The Weirdest Flash Format (Panasonic P2)
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- čas přidán 27. 06. 2024
- Hands down, this is the strangest flash memory format ever created, but it was created for very good reasons - just much, much earlier than it had any right to exist. Merry Christmas!
FYI, I didn't include much test footage because this video is meant to be about P2, not the camera - I just couldn't demonstrate much about P2 without the camera, so I kept it down to the absolute minimum, the features that would only show up because P2 was in use.
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00:00 Intro
01:38 Flash history
04:33 Comparison to videotape
08:50 Overview of camera/card
10:28 Cost/capacity
11:38 P2-specific features
19:52 P2 teardown
24:58 Proxy video appendix
26:53 Conclusion - Věda a technologie
When you first opened that up my jaw dropped briefly before I then grinned with delight. A bonkers, but clearly effective, workaround!
it's so smart! but so silly!
*Kaplunk drops into the chat*
Hi you should do a collab
*Kaplunk leaves the chat*
It's one of those things that is still happening today!! I highly recommend everyone look up how Red cameras' "mags" are actually super cheap crappy flash media.
If you guys do a collab, I swear to god I’ll up my patreon donations to the both of you. Don’t test me, I’ll do it!
Might just do it anyway but that’s beside the point.
Yes please! The times aren't exactly optimal for collaborations, but would love to see you two do something together about some vintage A/V equipment - or literally anything else! Also happy holidays folks, stay safe and thanks for all the amazing videos!
The next logical step is to open up a modern p2 card and find four micro SD cards in four SD card adapters.
How about 16 microsds in one of those quad adapters?
four SD cards with four adapters, and if you open those up, four microSD cards in each
@@RoyWiggins if only nanosd existed, you would have more adapters..
@@rxgtv While proprietary and not really an SD card because Huawei lost the rights to using SD card(couldn't tell you why) they did make their own flash storage cards which are the exact size and shape as a nano sim and currently the largest Nano Memory(NM) Cards can hold 128gb. It's very much in its infancy and a lot of companies aren't on board despite Huawei wanting this new form factor of memory cards to become industry standard. Now the pedants out there will say well if it's not an SD card why even blah blah blah? I'm mentioning it because we've been "stuck" with micro SDs for over a decade with seemingly no forward progress to miniaturize them even further and Huawei were the first ones who took that first step(even if forced to) towards miniaturizing expandable storage cards so it's worth mentioning it regardless it's not actually SD.
@@michealpersicko9531 there is no practical mainstream reson to do so. Like 1.8" hard drives.
Reminds me of RED's "proprietary" memory cards that were just toshiba SSD's with a passive adapter PCB lol.
And not only that, they were a single SSD, unlike the RAID 0 mess that the P2 cards were!
One part people forget is that RED cherry picks the SSD's for performance. In order to be guaranteed a specified performance criteria from Toshiba they have to pay a premium...granted not as much as what they are charging...but with the volatility of memory chip prices these days they are probably just covering their asses.
@@DFMurray I thought that argument was debunked?? Do they have a trade deal with someone for drives? Are they testing them lol?
@@DFMurray for sure they cherrypicks the SSD, they took the cheapest of the bottom.
@@gymprofessor329 they certainly certify exemplars of any type, yes, and either pay extra to know when internals change, or check. And they probably take in a bunch of stock just in case there are problems with supply.
Unless you’ve heard of them frequently shipping defective carts out in large numbers? Or worse, ones that only work when you’re using low data rates?
I was in TV when all that happened. First of all: the price of the camera does not differ that much from standard equipment at that time. If anything it might have been even cheaper - as the tape mechanism was costly. Speaking of which: this mechanism was subject to regular maintenance which didn´t only cost quite a bit it also took your gear out of work for the time. On the other hand you wouldn´t want to miss your maintenance cycles as that would mean unusable material which no one can afford. Third: you´re right with around 30 bucks per tape - but they had to be archived. You spent a considerable sum of money on tapes that were recorded and then archived. Now take the digital material from your card and put it on your server and that makes it so much cheaper and at the same time much more accessible as there was no one in the archive running around looking for that bit of footage you so desperately needed. You could just order it from your desktop and even watch a preview! Where you are wrong is the speed of editing with these. In the transitional phase from 3 machine editing (3 tape machines that is) to nle (non linear editing=computer) I was faster editing news stuff by tape by a considerable amount of time. The reason: the material had to be captured on the pc (from tape), edited and rendered and played back out on tapes or copied to a server. On the tape system I just edited the footage as it came in and it took me no less than 10 minutes to have a 30 sec news piece ready - and played out live onto a hard disk recorder in real time. When the whole process went digital that advantage went away soon. It was a great time to work in television and today I would pay money to do an editing shift "classic style" ;-) All the best for you in 2020. I enjoyed the tour of the P2 cam!
You'll get it -- as soon as he suggested breaking out the SD cards, my thought was, "I'm supposed to expect a camera ape to bring me FOUR SD cards, all properly labeled so I can put the four streams back together? Would that EVER happen?"
@@everlastingphelps you would have to get them to bring you 5 P2 cards, anyway...
