The Weirdest Flash Format (Panasonic P2)

Now I'm imagining a video 8-track with a continuous loop of tape to allow for continuous recording in the tape era

I like how we could just say "PC Card," but we don't. Because PCMCIA is just better: it's got CIA in it and lots of letters 😁

Here I am , watching a whol 30 minutes video again after a year, because I have forgotten what was it about. There are only two channels where I can handle such long videos: Technology Connections and Cathode Ray Dude [CRD] 🥰

Wait...why...did we not keep this format? The more I'm thinking about it, the more storage as it exists now, is making less sense. A literal card that we could easily slot in and out, just sounds like NVME with less steps and fiddly screws...why did this die out? Like, you have a laptop, easy storage upgrades and even hot swapable. Desktop or server, same diff without the need for these awkward ass caddies, and you could probably just make them bigger for higher capacities. Why the hell did we end up with this unnecessary screw in stuff?

Given it's PCI-E already, throw out the NVME format need entirely, just directly interface with PCI-E, lower complexity, job done, and you can STILL have PCI-E cards and stuff for everything else. How did we even get here?

I kinda miss this set, as messy as it was. Gave the operation a guerilla vibe.

The "MC" in PCMCIA stands for "memory card"

I don't know what the fuck I expected, but it sure wasn't a raid controller, 4 SD cards and the hopes and prayers of the R&D team. lol Thanks for sharing, truly an amazingly inane solution, despite it's efficacy.

Let me tell you a little secret, or rather, let me start with saying you are right, they are striping over the 4 sd cards.

Ah yes, the little secret.. while they don't use sd cards internally (unless buying fake ones), modern SSDs still do exactly the same trick and stripe data over multiple flash chips.

I think hard sectored, endless loop, digital videotape would have been a great idea. You have the runlength of videotape, but the indexing/knowing where stuff is of flash memory.

I ewasted a half dozen of a similar model about 10 years ago.
Our station had gone 100% HD. For legal reasons we couldn't sell or give them away.
I tried to snag one for myself. But then I figured out how much a lens would cost and decided to stick to my Canon DLSR.
Cost of P2 and reader was no issue, they were going to ewaste too.
Even had a desktop P2 reader!

Same deal for the Mac Pro towers and some old switchers. I had to witness such carnage at my last broadcast job.

I used a P2 camera from 2011-21 to shoot sports video. It never let me down. It still works, but just sits in my closet. I started using other cameras for higher end shoots in 2015. But the P2 was super reliable, and made me a lot of money.

The build up, the reveal, epic! However, my favorite part was the insurance card jab.

I need some p2 cards you selling them?

Great Video :) - Late Tape-Camcorders like the Panasonic AJ-SDX900E already had a 8-second Pre-Record function. It wasn't a new feature of the P2-Cams.

It's nice to see the "bolting multiple smaller things together in a single case to make one 'big' thing" strategy isn't only for large batteries.

To think I just bought four 2TB micro sd cards for about $100. BTW who in their right mind would take a camera on the lake without the proper protection?

Is there a continuation for this where he tried replacing the 4 old SD cards with newer and bigger SDs?

I think the trenchcoat solution is a lot slicker to the consumer: one piece of removable media instead of four, you don’t need to keep track of which four cards belong together, and while size is a concern… I remember using SD cards a few times and my thought was always “I will lose this if I handle it for more than ten minutes”. I can appreciate having a piece of storage large enough that it won’t disappear for forever into the void of my purse. There’s a certain confidence and reassurance that comes with something being too large to fall through a grate, and thick enough that it can be picked off a table without effort.

Also, Panasonic can now completely change the internals if SD cards don’t take off and it’ll work as long as you can fit it inside a PC Card. If you start by striping four SD cards inside the camera, it might be a lot harder to fit, I don’t know, nuclear decay-powered DRAM formats into a four SD card slots.

Try imaging each 1gb card to each 16gb card and inserting them into the cf raid ( of course after imaging the cards to the 16 gb resize the partitions in 16gb cards)

So far as replacing the SD-cards within the P2 carrier, maybe try non-SDHC cards? I think 2004 was before that standard existed.

what a reveal

about the eprom . you will need to reflash and modify it to accept higher capacity . the camera wont care what size it is

finding one of these cameras they are 1 to 2k still cool thing is you can get sdcard adapters for these and have 256gb lol

Part two: exploring hacks to replace the Panasonic P2 SD cards

Fun fact… some of the ~2010 era police dash cam recording systems (by Panasonic of course) used this P2 platform to save video data (now since gone to basically a city wide police wifi/cellular cloud based saving), it was also encrypted…. And is basically x amount of SD cards (well, the chips they contain anyway) inside of the P2 card to equal the Gb size of the P2 card. if I recall correctly this had the potential to be of stupid fast data speeds too.
(I commented this before watching the video…now I see it is literally 4 SD cards…. Makes me wonder if I could get a P2 card and chuck 4,4 gig fast SD cards in and boost the system ram memory on my Panasonic Toughbook cf-c1 🧐)

