A closer look at Panasonic’s P2, Grass Valley’s REV Pro & CompactFlash, and Sony’s PD Optical Disc.

Professional video is still largely acquired using the video tape cassette, but we predict that worldwide tape sales will hit a major downturn by 2008.

This will include sales of consumer mini-DV tape cassettes as the entire market transitions from linear to non-linear storage in the hold-out area of acquisition by 2010. The only exception will be high end mastering and archive use, where real-time compressed bitrates exceed 200Mbps (a la Sony HDCAM SR and Panasonic D5-HD). But in comparison to the new and emerging high compression yet high quality professional HD video like the 19Mbps ProHD (JVC), 25Mbps HDV (Canon, Sony), 50Mbps JPEG2000 (Grass Valley) and AVC-Intra (Panasonic), and Sony’s 35Mbps HQ-HDV, the linear video tape cassette performs hopelessly behind the times, considering ingest to servers and workstations is increasingly file-based, requiring non-linear immediate access to any point within the material.
Look at the small format 1/3” CCD HDV camcorders (Canon’s XL H1, JVC’s HD100, Sony’s Z1) and the HVX200 from Panasonic. All four of these less than $10,000 HD camcorders have a built-in mini-DV tape cassette drive. All of these now offer a third party Hard Disk Recorder attachment, because they realize that the mini-DV tape cassette is no longer acceptable for professional HD acquisition. As a matter of fact, the Panasonic HVX200 can only record DV to the mini-DV tape cassette. Why not DVCPRO, DVCPRO-50 and DVCPRO-HD? Well, the bitrates of DVCPRO-50 (50Mbps+) and DVCPRO-HD (100Mbps+) are certainly too high for the mini-DV tape cassette format, and DVCPRO, even at 25Mbps bitrate (about the same as DV) was never permitted by Panasonic to be recorded on a mini-DV cassette. Thus, to use the HVX200 professionally with any DVCPRO format, you are “forced” to use Panasonic’s P2 RAM cards. For professional (non-DV) shooters, the built-in mini-DV tape drive in the HVX200 has no purpose at all!
And the HDV models?
The Bottom line is that the mini-HDV tape cassette is primarily used for cheap long term and archival storage. The serious professional users buy the external Hard Disk Recorder, which will accept the compressed HDV transport stream live from the camcorder over a 1394 Firewire connection, as well as provide direct access once the Hard Disk Recorder is attached to the workstation.
Look at the Sony full size professional XDCAM HD (PDW-F330) camcorder relying exclusively on the built-in Sony PD (optical Professional Disc) cartridge drive, recording to an optical disc very similar to a Blu-ray Disc, but in a cartridge. No tape needed at all.
And look at Grass Valley’s new INFINITY HD camcorder relying on two non-linear technologies: Iomega’s REV Pro hard disk cartridge and CompactFlash RAM. Again, no tape needed at all.

2006 - The Year of the RAM

RAM or Random Access Memory provides instant random access with the highest sustained transfer bitrate of any computer storage medium and lightning fast transfers.  Optical Discs (a la Sony’s PD) offer immediate (not quite as fast) random access. Panasonic currently leads the built-in RAM-based camcorder market with its P2 technology, which is already delivered in significant quantities built into their SD and HD camcorders. Grass Valley (Thomson) has announced their Infinity HD camcorder line with integral RAM recording through the established CompactFlash cards, competing head on with Panasonic’s P2 camcorders. 2006 is the break-through year for RAM-based acquisition work flow in professional video.
What is Flashable RAM?

It’s re-writeable solid state memory often used to store critical data such as BIOS in PCs and cell phones etc. Due to the Flash RAM advantage of not needing a continuous power supply to keep the information from being lost. A “standard or non-flash” PC RAM card however loses its information once power is removed. The drawbacks are that Flash RAM is slower to rewrite, and after several hundred-thousand rewrites, the data may become permanently corrupted. So  obviously, removable RAM cards for camcorders must contain the Flashable RAM type for the program material not be lost once the card is removed from the camcorder. All solid state memory sticks or cards are therefore based on Flashable RAM.

Panasonic’s P2 RAM Card

The P2 card is a proprietary sub-assembly, designed and manufactured by Panasonic seemingly for exclusive use in Panasonic-made pro-video products. We speculate that Panasonic chose to package the RAM sub-assembly cards (SD cards = Secure Digital cards) inside a PCMCIA/CardBus compatible shell for three primary reasons: (1) Every laptop/notebook computer has a PCMCIA slot. (2) The PCMCIA/CardBus specs made it possible to theoretically achieve a peak transfer bitrate of 640Mbps, as the P2 guts have been designed by Panasonic using multiple industry standard SD cards (Secure Digital cards) inside the shell. (3) Panasonic wanted a proprietary system.
Panasonic says you get approximately one minute of DVCPRO-HD recording per GB of storage for 1080i60 acquisition, yielding 4 minutes for the 4GB and 8 minutes for the 8GB card.