@@JohnRunyon The thing is that each of the p2 cards on its own has 4m of video. Each SD card on its own has unintelligible garbage, and until you combine them in the exact order you have nothing useful
Based on their age, my guess would be the P2 cards you have there don't support SDHC, in which case the largest SD cards that could be used in it are 2GB each, regardless of whether the controller is hard-coded to work with only those cards or not.
Went looking to see if this had already been said :) it would only double the storage if it worked, but I'm still a bit curious if that would. Though if it is standard RAID0 it probably still wouldn't, without some way to induce it to reinitialise.
Thanks for this comment. I kinda assumed he knew that but it's worth documenting.
Would be interesting to dd dumps from the sd cards. Could be that they have some tagging data on them.
Didn't he mention 16gb cards were available?
@@JordonRenn93 Most likely the 16GB P2 cards are much newer than the ones shown in this video, and they use a different controller that does support SDHC cards (the P2 card he took apart in this video has a date code of 42nd week 2005 [0542] on the controller, and 4GB SDHC cards weren't released until 2006, so this controller is too old to support SDHC). Either that, OR the 16GB version has a redesigned PCB that takes eight 2GB SD cards (however I don't think this would fit in a standard PC Card form factor).
Being a sysadmin has conditioned me to scream internally whenever I hear the term "RAID-0". But this .... this might be the most ingenious application for it that I've seen so far. It's simple, clever, and the only way to achieve the required speed. And the small size is almost sort of a bonus - if one of the cards dies, it's not *that* big of a deal as you only lose 5 minutes of footage - annoying for sure, but still better than losing an entire tape or something. What a clever workaround!
As for why the other SD cards didn't work, I have a feeling that the LSI controller has its raid setup configured at the factory and expects the 4 SD cards to already be formatted for its RAID layout. With other hardware RAID controllers, you need to enter their setup during boot to configure a new array on fresh drives, but that's obviously not possible here. I have a feeling that if you made a block-level copy of the original cards to another set of SD cards (probably not SDHC or XC though) and plopped them into the adapter, it would work just fine. SD cards do have a unique serial number programmed at the factory (learned that when I tried to update the navigation software in my 2015 VW Touran - the entire nav database is stored on an SD card that you can just overwrite with a newer version on your PC, but the car only accepts the original card. The manual says it's because that card is weather and temperature-hardened, my gut says it's so they can sell you a 16 GB SD card for 50+ bucks when it goes bad), but I doubt that they'd bother to verify that in an embedded solution like the P2.
RAID0 always gets a bad rap, but in my experience, it's just as reliable as any single-drive solution.
I've been using RAID0 since the original Western Digital Raptors came out 15 or so years ago. I had two 74 GB drives striped for my high-speed game install storage. If you wanted high-speed storage, at least until SSDs became mainstream, it was pretty much your only solution back in that era.
Even today, if you have the need for high-capacity high-speed storage, a pair of multi-TB HDDs in RAID0 is still a more cost-effective solution than high-capacity SSD storage, and still has better throughput than a single large HDD. In fact, most current 1+ TB drives I've encountered in clients' budget Dell/Lenovo/HP/Whathaveyou systems are so slow, I'd rather have teeth extracted with no Novocain than perform routine Windows updates. It's a shame these big players still sell modern machines with such slow primary system drives; it really ends up making the product look really bad as the average consumer has 0 understanding of what they are getting with a gigantic HDD versus the more expensive yet "tiny" SSD option when they spec their systems. I work with people often that have a computer only a few years old, and they are already talking about buying a new machine because it's so painfully slow to do anything. Then I check the machine for them, and find the 1 TB+ 5.4k RPM archival-grade HDD pegged at 100% active time, yet only moving kilobytes, sometimes megabytes, of data and the CPU sitting idle and the RAM empty. Then I blow their mind by swapping them to a 500 GB Samsung SATA3 SSD instead of replacing their computer outright and it performs so much better... But that's going off on a new tangent, so perhaps a story for another day.
My main game rig/workstation has a 500 GB NVMe for system drive and programs, a 2 TB NVMe for game installs, and an 8 TB RAID0 for my media collections using two 4 TB WD Greens. It formats out to about 7.5 TB, and averages around ~350-400 MB/sec performing large sustained data transfers.
I don't just throw caution to the wind, however. As ANY MECHANICAL DRIVE STORAGE is prone to failure with age, not just RAID0, I perform full media backups to a NAS with WD Red NAS drives in RAID5 for redundancy. And I don't even "trust" that. I make regular copies of my archives to an additional Dell PowerEdge using a PERC raid controller and four 3 TB WD Blacks in RAID5 with a dedicated hotspare.
Ironically, with all that redundancy, my final archive goes to LTO4 tapes for extra safe keeping...
But, now I'm going off on a tangent again... ☺
@@DavidHansen725 raid 0 is by definition not as reliable as single drive storage. It’s as reliable as 4 (or however many) drives taken together, and fails if any one of the constituent drives fails. In practice, that’s often fine.
@@DavidHansen725 Please beware of the single point of failure caused by using system integrator branded RAID controllers over documented RAID formats. In the 2000's there was an attempt to standardize the format used by RAID controllers, but it seems to have become associated with BIOS based fakeraid and not used by most active RAID controller brands like LSI, nor by OS built-in software RAID.