Great video as always man

Funny thing, in the late 90 where i worked, there was a soft on an indigo sillicon graphics who worked on picture with a low rez version and applied everything after that on the hig def( the picture wheighted more them 200/300 mo).

why did I laugh so hard at that 💀💀

It's so interesting to me that they went this way because, I don't know about then, but I know about now, and the enclosure of an SD card has quite a lot of volume to it. A lot of modern SD cards are almost empty, but even if they used to be packed with PCB and stuff, you could have fit that stuff on the carrier PCB at maybe 3x the density before counting that you wouldn't need the headers. I'm looking at a 64MB Panasonic card on wikimedia commons (Sdcard_panasonic64mb_inside_front.jpg) and there's 2 ICs plus 2 resistors that do fill a lot of the space inside, but about a quarter, estimating by eye, of the PCB is given to the board edge connection, and if you got rid of that plus the plastic, these 4 components are definitely less than half of the volume the complete SD card occupies. Panasonic definitely could have fit more storage in the original P2, or saved money by simplifying the manufacturing and BoM. It's always so bewildering to me when companies do this stuff. Ok so maybe, this flash chip is Samsung. Maybe they had a deal with Samsung that didn't let them put the chip in other products. They had to make SD cards to use the chips, but they could do whatever they wanted with the SD cards.

Maybe nowdays they still do this but it's because SD card manufacturing has scaled up so far that it would be more expensive to source the flash chips. I don't know that they still do this, I would hope not, I would hope it's an M.2 at least, maybe an mSATA just for the masochism.

<3!

Awesome channel i got you a subscribe extra 😊👌

体形が俺と似ている・・・

Think about how cool you'd be showing up to your kids game with one of those babies! All the other "born in the 80s Dads" would be soooo jealous! 🤣🤣🤣🤣

we need the "shrek" media format.

Its pretty funny to see features in a 2000s camera which are sold 20 years later to the consumers as "new" and revolutionary.

I'm getting flashbacks to awful VFX inserts shot on P2 when the situation was too dangerous for more expensive cameras

I wanna pat the kitty. I miss my Blackie. Watch out fella, I think that breed has problems with cancerous growths in the abdomen at later ages.

All my pre 2000 flash cards still work, unlike modern ones. PC card one for my Omnibook 800 and the 48MB CF card I purchased in 2000 which cost a fair wad.

This is incredible

P2 SD was introduced at a station I was working at in 2008-09, of which was a decent step up from the process of capturing BetaSP in real-time to Grass Valley News Edit and bouncing the edited video back to tape for playback on air. As for the construction of the bundled SD cards in a P2 shell, it was nice for the era as all edit bays at this specific station had four-port P2 card readers that Final Cut Pro could import the A/V files on. In a pinch, one could hand off cards to an editor and you could move onto another assignment if need be. In a ENG sense, it was great when a lot of 4:3 standard definition video material was involved. The major downside was import time when the switch to 16:9 HD occurred. If the computer was not fast enough, the process was often annoyingly slow.

four of them

I spy gunpla kits in the corner

this is so infuriating having used this format in the late mid 2000's.. It was sd cards? Dear god

I had a DSLR that took Callunacards. Those were a thing probably just until P2 came around. Although I don't think DSLR world never used those. Instead they oped for PCMCIA to CF adapters and just plain CF cards. Oh, and what was a Callunacard, well it was a full size PCMCIA card that housed an actual hard disk. I can still recall the sound of a HDD spinning up next to my ear every time I took a picture :D I do believe that Callunacards were quite reliable and cheap, probably more than the early "high capacity" super expensive flash cards (PCMCIA or CF).

Going to a side track for a bit, I do know that flash was available for some professional markets much earlier than for digital imaging but it was quite expensive for a long long time. I think the earliest device I have seen using flash cards was from very early 1990s. I can't recall the use (it was in an electronics lab), perhaps storing user/operator settings for a spectrum analyzer or oscilloscope. The cards were like few kilobytes in size and it seemed like more of a gimmick than anything. Finally, in the 00s industrial electronics market was saturated with proprietary flash cards as a way to transfer settings and cal data (and sometimes the firmware) when a broken device is swapped. Nowadays, I think everybody just slaps an SD slot in their devices.

This was wonderful, I shot on P2 on an HPX170 for a long time, but surprisingly never cracked open one of the cards. There's also a non-zero chance that the controller is actually raid5, or perhaps implements some proprietary error-correction scheme. Pro video really requires the best reliability - imagine if you have a five million dollar effects shot, like blowing up a building - the camera simply cannot fail.

Saw another comment about the RED cards on the 1st gen DSMC being just a sata ssd in a trenchcoat - i did crack one open and laughed when i found that!. Well, cried a bit, because of the price!