Panasonic Touts P2 Success and Unveils Future of Pro Line

Las Vegas, NAB, April 23, 2006 - In a press conference today, Panasonic introduced several new products in their professional video line, including the AJ-HPC2000 shoulder-mounted camcorder. The company also discussed the development of a new H.264 codec, and gave upbeat predictions for the future of their P2 product line.

A high speed solid state media, whose digital card format was introduced here at NAB two years ago, P2 offers film, broadcasting, and news media professionals the ability to record standard definition DV (25 Mbps), DVCPRO50 (50 Mbps), and DVCPRO HD (100 Mbps) video to a wide array of Secure Digital (SD) cards. Panasonic claims to have captured 80% of the broadcast news market with P2, including over 15,000 units sold to over 300 broadcasters worldwide. In addition, Panasonic claims their high definition equipment dominated the Winter Olympics at Turin, Italy, and announced that the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China, would use Panasonic P2 equipment.

“Our new P2 HD products deliver the highest operational reliability and full production quality, and expand the flexibility and versatility of HD in the field for broadcasters and video professionals,” said Robert Harris, Vice President of Marketing, Panasonic Broadcast. “These P2 HD products will build on the solid growth of P2 DVCPRO, which has been adopted by more than 100 U.S. TV stations and other well-known broadcasters worldwide.”

The new members of the P2 HD family include the 2/3” AJ-HPC2000 shoulder-mount camcorder, available in the first quarter of 2007 at $27,000, the AJ-HPS1500 studio recorder available in January 2007 at $19,950, the AJ-HPM100 mobile recorder available in November 2006 at $12,000, and the AJ-PCD20 drive available in July at $1,980. In addition, the AG-HVX200, a hand-held DVCPRO HD P2 camcorder, which was announced at NAB 2005, is currently available at $5995 without P2 media.

Products using P2 technology offer solid-state memory recording without the moving parts of other tape, hard disk, and optical disc based systems. Panasonic says that this insures the highest possible reliability, especially in challenging conditions of extreme temperature range, shock and vibration. The new P2 HD products are supposed to offer a significant reduction in maintenance costs, longer useful product life, and immediate access to recorded video (no need to digitize) and metadata. And, by utilizing a standard PCMCIA interface and computer file structure, P2 HD supposedly fits easily into any standard IT infrastructure.

P2 HD products offer 100 Mbps DVCPRO HD with independent intra-frame encoding, 4:2:2 color sampling, and less compression. According to Panasonic, this makes HD content easier and faster to edit and more able to stand up to image compositing than that produced by long GOP MPEG-2 systems. In addition, the new Panasonic products are backwards compatible with existing DVCPRO50, DVCPRO, and DV-based facilities. The new, multi-format P2 HD products are differentiated by their ability to record in 720p, 1080i or 480i, which, Panasonic says, addresses the requirements of diverse HD broadcast applications.

As an additional item on the agenda, Panasonic announced that they would support H.264 MPEG4 with a new, optional codec that will be available in April 2007, in addition to their widely supported DVCPRO HD codec. The AVC-Intra (H.264 compliant) codec is said to offer significantly better compression efficiency than older MPEG-2 codecs, and can provide high quality for news at half the bandwidth of DVCPRO HD. This bandwidth savings, without long GOP compression, is supposed to offer storage and distribution advantages as well as twice the recording time on a P2 card.