@@johndododoe1411 Can't comment on other SI's servers but I'm pretty sure Dell's PERC cards are LSI with rebranded firmware. I'd have to pull the heatsink off of one of my spare cards to verify, but I'm almost certain that is the case. My PowerEdge T610 has the PERC H700 SAS RAID controller with cache module and battery backup, definitely not BIOS-based. My personal experience is that I've had no trouble moving the disks and importing the RAID configuration from one Dell server to another, so I don't anticipate having any problems should I ever upgrade to a newer chassis, or have to replace a dead controller should the need arise.
My game rig is using BIOS-based Intel RST for my RAID0, and it's been working flawlessly as well, although wouldn't expect to be able to move that RAID to another system if/when I upgrade. The only problem I've had with that is updating to the RST 17.x drivers, which disables my SSD cache as the feature is no longer supported. I just reverted to the 15.x drivers supplied by Asus for my motherboard to fix that issue though, and the SSD cache came right back online.
@@DavidHansen725 PERC is a Dell rebranding, it might be LSI one year, EMC another. And the custom firmware might change the disc format compared to similar unmodified LSI cards.
Actually, there's another weird fun fact, the SPX800 also is a linux computer, the firmware image holds a linux 2.4 kernel.
holy crap, that is... interesting to say the least. I... I want to hack it now.
All Panasonic P2 cameras run some weird version of Linux. There's a guy online who did some digging on it, please do a video on it!
@@CathodeRayDude If you need the software upgrade to use cards larger than 8GByte you can contact Panasonic's support, they should send it to you. If they don't they sent it to me some years ago, so feel free to drop me a message if you need it.
@@BenJonesVideographerLinux in embedded firmware is very common, and it's almost always "some weird version" (in the sense that it's not a standard distro like Ubuntu or something). Routers, set-top boxes, TVs, security cameras, etc all usually run Linux
Shrek, the most professional flash memory format, very widespread in the business world. It was promoted by the mobie with the same name
It is also the only flash memory format to store data in multiple layers, similar to an onion though some incorrectly liken it to a parfait. DVD-DL used a similar concept, but only stores 2 layers and is more like a sandwich.
I'm a believer.
@@joemck85This comment wins
I about lost it when you stuck the handwritten Beta SX and DigiBeta labels on there 😂
I HAVEN'T FINISHED MY VIDEOTAPE COLLECTION YET
For the record DigiBeta tapes were definitely $100+.
I had a couple HD P2 cameras back in the day - HVX200's - they still had a tape slot, because clients didn't believe in flash memory so we sometimes had to shoot onto tape. People complained about the cost, it was huuuuge, I made a ton of money renting out the cards to other productions.
The RED cameras that I moved to after the Panasonic P2 used a 'REDMag' that wasn't too different (at the start) than the P2 internals.
Another of my favorite channels! I currently use Sony SxS cards in my camcorders and that is a format that is more than a bit confusing. With there 3 different speed cards and SD card adapter but at leas the camera know the difference and will tell you what formats it can record on the card you have in it.
@@soundman447 thlk m.
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We had a HVX200 too. Never bought a P2 card for it - I remember they were like $900 for a 8GB card. We ended up going with 2 or 3 Firestores (?) which were 100GB hard drives that tethered to the camera with a firewire cable. They were maybe $1000 each? Anyway at 1GB per minute of video we were so excited to get 100 minutes per hard drive.
@@N6TJA k
I heard about the "redmag" issue. Seriously. That is just stupid.
shrek, the best format
Shrek is love. Shrek is life.
*HEY NOW*
came here to say this
@@Crlarl you're an all Star
I'm a believer!
P2 was a workaround to the tech limitations of the time. I remembered even in 2008, an 8GB Sony Memory Stick cost nearly US$100 and only recorded an hour of 1080i HD video @ 17 Mbps. As for the concept of RAIDing SD cards together to allow higher throughput, JVC did that in 2012 with the GY-HMQ10 4K $4,995 camcorder. That camcorder had 4 SD slots that recorded each quadrant of 1080p HD video which required software to stitch them back together in 3840×2160p, however that camcorder can record HD with just 1 SD card. It was a workaround to allow 144 Mbps 4K to be recorded on 4 identical consumer-grade SD cards at a time when U3 SD cards (let alone UHS-II) didn't exist yet.
oh my god! this is incredible! I need one now!
Sony MS were a particular ripoff though...
@@SianaGearz That, and there were *so* many fake "Pro Duo" formfactor cards out there it was unreal... which really didn't help when you had both a PSP and a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone, both of which really "couldn't have enough storage" so to speak
That reminds me a lot at how 8K is handled now in a lot of setups like in the BMD constalations where it's still 4x4K SDI feeds.
I guess you you watch that 4K stream from those cards on 4 HD Hyperdecks and a 4xHD to 1x4K converter in realtime xD
if you really wanted to
I remember the first time I used a camera that could record video. It was 2003, I borrowed my Dad's digital camera for a school trip, and it would shoot 24FPS video in 480 x 320 resolution, and took a 256MB CF card. My friends were so excited until I told them it had no sound.
haha do you remember the model?
@@rxgtv It's literally a noname brand that disappeared a year after making the things. I have it in a cupboard someplace so if I find it I'll edit the post with a model name! Had it out last summer and took some wonderfully grainy shots of a wheat field.