Grass Valley’s CompactFlash RAM Card

The CompactFlash RAM card is a non-proprietary product package, designed and manufactured by many different manufacturers to agreed interface standards in many MB/GB capacities for many different uses in consumer and professional applications. SanDisk’s 8GB Extreme III CF cards offer a sustained transfer bitrate in excess of 20MB/sec (160Mbps) at a US discounted selling price of about $500. We believe Grass Valley chose CompactFlash RAM for the reasons of non-proprietary design and to be available to purchase anywhere at competitive prices.
The GV INFINITY is the only camcorder product so far from GV announced to feature CompactFlash cards. The GV INFINITY camcorder offers two slots for CompactFlash cards, enabling a total “on-line RAM capacity” of 16GB (2x 8GB). This is sufficient in competitive terms vis-à-vis Panasonic’s 40GB (5 slots x 8GB P2 in their full size camcorders) as the Infinity also features a built-in REV Pro removable hard disk drive with 35GB capacity, where the Panasonic P2 camcorders (so far) only have P2 RAM as removable media. Because GV’s compressed HD is half the bitrate of Panasonic’s DVCPRO-HD, the 8GB CompactFlash RAM card can hold twice the time capacity at 16 minutes (2 minutes per GB).

Sony’s Re-writable PD Optical Disc

Sony’s Professional Disc (PD) is a re-writeable optical disc offering very high optical recording densities, similar to the Blu-ray Disc (BD) technology. It appears that the PD is really a BD in a cartridge. The currently shipping first generation PD holds 23GB of data, or approximately 60 minutes of 35Mbps compressed XDCAM HD, 90 minutes of 25Mbps HDV-compliant HD, and 2 hours of long playing 18Mbps XDCAM HD. The sustained write speed is 72Mbps, but this is less important than the sustained read speed, which can reach 144Mbps using a Sony PD player/recorder unit fitted with a dual-head-drive. This is an impressive 6x faster-than-realtime if acquired in the 18Mbps long playing mode, or still 3x faster-than-realtime in the HQ-HDV mode of 35Mbps.
We believe that a mini-Optical Disc (80mm) is needed to replace the mini-DV tape cartridge in the HDV camcorders such as in Sony’s own Z1. We therefore forecast that all of the Japanese HDV camcorder manufacturers (Canon, JVC, Sony) as well as Panasonic will introduce models with mini-BD/mini-PD drives by 2007 for PRO-SUMMER and professional use. A mini-BD disc will likely have a dual layer capacity of about 15GB which will provide about 40 minutes of HDV capacity. This is quite acceptable for many professional applications.

Sony and Panasonic agree new consumer HD format

On May 11, 2006, Panasonic and Sony released the news that they have agreed a new consumer recording format named AVCHD, based upon the MPEG-4 AVC H.264 standard. It is intended for consumer HD camcorders with built-in recordable mini-DVD drives. The gross compressed bitrate is max. 18Mbps providing for both 1080i and 720p recordings. This means that highly cost effective consumer AVCHD CODEC chips are under development by these two giants, which will benefit the professional HD video industry in the longer term. This also confirms that mini-BD (Blu-ray Discs) will soon be used in HD camcorder designs for consumers as well as professionals.

Forecasting the Future in HD Camcorder Storage

The broader world market of professional HD camcorders will use compression resulting in a gross bitrate from about 20Mbps to 60Mbps (video bitrate range approx. 17Mbps to 50Mbps). Sony’s PD currently record at a sustained rate of 72Mbps, which proves that the nearly identical BD can realistically support realtime compressed HD recording up to the same 72Mbps. A mini-PD or a mini-BD would sell for about $20.
Grass Valley’s REV Pro can record at a sustained bitrate of minimum 110Mbps, comfortably supporting realtime compressed gross HD bitrates up to 100Mbps. But Grass Valley does not compete in that lower HDV camcorder market, and we do not believe that the Japanese suppliers of HDV camcorders will choose REV Pro type of removable storage over optical disc (PD or BD).
What about internal removable RAM-based recording? CompactFlash offers a sustained write bitrate of about 160Mbps, while Panasonic’s P2 may be significantly higher. But, at compressed gross realtime HD bitrates of less than 60Mbps, a transfer rate of 160Mbps is sufficient in most applications. At HDV bitrates (JVC at 19.7Mbps and Canon/Sony at 25Mbps), 160Mbps provides up to 6x faster-than-realtime transfers! Even with Panasonic’s newly announced professional AVC-Intra HD compression at about 60Mbps gross, CompactFlash will provide 2.5x fast transfers.
Based upon the above analysis, we forecast that professional HD camcorders starting in 2007 will be fitted with BOTH mini-Optical Disc drive AND dual RAM sockets, but WITHOUT video tape cassette drive. We think you should bear this in mind when you plan your investments in pro-video workstations and servers in support of your future acquisition processing requirements.

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Tore B. Nordahl
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