portable hard disk unit with a P2 card slot that quickly transfers the content of P2 cards to an internal hard disk drive.



storedrive.jpg
“The new P2 Store drive allows news crews to shoot more stories more efficiently because it simplifies the ENG workflow,” said Joe Facchini, Director, Product Marketing, Panasonic Broadcast. “We have designed the P2 Store to be ultra rugged and ultra easy for field use. Simply plug in a P2 card, push the Start button and your DVCPRO content transfers at faster-than-real time.”



The 2.5” 60GB hard disk drive can hold the contents of up to 15 4GB P2 cards, and the entire contents of a 4GB P2 card can be transferred to the internal hard disk drive in about four minutes (in Verify Off mode). After the P2 content has been transferred, the P2 store can connect to a nonlinear or server ingest PC via a USB 2.0 interface and appears as an external disk drive. The AJ-PCS060 has a shock-resistant magnesium alloy body and is equipped with special impact-absorbing materials to cushion the hard disk against shock and vibrations.



In the field, the 1.4-pound AJ-PCS060 stores the contents of P2 cards, thus minimizing the number of reusable P2 cards needed. Back at the studio, it serves as a high-speed drive for transferring video into a station’s Local Area Network (LAN) or nonlinear editing system to speed access to the recorded content.



For quick and easy operation, the AJ-PCS060 simply has a large start button. The drive also includes LED indicators for copy status, drive capacity and battery life remaining. The drive supports Windows 2000 and Windows XP operating systems. It runs on DC power, so a user can use a 7.2V DC battery or a 7.9V AC adaptor to power it.



The AJ-PCS060 is available at the suggested list price of $1,800.



Panasonic’s DVCPRO P2 series products are fully compatible with DVCPRO, the industry’s standard for digital newsgathering, and provide a seamless migration path to DVCPRO HD. 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 low-cost archiving, while eliminating traditional digitizing and ingesting operations. The core products – AJ-SPX800 camcorder, new AJ-SPC700 camcorder, AJ-SPD850 studio recorder -- eliminate transports and mechanisms, resulting in a significant maintenance cost-savings because of the absence of any moving parts that can break down or wear out from repetitive use. Moreover, DVCPRO P2 products are resistant to environmental stresses such as shock and vibration. For more information, visit www.panasonic.com/p2.

About Panasonic Broadcast
Panasonic Broadcast & Television Systems Co. is a leading supplier of broadcast, professional video and presentation products and systems. Panasonic Broadcast is a unit company of Panasonic Corporation of North America. The company is the North American headquarters of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (NYSE: MC) of Japan, and the hub of its U.S. marketing, sales, service and R&D operations For more information on Panasonic Broadcast products, access the company’s web site at www.panasonic.com/broadcast.
 
I thought something like this would be more expensive., not much difference between that and the dv decks such as dsr-11 and the panasonic version, whose model number escapes me at the moment. So i'm guessing around $1600 in the stores? Of course you dont really need it since there is nothing to wear out on the camera now.
 
Hmm. Very cool little device... but I'll probably take that two grand and put it toward a new laptop to capture to on-the-fly instead.
 
I think 90% of users will do the same. I think the P2 Store is a specialty-market item for news shooters, etc. I think most of us would get much more value from running HD Rack on a decent laptop. But the P2 Store is nice for what it's good for, that's for sure.
 
a laptop!?!??! I would hate to have a computer of any type mac/pc doing my recording for me while the $$ is burning on a shoot and you MUST get the project shot/stored or else.....
 
yeah this is probally for either really hardcore eng guys in the middle of nowhere, or for dramatic shoots with big crews. When you have 50 people standing around its much easier to be able to whip out the card and into this thing on your hip and flush the data then running over to a laptop (which hopefully nobody stole when you weren't looking) and pressing keys etc.

Also you dont have all those little things that can go wrong with laptops, and you dont need to have someone that knows how to use a computer to do it (yes there are still those people out there). And it looks like you could get away dropping this thing.. laptop is pretty much death if you drop it.

Plus... you can use it as a deck, which is nice because the HVX is bigger than the DVX and for people like me with cramped desks not having a big $10,000 paperweight D/L footage while the cat walks by and knocks it to the floor is a good thing.

The thing I am surprised about though is the no-mac thing.
 
yes.. of course dvrack would be a much better monitoring solution, if they decide to include the dvcpro HD codec in their software.
 
obin said:
a laptop!?!??! I would hate to have a computer of any type mac/pc doing my recording for me while the $$ is burning on a shoot and you MUST get the project shot/stored or else.....
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Okay, check me here on this -- but aren't you using the andromeda? The one that requires it to be cabled to a computer? How is that different?

We just finished a five-week feature shoot where 80% of it was tethered to a laptop so we could use DV Rack. And nobody on that crew would ever want to shoot without it again. If there's any way to make it happen, we'll run that cable to the laptop and run DV Rack or HDV Rack or HD Rack, whatever's appropriate. It's just too unbelievably incredibly handy, that it makes no sense to *not* do it.

Especially in the era of HDV -- somebody shooting HDV without knowing exactly what they're getting on tape is just asking for trouble. And somebody shooting on tape at the peril of 15-frame dropouts, without some sort of backup, is begging for trouble. I don't think I'd ever shoot a frame of HDV again without having at least the FireStore plugged in, and preferably (by a factor of 1,000 to 1) having HDV Rack plugged in.
 
well i like this little drive and im gonna buy one. so naa naa naa naa.

actually, it would kinda suck having it but no camera or P2 card for another 3 months.

the little blinking lights could only keep me occupied for so long.
 
I kinda want one,but for the price, I can just use a laptop (or the one I already have),
and just transfer the P2 cards via cardbus32 slot.
 
I thought I would get this, then after reading some comments about having a laptop instead, I'm just not sure... Personally, I think I will have both. This device could be very helpful. Though, I'm not sure if it works for the Mac yet or not.
 
This would work great for doc shooters. It would be awesome if we could hook this up directly and record to disk, but I guess Panasonic is letting firestore handle that.
 
Jarred Land said:
Plus... you can use it as a deck, which is nice because the HVX is bigger than the DVX and for people like me with cramped desks not having a big $10,000 paperweight D/L footage while the cat walks by and knocks it to the floor is a good thing.
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What capabilities does it have as a deck? Any ideas? Do you mean it has video outputs of any sort?
 
well as a deck, its only function is to go out via USB to your computer... there is no such thing as FF/RW on the P2 cards nor Digitizing so there cant be much more than that.
 
Jarred Land said:
well as a deck, its only function is to go out via USB to your computer... there is no such thing as FF/RW on the P2 cards nor Digitizing so there cant be much more than that.
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I thought that would be the case... just being hopeful!
 
If you could record directly to it then, yeah I can see use for it. Strap it on along with the steadi cam and much more time between a reload. Otherwise every set I've been on has a video village set up so you might as well go ahead and record there, especially if you have something like HD Rack.
 
Gopher_Greene said:
If you could record directly to it then, yeah I can see use for it. Strap it on along with the steadi cam and much more time between a reload. Otherwise every set I've been on has a video village set up so you might as well go ahead and record there, especially if you have something like HD Rack.
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ENG guys don't though. This could certainly be a handy bit of kit in war zone or somewhere else inhospitible.

I wonder how long it will be before P2 cards "out-capacity" this device though... hopefully only a couple of years!
 
yeah but im sure when the p2 cards hit 60gb, 2.5" hard drives will hit 900gb so it should keep up, but if you have a 60gb p2 card the whole concept of offloading footage kinda becomes bunk.
 
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