Have you tried the Menus in Sony Cameras of that era? The regular settings menu was already messy, but did only show a fraction. You had to press the Menu switch and selection button simultaneously while turning on the camera. This lead you into the unknown realms of the maintenance settings. Finding anything there was really a challenge. At least they numbered each setting, so you could look up the number in the manual beforehand.
The Panasonic one looks kind of similar.
looks almost the same as my Sony. Even the same top level menu names :)
I remember the pre-record feature was the sole reason I bought the Casio Exilim series of point and shoot cameras. I loved that feature for my sister’s basketball games. I always got the perfect shot when they made baskets
Fun Fact, PCMCIA, CompactFlash, and IDE/Parallel ATA are all cross compatible and all electrically compatible... for the most part. You can use passive adapters to convert any of them to any other one.
I love that you can get a 256 gig SD card for like $30 now, and 15 years ago it would have been tens of thousands for that storage.
my fave part about making this video is that i absolutely did not realize the prices were THAT outrageous. i knew they were "high" but I had just never done the math. It stills feels very strange to think that 8192 / 256 is 32. It still feels weird and I keep worrying I did the math wrong somehow even though it's just the most basic division operation. It's just hard to accept that the amount of storage we use increased by a factor like that. An 8GB SD card would be virtually useless to me now.
Dads everywhere shelled out the big bucks for premium storage. I probably have tens of thousands of dollars of crap that's not even worth the garage sale now.
@@LolaliciousSmiley yep, my parents bought a 2 MP Kodak in 2000 because it was getting expensive to take pictures of baby me on film. 32 Meg CF card that went with it, probably $150 at the time.
Wait until you realize that 1TB MicroSD cards just got the mainstream market for under $300.
@@CathodeRayDude The interesting division is 256 / 8 = 32. So a modern 256GB card is 32 times the capacity of an old 8GB P2 card.
Off the top of my head, there were two good reasons why it sold well.
One, it could save some agencies $10-20k a year in editing costs. It was much, much faster to manage.
Another was film storage. It was faster to archive than other digital formats. Studios were able to convert from physical tape storage rooms (be it digital or analog tape formats), to digital storage racks and archive backups. That also means it's a lot easier to find archived footage for later use.
I've never heard of P2 before but when you made the big reveal that it's just four SD cards I nearly lost it. Excellent video, as always! Merry Christmas!
Please never stop making videos they are interesting af
Nice to see this vid. on a format I only heard about.
As I worked in TV at the time, some things I can add.
- A digibeta tape holds about 60 min, and was ~30 Euro's. SP tape was about the same, but holds only 30 min. but you can record SX on SP tape!
- There was a 8 second prerecord option for digital betacam camera's, so you can record from before hitting record.
- Betacam SX was meant as a news format, and was used some by some in the industry, but Digi beta and Beta SP was by far the most until ~2005 for news, al least here in the Netherlands.
DV cam was mostly used for lowbudget TV programs. DVC pro was also not very common. Sony also introduced Beta IMX, but it was no sucses, and I only ever saw a few recorders, and spotting machines. no camera's.
- I have never seen a P2 camera, and only heard about one Belgian broadcaster using them. I do not think they were very successfull around here.
-The Batacam tape transport mechanisms (SP, SX and Digibeta) are actualy very stable, and very reliable. Camera's get a lot of abuse. However, they do require regular cleaning and maintenance.
All mechanisms were made by Sony (also for other brands like Ikegami, BTS/ thompson ect. ) In broadcasting they know you can't do a lot of takes twice. News events do not repeat them selfs cause you screwed up your recording.
Everyone impressed with the P2 card. Meanwhile I'm in love with the cute 260MB PCMCIA HDD.
Does anyone else remember the even smaller Microdrives, little hard drives the size and shape of CF cards?
@@no1DdC They stuck them in iPod minis I think.
I've been watching a bunch of your videos lately and I just want to say the quality of your presentations and the content is top notch.
It's not parroting other youtubers it's new information to me and it's very entertaining and educational.
Here's hoping you keep doing what your doing.
Thank you so much. I am trying my best to touch on things that are unknown, it's both the most interesting thing to me and I think a lot of people.
I am in love in ingeniousity and compability of this thing. I imagine Sony doing this... And sticking five proprietary connectors, one for every revision of format
@@segarallychampionship702 pretty sure they did exactly that with MemoryStick. I have an adapter that converts it to microSD that I'm pretty sure is passive.
the P2 card that you took apart reminds me of red mags, they are essentially M.2 cards in a metal case
If only they actually were M.2 ... those idiotic cards use mSATA SSDs, the predecessor to M.2 from around 10-12 years ago
@@Knaeckebrotsaege They will probably will switch to m.2-2242 when micron discontinues the M500.
Great Video!
I remember companies that bought these P2 Cameras back in 2012/13. This system was really showing its age by then. The cameras shot full hd with a decent codec and data rate, but retrieving the footage was abysmally slow. Especially if you compare it to Sony's SXS Card system which was available at the same time. The P2 cards usually maxed out at about 20 mb/s compared to the sxs system with excess of 150 - 250 mb/s. And this does make a big difference after a long day of video shooting, even copying to regular HDDs. And the fact that Panasonic used regular SD Cards in Raid 0 was ridiculous, even back then. They were the first with a professional Flash Drive Storage system for Cameras, but being first really came with a lot of disadvantages in the long run.
