I recently got my camera and I really like the look I get with the HD video. But what I come to realize is that the P2 cards are too expensive and do not hold enough video when you are shooting 108i HD so my question to you is, and I am hoping that you are having the same issue and have come up with something, is how can I work with this technology without having to buy 10 8GB P2 cards. Can I record directly to a powerbook while I am shooting? or do I need to buy 2 P2 cards and a powerbook so I can keep flip flopping between the 2 when I am shooting? What can you tell me? I have a shoot this saturday and I don't know what to do. I want to shoot 1080i, that's what I got the camera for. Thanks, indeefilm

I'm still new at this myself, but you have a couple options; 1) Firestore is a 100mb disk drive that records from the firewire port;, and 2) yes , if you have FCP on your MBP, you can record directly to your laptop.

Do you know the settings to connect to the laptop? I tried it on my G5 and couldn't get any signal over the firewire

My new Mac Pro is in the mail, so I don't have any experience with this yet, only what I've read. Check out the DVX User Forum, lots of experts there.

As I understand it firewire can't support the transfer rate so you have to record to P2 when doing 1080i HD. You can record direct to hard drive but you get a compressed file, only the P2 is truely native uncompressed.

I've done a lot of reading on this camcorder and I'm planning to buy one, but like others have pointed out P2 memory is way OVER priced considering a 8GB iPOD costs 1/4 of the price and has sufficient memory bandwidth (internally) to easily deal with data rates of 1080i HD. Most flash RAM (or variants of) are well beyond the data rates required for 1080i uncompressed, the limiting factor is the interface to the flash RAM. But I'm pretty sure the interface isn't valued at 3 X the cost of the flash RAM (it's PCMCIA spec which has been around for some time so the tech isn't "new").

But I guess memory always has been a very lucrative market with huge profit margins.

Rob.

A P2 card is much more than just flash memory. It is actually an entire computer of sorts, complete with its own firmware and CPU. Not only are the electronics required expensive, but the actual flash memory is made up of four of the highest-grade (and fastest) SD cards available. Moreover, these 4 cards are setup in a RAID 0 array for performance...

If you do long-form recording, maybe P2 isn't for you. It is geared more towards dramatic productions, in which individual takes are typically much less than the P2 card's capacity.

The Firestore gets good reviews, but since I don't own one, I can't speak to their accuracy.

You may also check out the Cineporter, which is coming this summer from Specialized Communications. It will be fairly pricey, but it will allow for extremely long-form recording, with all of the benefits of the P2 recording (except solid state, that is).

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