Panasonic P2 in Full Swing at NAB 2006

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Panasonic P2 in Full Swing at NAB 2006 Company unleashes flurry of new products supporting solid-state acquisition, editing and production By Charlie White

Panasonic has a bone to pick with anybody who thinks their acquisition format is better than its solid-state P2 cards. That's why at the company?s rollout event here at NAB in Las Vegas on Sunday, it introduced lots of new products supporting the solid-state P2 format. Let's take a look at some highlights of the Panasonic presentation.

Panasonic started off its press event for NAB 2006 with comments about how its solid-state memory is better than optical disk or a hard drive-based storage for video acquisition, and certainly better than tape. It made some strong arguments for its P2 flash based memory format, whose prices have been dropping precipitously over the past year. Building on the success of its AG-VX200 DVCPro HD camcorder that uses P2 memory, it introduced a variety of the new products that support that format, in addition to many others.

Aware of the main objection to its P2 format for acquisition of SD in HD content -- the exorbitant cost of the P2 solid state memory cards compared to Sony's XDcam disks -- Panasonic emphasized that its 4GB P2 cards now cost $550 compared to the $1400 those same cards cost just a year ago at NAB. They also reminded the audience that 8GB flash cards are now available, with 16GB cards on the way.

AJ-HDX900
The company then introduced its new products, starting off with its AJ-HDX900 (pictured above), a camcorder that will cost $26,500 and will be available in July. The company touted the new camcorder has an advanced HD version of its highly popular AJ-SDX900 DVCPRO50 cinema camera. Its claim to fame are its three one-million-pixel 2/3? CCDs. Panasonic also emphasized its versatile multiformat recording support, where it can record in DVCPro HD using multiple variations of 1080i, 24p, and 720p.

AJ-HD1400 DVCPro HD VTR

For those still working in the tape world using DVCPro HD, Panasonic announced an update to the AJ -HD1200a, the AJ-HD1400 DVCPro HD VTR (pictured above). It will list for $25,000 and will also be available in July. It has HD SDI and 1394-out and has a compact form factor that is AC and DC-powered. A new feature is its assemble/insert editing functions that can be controlled by either RS 422 9-pin or the 1394 interface.

AJ-HPM100

One of the most innovative products introduced was the AJ-HPM100, a P2-based solid-state memory recorder patterned after Panasonic DVCPro laptop editors. It's well-suited for field work with its 9-inch widescreen LCD monitor and six-slot P2 drive. As you can see in the graphic, it's ready for editing tasks in the field, with a jog shuttle dial, playlist editing functions, and it even has stereo speakers and can hook up to AC or DC power. If loaded up with six 8GB cards, the unit can record for 48 minutes in 1080i or 720p DVCPro HD. This jewel will be available in November for $12,000.

Along with that announcement of the AJ-HPM100, Panasonic announced a new codec that's H.264 compliant. Called AVC-intra, the codec aims to save bandwidth in a way that similar to the HDV codec which uses long-gop compression, but will still offer the easy editing of DVCPro HD. It will use half the bandwidth of DVCPro HD 100 megabit-per-second footage, and subsequently will offer twice the recording time on a P2 card as garden-variety DVCPro HD. That codec will be available in April of 2007, according to Panasonic.

Another notable introduction was Panasonic's AJ-PCD20 (Don't you just love these alphabet soup product names?), a five-slot P2 drive that facilitate high-speed transfer of files from P2 cards into nonlinear editing systems and servers. To be available in July for $1980, this unit installs in a standard 5.25" bay in a PC, and with either a USB 2.0 or FireWire 800 interface, it connects to the host computer and then can be available throughout a television station?s local area network. This versatile unit can also be used in the field along with a PC or Mac notebook -- looks great for editing and playback on the road.

Panasonic made a strong case for its P2 cards in its NAB press event, a case which will be entirely true as prices of this solid-state memory continues its precipitous drop. It looks like Moore's law is still alive and well when it comes to solid-state memory, and as soon as Panasonic can sell 32GB P2 cards for under thousand dollars, there will be no other format that can touch it. Even now, Panasonic has a line of DVCPro HD camcorders whose pricing starts at a level that's scarcely above $6,000, and range all the way up to its highest-end VariCam models. This year, Panasonic showed strong professional level support for the P2 format with a variety of VTRs and field units. This was a big year for Panasonic and for P2, where Sony, in its press event immediately following that of Panasonic, had hardly any products to announce.

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