P2 was faster than that, unless using a slow adapter. I remember PC stores at the time selling front panel "drives" that essentially extended the wires from a full speed motherboard PCI slot. Those should give full speed P2 on a contemporary editing workstation.
Wow, an SD card just for settings. I'd seen some early consumer digital video cameras that had a dv tape, plus a memory slot for stills.
Have you considered that maybe the controller doesn't support SDHC? Maybe you could try 4 2GB SD cards and see if the upgrade sticks then?
Agree, that was my first thought.
I think the controller's firmware uses perhaps a whitelist to only allow some cards. The cards are labeled Panasonic Pro High Speed, and Vwestlife some time ago made a video about the D-Snap camcorder which requires Panasonic High Speed SD cards. But maybe that's specific to the camcorder.
I think it happened that way to rush through development time. Making stuff with off the shelf components is way easier (as in less development time) than custom designing stuff, especially for something seen as experimental by management.
good point!! very good point!
Might have also been in a race to get the first mover status. I wonder when Sony released its first pro non-tape digital pro camera?
As I recall things, SD production at that time had scaled up to the point where it was literally the cheapest way to get flash memory short of bare dies(which are obviously much harder to work with). It was a big deal when they started undercutting CF prices, especially when they started matching them at large capacities(despite CF being easier to build and having room for more silicon inside). So it looks weird, but makes good monetary sense.
It also let them focus on the controller chip, which still had to be custom.
Yeah, I was thinking something like that.
Although soldering flash would be cheaper once your process is in place, that requires modifying an SD supply chain to separate out some of the raw NAND chips, and transport those fragile components to wherever you're making your P2 cards. Whereas grabbing some cards at the end of the chain involves no real process changes, and would be much easier to transport.
Plus, you're probably not making *that* many P2 cards initially since it's a new product category in a professional industry.
I'm surprised they didn't use XD cards in those p2 cards. That media standard was essentially a direct connection to a nand flash chip. Then again it was pretty much dead by 2005....
Good work, man. I've had to deal with their later cards that are SD-sized and I'm certain those are mini-RAIDs as well but the controller is in the camera or the reader. I lost half the footage from Knobcon a couple years ago because the photog didn't understand this and just threw it in her laptop!
Methinks the SD card for settings isn’t so much for disaster recovery as it is to allow a cameraman to quickly move his settings to whichever camera is available when he starts his shift. Kinda like the newer cars that remember the seat positions separately for each key fob. :)
Would also let you easily copy settings between cameras, back them up, etc.
Your channel is fantastic. Thank you for risking your card and opening it up. You do the things I don't have the space, the time, nor the money, to do!
This is a wonderful Christmas present! Thank you for the great videos covering unique aging tech and giving us your in-depth knowledge and attention to strange details :)
"We use my health insurance card to get the card out - it's the only thing it's good for"
Ha, preach brother. I cackled at that line so loud my wife had to ask if I was okay.
@ 19:44
I think the competiton from Sony, the XDCAMs recording to Professional Disc, basically a BluRay in a housing, was another interesting way to ditch tape, as the media was much cheaper and higher capacity (20 and 50 GB). Here in Germany both formats were adopted, for example the SWR and many of the other ARD broadcasters went for the Sony system, while the ZDF went for Panasonic. The XDCAM is still in use over here, up until a few months ago the PDW 700 was the main camera for ENG work and a lot of freelancers still use it.
"c'mon, it's not THAT kooky..." (sees the inside of the card) "it's ENTIRELY kooky!"
It's like that microSD RAID sata SSD thing linus had
After a bit of research the Panasonic Pro High Speed 1 GB SD card, was sold for professional photo cameras like the 2004 Canon EOS 1D Mk2, and it's cost was around 200$ (retail) and the press release announced at the time "Data transfer rate: Up to 20MB/sec".
I love the personality and humor you put into your videos!
Great video, love the level of detail you go into on tech. This is the first of your videos I have seen, and you, sir, have gained a new subscriber. Thank You.
16:34 I used firewire on my old XDCAM camera, years ago. When you install the Sony FAM driver on your computer, you can use the camera as an external drive. Back in the days I could transfer up to 2.4x the speed. So, a recording of an hour took only 25 minutes to copy to my computer
Loving your videos! I didn't at all anticipate SD in Raid 0... that's amazing...! Thanks for opening my eyes to lots of cool tech!
Holy shit, it has been a long time since I've heard the acronym "JBOD"
And yet I use it everyday. I have an HP Server that has a SCSI ultra 320 Controller with two drives. I have exported these two drives as jbod so that I can have them running as raid 0 with zfs which is much more flexible than to Export them as raid 0 in the Controller.
@@nilswegner2881 Totally. I stopped being adjacent to the IT team about 5 years ago. I get to be blissfully ignorant of all the pain and tribulations encountered keeping my bits safe. I salute you! :)
@@hpux735 I am Just starting to get into the Business. I'm in my second year of becoming an IT Administrator and I Work at a company that uses as many OpenSource systems as possible to avoid paying Money to Microsoft for worse products. The caveat of that is of course that you have to do a Lot of Things all by yourself but because my Mentor and I are both the biggest nerds in the World it's awesome.
Thank you so much for your channel. You're doing the right thing by pursuing your passions.
Great video. Your videos provide so much interesting information about topics I never knew I cared about.
