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MillimeterP2 Hits Its Stride in 2009
Dec 21, 2009 12:00 PM, By Helmut Kobler
The Panasonic AJ-PCD35 makes no noise and fits on a crowded desk.
Speaking of years, E series cards have two other interesting features. The first is that, unlike older P2 cards, these cards eventually wear out after you've loaded them up and erased them a number of times. That sounds like it could be an issue until you realize that Panasonic gives an E series card a five-year lifetime, assuming you fill and erase it every single day during those five years. Since no one shoots every single day, year after year, the cards are likely to last closer to 10 years or more. You can monitor a card's life expectancy, and when it finally does give up the ghost, it becomes read-only so you don't lose footage.
The second feature of E series cards is that they're considerably faster than older P2 cards. They can transfer data up to 1.2Gbps versus the 600Mbps and 800Mbps of older cards, so you can offload them to a hard drive quicker than ever. That brings us to the next change in the P2 universe.
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Offload cards at blazing speeds
In early 2009, Panasonic shipped a new P2 card reader called the AJ-PCD35 ($2,190), which lets you simultaneously offload up to five P2 cards to your editing computer.
A five-card reader isn't a new thing; before the PCD35, Panasonic shipped two earlier models, but they connected to your computer via a glacially-slow USB 2.0 connection or a slightly-faster-but-still-dog-slow FireWire 800 port. That meant it could take several hours to offload multiple high-capacity P2 cards.
The PCD35 changes all that. It connects to your editing computer via a tiny PCIe card, and transfers footage about five times faster than older Panasonic readers (transfer to a RAID for best results; a RAID can keep up with the PCD35's speed, but a single hard drive can't). In other words, the PCD35 can offload five 64GB E series cards (filled with 13 hours of 720p24 footage or 6.5 hours at 1080p24) in less than an hour. The PCD35 also works with laptops through Magma Systems' $199 EX34 ExpressCard adapter. Transfer times will be slower on a laptop for a variety of reasons, but the PCD35 still gives you impressive transfer speeds in the field.
Let that sink in. You can have 13 hours of footage in the hands of producers, transcribers and editors in less than 60 minutes. That's greased lightning as far as footage transfers go. If you tried to digitize that footage from tape, you'd have to pay some poor soul to feed dozens of tapes into an expensive, proprietary deck, which would merely capture the footage in real-time. Even if you shot on Sony XDCAM disks—another tapeless format that competes with P2—the spinning disk couldn't match the transfer speeds of P2's solid-state chips, and someone would still have to nurse each disk's transfer, one at a time.
At $2,190, the PCD35 isn't cheap, and I have to think Panasonic could drop a few hundred from the price. On the other hand, the drive is far cheaper than any professional media deck I can think of, and its fast offloads save massive amounts of time and money in postproduction.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.