Posted by AnthonyR on 09/26/05 15:42

"Toby" <kymarto123@ybb.ne.jpp> wrote in message
news:43380164$0$6806$bb4e3ad8@newscene.com...
>
> Hi Anthony,
>
> Flash memory is stable. The P2 cards are like PCMCIA cards, hot-swappable,
> and the camera holds 5 of them. They don't need any time to spin up, no
> power source, and no delicate heads to hit the platens if you drop them.
> The fly in the ointment right now is the price--I heard that they are
> $1750 each for the 8 gig cards. I believe they hold about 40 minutes worth
> of video at 25 Mb/sec. Of course in a couple of years they are expecting
> to have 32 or 64 gig cards.
>

Thanks for the info Toby,
Yes, this appears to be better, you're right.
Price is the obstacle now, but that will come down as they made and sold.
Like all things electronic.
Remember the first RAM Modules? 1 gb of RAM in a PC in the 90's would have
cost a fortune.
So yes, I see the light, 64 gb flash card in a camera slot with a second one
as a backup, nice!!


> The nice thing is that if you are editing non-linear you just plug them in
> to a reader and have immediate random access--no digitizing necessary. For
> archiving they can be dumped to tape, but my company--which is
> beta-testing the system for Panasonic in Europe--figured out that it is
> actually cheaper to dump them directly to HDDs. One 300 gig HDD is cheaper
> than the tapes to archive the same amount of material, and the price is
> only going to go down. Once you have enough cards you don't have to buy
> tapes anymore, and you can save only the material that you need--no more
> 30 min tapes saved with only 10 mins of good material on them.
>

So using a 300gb HDD for long tern storage sounds tempting, but is it as
reliable as tape?
What if you plug it in one day and it doesn't spin up? I guess it can go bad
just sitting there from what i read online.

What about backing up the video data on big size data backup tape system?
would that be cheaper than a lot of little tapes?

> Panasonic has already introduced this system in their latest prosumer HD
> cam, but the camera is $6000 and the cards are also monstrously expensive,
> so we'll need a couple of years until this makes it to the real consumer
> market.
>
> And of course there's Sony with XDcam, which is now compatible with Avid
> for editing...
>
> Toby
>
>

Yeah, i can't wait for stuff to trickle down to consumer prices, that's
where I fit in. :)
AnthonyR.

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