I say that Lucille line all the time, and you inter spliced it perfectly! Thanks for the smile.
Just arrived in my recommendations! First time watching and very interesting, I've never even thought about the history of professional AV cameras. You just earned a new subscriber!
Thanks, glad to have you!
When I was in film school, the hot digital cameras the school had were the Panasonic HVX-200. I always thought the P2 cards were pretty rad (probably because I didn't have to pay for them), they had a really substantial feel to them and slotted into the cameras very solidly. This was right in that wild time when the RED One was released, and the Canon 5D MkII, shit was changing faaaaassssst. Our final projects were shot our on 35mm film.
I love P2's secrets, literal SD cards in a metal box, lol. Awesome.
I suspect your 16GB cards didn't work because they're SDHC. You should try some 2GB cards.
Yet another great video, man. Was looking forward to seeing videos of these newer cameras from ya.
Merry Christmas, mate. Have a grand new year and I look forward to seeing what ya put out next!
I felt like a real doofus for not realizing that the controller obviously wouldn't recognize SDHC cards. Well, I had to wait a while to get them from eBay, but I obtained four identical SD (*not* SDHC) 2GB cards and tried them... and no dice. The results were interesting, though.
I put the four cards, as I got them (formatted 2GB FAT32) in the carrier, the camera recognized the card, but failed to format it. I pulled the cards, numbered them, then took the old cards, imaged each one with dd, then transferred the images back to the numbered 2GB cards and reinstalled them in the carrier in the right order. So now I had four cards with 1GB partitions in the exact desired stripe configuration (hypothetically, maybe) but got the same result.
Obviously there could be lots of dimensions to this. Maybe the camera expects an 8GB card to have a different stripe order, imposed from the factory and never changed. Maybe it really does have serial numbers burned into a ROM on the card. There could be lots of other explanations.
One thing that was very unexpected: I connected the camera over USB to my PC and the card appeared as a single 4GB volume, which I was then able to perform a format on from Windows with no errors. It still didn't fix the issue, but it's interesting that the camera does appear to be able to read the card just fine, it just doesn't Like It.
If anyone has experience with this trick, let me know. I feel like I remember some replies along these lines but I can't find them in CZcams's messy UI.
If you think this is weird, you should look into the Ikegami Editcam next.
I really want to, but they're unobtanium - nobody's even selling one, at any price, so I'd have to do it all in theory and I don't love that kind of production.
Oh yes ! This was so weird, and only awesome if you had an Avid Media composer Workflow. I think if you ingested the Editcam footage I recall that it was basically instantly ready for editing in Avid with everything sorted in Bins etc. ? Haven't seen this format in ages :)
Those editpak cartridges are wild, but the paks solely working on avid hardware is probably what was the biggest barrier for anyone with existing editing software
Ill keep my eyes open for one for you. But yeah very rare. I think the last time i saw an editcam was at the NAB convention in 1996.
Great video as always man
Thank you so much for making this 🙏
I always wondered what those PCMCIA looked like under the hood. Hilarious in this case!
Your content is a good blend of informative & wit, very easy to follow along.
Always wondered about P2. Thanks for the video.
When i was in high school, back in 2008, we had a very robust TV Production program. The bulk of our cameras were DVX-100Bs, but in mid 2009 we got ourselves a P2-based HVX-200, this weird little hybrid camera that could record in SD DV or on P2 cards. We absolutely *loved* the P2, even when you were recording in SD, precisely because you didn't have to sit the entire class period capturing all your footage into FCP. I was a geek even by the standards of the program so I knew about the 4-sd-cards-in-a-trenchcoat situation even back then, but this is the first time that I've actually seen it with my own eyes. I, too, am surprised that the stuff isn't soldered in.
Anyway, thank you for the great video and I look forward to more of your stuff in the future! Subscribed!
I really like your wording. It really captures just how insane this all was, certainly from a retrospective view.
Great video. It's crazy to see the origination of features like loop-record and a pre-record buffer. Also looks like Panasonic put more effort into their P2 cards and was more transparent about them than RED mini-mags.
I can't believe it. You're showing the exact same technology (and camera) I purchased for the TV Station I worked in that era...Getting rid of tapes was miraculous...
We are still using a modern version of the Panasonic P2 camera (AJ-PX5000G) at the TV network where I work. Super reliable format, it's incredibly rare that we have an issue with the cameras or the cards, and quite a lot of our P2 cards are the old 8gb ones like you showed in your video, some of them must be around 10 years old by now. For daily news purposes we shoot in AVC-LongG25 which still allows approx 30 minutes on an 8gb card, with 60gb cards the normal use for longer shoots. Keep up the great work dude, loving your videos.
Gosh, those multiple card slots are delightful. Imagine getting to reload a camera like an ammo clip! 💕
Nice vid! You are getting me interested in old cameras...
I laughed when I saw the four 1 gig SD cards inside that larger card. Pretty good idea.
you could modernize them to hold like 512GB for about 200 bucks a card now. (card as in p2 card, not per sd)
I had 8x 128GB sata ssd raid for a few months but raid support in windows is like trying to light a dollar store bic while outside in the rain. (not impossible, just why would you?)
I gave up on it pretty fast.
