P2 reliable as tape, better, or not: USERS PLEASE RESPOND

I've been using P2 since January of 2006 when I took delivery of my HVX200. Not a single problem with the cards.

As for tape I've been using them since 1994 when I started in this business and yes there have been dropouts and lost footage.
 
Been shooting with the HVX since February of last year.
I shoot on both P2 cards and the Firestore.

In the past 14 months we've shot 68 episodes of different series, countless commerical and promo videos, as well as many many hours of test and personal footage.

We've never had a single glitch, lost clip or failure of any kind.
It's a rock solid medium and workflow.


I honestly can't remember how often I got drop outs and glitches when shooting tape -
but I remember it was often enough for me to not be surprised when it happened.
 
I did some more research and thought I'd share this with everyone:

What's inside a P2 card?
P2 cards are high-precision micro-computers with their own processors, firmware, a RAID controller, and gigabytes of the highest-quality zero-fault solid-state memory chips. A P2 card is an intelligent device that manages the data files — and even does a write-verification step for every byte of memory that gets written to the card (thus assuring fault-free operation). Early P2 cards were manufactured using actual SD memory cards in a striped RAID array, thus increasing the performance far beyond any individual memory chip’s speed. The newest generation of P2 cards dispenses with using individual SD memory cards and actually uses the core memory components.
Click to expand...
http://panasonic.com/business/provideo/p2-hd/faqs.asp


Most likely the way the "Write-Verification Step" works is that it writes a block of data and goes back and checks every byte written within the block; both the source byte and the P2 byte must match. Even if one bit is off, there would be some sort of card error message given to the user.

I'm impressed, flash is a very good media. Anything can fail, but the chance of a failure with flash is VERY low. This Write-Verification Step is an extra layer of protection added to P2. No surprise that I'm seeing message after message of no problems with P2; thanks for all the feedback.


Bob Diaz
 
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