The P2 store looks like a great piece of equipment, and very useful. But at $1,500, wouldn't it be better to just buy a Macbook for $1000, or a used powerbook for under $1,000 for on site offloading? Or is there any reason that offloading onto a laptop isnt as efficient? Maybe significantly slower?
P2 Store vs. Macbook for offloading.
- Thread starter mrbrycel
- Start date
PowerBook over both because it has a Type II Cardbus slot, and the MacBook does not.
FW transfers from the cam are slow.
FW transfers from the cam are slow.
Barry_Green
Moderator
No, it'd make a lot more sense to buy a $600 Windows laptop. A modern Windows laptop will offload cards about twice as fast as the older PowerBook.
slimchrisp
Well-known member
i use my macbook pro and a duel adapter. a new windows laptop is cheaper (and faster than an old power book with a pcmcia slot), but the advantage of staying mac is you can do rough edits in the field, review footage for continuity, etc. that of course assumes you want/need to edit with final cut pro in the field. and of course you can't do that on a windows machine.
I still use my P2 store despite having a duel adapter and mackbook pro. It allows you to dump cards without a computer which is pretty handy sometimes. It can also be used as a card reader although it is slower than putting the card directly into the computer.
For run and gun, I'd say the P2 store wins but if you are in one place for any length of time, then the computer works better and you can see your footage right away. The p2 store involves a certain amount of trust although it has never let me down.
There should be some used ones out there, I'd say in the $900 range.
n8ture
Veteran
I just spent the day shooting a corporate video in Illinois. I dumped all my 4gig P2 cards to the P2 Store and now I'll hook it up to my Mac Powerbook and transfer them all to an external hard drive so I can go out and shoot tomorrow morning and do it all over again.
It works great with 4gig cards but with only a 60gig hard drive it doesn't work so well with the larger P2 cards.
It works great with 4gig cards but with only a 60gig hard drive it doesn't work so well with the larger P2 cards.
pranic
Well-known member
The P2 Store seems like a product with a very limited lifespan with the impending release of 64gb cards. Right now, if you had a couple 32gb cards, the P2 store wouldn't be able to offload all of them (of course, you'd have to be shooting a lot of stuff to fill those two cards). I think I'm with everyone else -- picking up a cheap windows laptop or if you have an older powerbook, they seem to be the best options. With a macbook pro, the duel adapter seems to be the best answer.
However, if you shoot less than 60gb of footage per day, or are in a tight space where a laptop becomes unweildy, then the P2 store is probably a great asset. There was one shoot with a 4gb and 8gb card and a P2 store, where our camera operator was stuck by himself on the back of a media truck during a marathon, and there wasn't enough room to operate a laptop, so the P2 store worked very well in this situation. It has its place, where laptops might not be the easiest solution.
However, if you shoot less than 60gb of footage per day, or are in a tight space where a laptop becomes unweildy, then the P2 store is probably a great asset. There was one shoot with a 4gb and 8gb card and a P2 store, where our camera operator was stuck by himself on the back of a media truck during a marathon, and there wasn't enough room to operate a laptop, so the P2 store worked very well in this situation. It has its place, where laptops might not be the easiest solution.
Barry_Green
Moderator
The P2 Store is already basically end-of-life. The replacement is the P2 Gear, which uses external hard drives of any capacity, and has a screen, SDI out, and a few other nice features (like having two slots, firewire, etc). It's a lot more expensive than the P2 Store was, at $3995. But yes, as others are saying, the P2 Store is of limited use now; you can only fit three 16GB cards on it, or one 32GB card.
It was great when card capacities were tiny, but with 32's on the market, the P2 Store doesn't necessarily make much sense going forward.
It was great when card capacities were tiny, but with 32's on the market, the P2 Store doesn't necessarily make much sense going forward.
Barry_Green
Moderator
No, the P2 Store is one of the slower devices. Direct offloading to a P2 Store takes about 1 minute per gigabyte. If you went through a Duel Adapter into an MBP, you should be able to get transfer speeds of two gigabytes per minute.
slimchrisp
Well-known member
that's right on the mark of what i've been getting.