@@tommytomthms5 I saw a video on here from years back where someone built a PC from scratch and he had maybe 24 SSD drives all hooked together by Raid and he was jumping on a trampoline while someone was playing crysis. Worked great but I bet there's better stuff now.
The machine I'm on now is probably better.
You make me so happy! It is refreshing to see your inquisitive mind on such wonderfully nerdy subjects! By and chance could you take a in-depth look at the "purple book" standard aka the double density CD?
RED cameras do the same thing: Its just a normal M.2 SSD with a special connector. Btw: great video, very entertaining! Thank you!!
This is fun, when I first started working in media in 2012 the studio I worked for used a Panasonic HVX200, so I got to work with the very final version of this stuff. It worked pretty well, but was still outpaced by DSLRs and the affordable cinema cameras coming out at the time. One thing I remember about the format is how much highlights were left to recover in color correction. There was also a Canon XL1 that lived in a cabinet, but I never got to play with that.
"Why not put the raid controller in the camera" Well then you couldn't put the P2 card into a laptop, because it wouldn't recognize it.
And the weird packaging, putting whole SD cards into a case instead of directly soldering onto the PCB: maybe because it was easier to repair? I don't think those SD cards lived too long, and if a P2 card failed all Panasonic had to do is identify the wrong SD card and replace it with an off the shelf one. Possibly a 5 minute repair from start to finish. With a soldered on flash storage, it would have been impossible to repair (ot at least would've cost more than to just replace the whole unit).
You could send in broken cards to panasonic and they rescued that material and repaired the card exactly the way you described it. I only know of one occasion that happened to a camera operator I know - so it usually was considered quite reliable. I mean: it had to be. We all were quite anxious with that digital stuff back then. A dropout on a tape might kill a scene - but a broken card or badly written data could cost you a whole day of work.
That ant the manufacturing process, if they did chip on board P2 they would have cost way more than they would have to create a whole new fabrication line for a product that is made to last a loooong time (the professional world in general is not too friendly with throwables tech) and sold in minimal numbers. I feel like panasonic at the time had manufacturing lines for SD card and PCMCIA cards. Which made the manufacturing process cost less. I even bet that the SD card in there are their high quality SD line for professional photo cameras of the time.
I was thinking about swapping out the SD cards, and then you did it.
Perhaps the issue is simply that it needs the standard SD cards (which go up to 2GB each), and SDHC simply wasn't supported by the controller.
Entirely possible, I forgot that there was a size limit on plain SD.
@@CathodeRayDude Also not 100% sure if there were any minor pin tweaks they did to support that, or if it was all on-chip magic that gave SDHC the capacity boost.
There were definitely 64GB P2 Card variants available by around 2010. So SDHC was possibly implemented at some point.
@@MaxKuehn Right, but that would be in the controller *on* the card. I'm sure the camera itself can index that much, but the controller between the cards and bus is probably limited to 2gb
@@CathodeRayDude it definitely split the files after a certain size (2gb or 4gb). And it saved it in the MXF Atom format with separate Audio and Video Files with really unintuitive file and folder names ;) But it was easily recognised by most editing systems after ingest. XDCAM Disc was the same under the hood, but only showed the MXF OP1a single file if you had the drivers in Windows/Mac installed.
Fascinating!
So interesting. Thank you.
wow proxy editing is mind blowing! thank you for that
Proxy editing should be available without having the camera itself generating the proxy stream. Generating the proxy stream in the editing suite would require a computer doing a first read-through of the high resolution compressed video (at faster than real-time speed), using a fast (hardware accelerated) codec.
These are gold!
I love how my prosumer Canon HF-G30 has almost all of those features and benefits of flash based storage but for a significant fraction of the price of what that camera and the P2 cards cost, how technology flies! I also remember using a P2 camera during my film studies back around 2008-2009, and what media did we use with that camera? DVCPRO tapes haha, it seems my school could afford the camera but not the cards and I can definitely see why!
Also this video was excellent, keep up the good work!
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 love your wit. ❤️
This is really amazing! Four SD cards with striped raid controller!
I remember when a colleague of mine got his first tapeless HD video camera, he was so excited he "doesn't have to deal with tape anymore." I was like "great, it cost you $800 to shoot 10 minutes (100mbps) at a time and you have to have somebody follow you everywhere with a Macbook." As for BetaSX, I worked at a TV station that used it; not a particularly clean format but good enough for the 6:00 news and a fraction of the cost of DigiBeta. We switched to widescreen shortly before I started working there, still recording everything on BetaSX, and all our viewers thanked us for "going HD". We wouldn't actually go HD for another 5 years or so, when we became the only 1080i60 station in town.
I literally am obsessed with these videos…when I say I’ve been bingeing your channel I mean ~bingeing~
My gf knows your voice and whenever I watch your vids she just calls me a nerd 🤣
This is incredible
I recall James of Cinemassacre made a video talking about his old cameras, one of those used P2. Fun to finally know the secret of that mysterious format.
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.
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.
I know this is an old youtube video, but I can't help that I saw your Gundam Zaku in the background.
What a surprise, I have the same..
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.
That's hilarious! Though early SSDs were having throughput issues with their controllers, so some would run them in raid 0 internally, allowing them to better saturate the SATA bus.
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!
I love this stuff, its kinda like dankpods for old camera stuff, fantastic
the compatability issues with the 16GB sd cards could very well have been due to the fact that sdhc cards tend to not work in older things that're designed for standard sd only (standard sd can only handle up to 2GB on a single card)
Wow totally amazing. I was wondering about the bigger sd cards going into the p2 holder from the moment the dirty little not so secret was revealed
I just bought a panasonic s5iix and was absolutely thrilled to discover this feature 9:36
Awesome video! I never would have guessed that it was four SD cards in them!
I worked for a large city's IT department over a decade ago and spent most of my time in the police department. Panasonic used P2 cards in their Arbitrator (law enforcement) line of cameras and recording systems, and we used them exclusively. The dash camera was mounted in the front of a police car, a back seat camera was mounted on the ceiling, and both (plus audio) recorded on a bank of P2 cards in a recorder unit in the center console. They used the continuous recording and trigger functions to be able to record what caused the officer to take action. Common triggers were flipping the lights on or going over a certain speed (based on GPS in the Toughbook). We had ours set to keep 30 seconds of video from before each trigger, and 30 seconds after the recording was stopped.
We had ours set up to automatically upload and sort footage whenever a police car was within wifi range of the city's network (at the police station, fire stations, city hall, etc). If a car had too much footage on it or it needed to be dumped promptly, we used the USB P2 card readers that you mentioned.
It was a pretty slick system, but I'm pretty sure it was stupid expensive. I was in charge of installing and fixing everything, not worrying about what it cost 😅
Hah! I've been thinking of buying an Arbitrator - there are THOUSANDS on ebay for DIRT cheap. Not sure what to do with it but I think they're like $30 now.
@@CathodeRayDude Not a bad deal for all of the cool tech in them. You'd need a laptop to run the Arbitrator software. I never used them on anything other than a Toughbook so I don't know if they're required or not, but I don't see why they wouldn't work with a regular laptop. Would definitely be fun to play around with though.
If you want one to use as an actual dash cam, at this point itd still probably cheaper and better to get a 1080p dash cam that records continuously to a 32gb micro SD card. I picked one up for under $50 w/SD card, installed it in 10 minutes (had to run one cable for power), and it more than gets the job done.
The black chip on the reverse side of the PCB is 29LV800BE, an 8MB flash chip from around 2003. It has a maximum access time of 70 nanoseconds on both the chip enable, write enable, and read enable lines, which works out to about 14MHz, which at a first glance, is indeed adequate for an uncompressed digital NTSC signal.
The math, I think: 720x480 for NTSC works out to 345,600 pixels, each of which used three bits apiece, uncompressed, for a total of 1,036,800 bytes per frame--a little over one megabit. This is fine if you assume there's no error correction or issues, and my initial impression is that this is some kind of buffer that is being written to initially, not unlike modern SSDs and their DRAM buffers. However, this doesn't make much sense because the original SD specification operates at 25MHz--20 to 30 percent faster than 14MHz.
Another viable theory (I imagine) is that the 29LV800BE is being used as a sort of L2 cache for the 'drive', and the SoC (the shiny chip right beside it) contains a much smaller quantity of cache, for faster access times, performing the initial ingest of footage coming in from the camera, just in case the SD array just isn't quite fast enough.
Another possibility is that they're using this 8MB chip to store the FAT metadata so as to maximize practical usage of the SD cards, which actually tracks somewhat with the JBOD or RAID0 theory, as a lot of RAID controllers will store their configuration in NVRAM or flash memory similar to this. Thinking more on it, this is the theory that makes the most sense.
Yep, my money was on the latter - it's just the metadata for the mass storage controller and this was the smallest NVRAM-type device they could find.
I'm so happy to have stumbled across you on twitter, your videos are great!
Also those cards remind me of those RED storage cards lmao
Hello from a editor that wroked with P2 for few years in TV studio.
Why PCMCIA packages? You can crash them, you wont lose them as a set of 4 SDs etc.
And dont forget about field editing/recording, just toss it to laptop and edit it in field etc.
Problems with transfer speeds were introduced from original P2 reader, that usually worked as USB2 with USB1 speed... So we are usually used PCI readers on workstations.
And yep, P2 is RAID 0, with the drawbacks (camera loses power while recording, its a chance that you will lose all active footage). Also, worth mebtioning, that you get specially conterneized files and folder structure (MXFs)
We had near HD cameras (and it was like first pro camera). The settings on those allow you to unleash any creativity, and open shutter control with progressive filming allow you to make slow motion out of the box. Basically, you could color grade your footage right in the camera, if you want to.
Man, I've become a huge fan of your channel.
I used to shoot on that very camera at college. It was the "fancy" camera we had at the time -- the rest of our cameras shot on DVCAM tape or Betacam. I always avoided the P2 stuff -- it was just slow and clunky.
The build up, the reveal, epic! However, my favorite part was the insurance card jab.
I still have a Panasonic HVX200, which takes both Mini DV for SD video and P2 for HD video. It was "Panny's" crossover camera when HD was coming into it's own back in 2005. I have a BMPCC4K now, but I still love that HVX200! It's a workhorse!
I learned on P2 cameras, back in college! Oh my gosh how things have changed.
This is wild!
When you pulled the
Spoilers:
SD card out of the housing and showed me the off-the-shelf label I screamed "NOOOOOOO!" at my phone.
god damn, this is SO cool! :D