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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Flash again

Panasonic makes big $$ off their p2 cards because they made the system to only accept panasonic p2 cards and not any standard flash card. If they had made the camera able to accept any flash card the camera would be much more popular and they would sell a ton more cameras (I assume) but panasonic got greedy. They designed the camera to make the most money they thought they could out of it and did not think of the consumer. I think Red is thinking about the consumer. No film camera builds their cameras to only take Fuji film that would be stupid. So it seems like red is taking the same approach as film camera companys. Red builds cameras not flash memory so it seems like they want to give their customers the best bang for their buck and thus build a camera that accepts standard flash cards, that way we all benifit from advances in flash card technologies. This all stands as long as red is building the camera to take standard flash cards. Does anyone know if they are?
 
Panasonic makes big $$ off their p2 cards because they made the system to only accept panasonic p2 cards and not any standard flash card. If they had made the camera able to accept any flash card the camera would be much more popular and they would sell a ton more cameras (I assume) but panasonic got greedy. They designed the camera to make the most money they thought they could out of it and did not think of the consumer. I think Red is thinking about the consumer. No film camera builds their cameras to only take Fuji film that would be stupid. So it seems like red is taking the same approach as film camera companys. Red builds cameras not flash memory so it seems like they want to give their customers the best bang for their buck and thus build a camera that accepts standard flash cards, that way we all benifit from advances in flash card technologies. This all stands as long as red is building the camera to take standard flash cards. Does anyone know if they are?

So that means Panasonic was lying to us when they said the reason for P2 cards was because over-the-counter solid state memory cards weren't robust enough to handle the video? I can't tell you how many times I read that they needed to use some kind of special chips in their P2 cards that had fewer defects than consumer flash cards and, as a result, were much harder to make and more expensive, blah, blah, blah... was that all just a bunch of nonsense???
 
So that means Panasonic was lying to us when they said the reason for P2 cards was because over-the-counter solid state memory cards weren't robust enough to handle the video? I can't tell you how many times I read that they needed to use some kind of special chips in their P2 cards that had fewer defects than consumer flash cards and, as a result, were much harder to make and more expensive, blah, blah, blah... was that all just a bunch of nonsense???


I can not confirm that Panasonic was lying all I can say is that I have heard of people taking apart their p2 cards and they contain flash memory from other companys. Plus what do you really need to do to make flash memory more robust? They have the panasonic HD system that they use so if they felt that standard flash memory was not robust enough why would they ever come out with a HD system? It all just seems fishy to me.
 
"A codec that brings 4k down to 25mb/s with little, if any, loss in resolution??? Unheard of. I mean, the idea is such a leap from the norm that it just doesn't make sense to me that no one else would have ever tried it. "

that should be Mbs not mb/s ...
another camera going this route is the SI 2k camera using cineforms raw codec with their camera which can capture to usb drives or to a laptop .. of course their Mbs number are lower as it's 2k and i believe using around 5-1 compression ?
 
The main reason for Flash drive technology being where it is at the moment is Microsoft. About 2-3 years ago they published a spec for flash drives for future Windows OSes. This is really just a great convergence of technologies. A Flash drive would have been possible, Ram drives have been in existence for almost a decade. It is great timing that so many drives are coming to market simultaneously. Also it should be pointed out, that only till recently, most of the newer drives that just got released on the market were never really displayed or shown to the public. They were talked about, but a working model was not released. So it seems like all of a sudden flash drives are everywhere. This is really the build up to the release of Windows Vista on Jan. 30, that is all. But hey, a high tide raises all ships!
 
one possible reason why Panasonic has the position that they do with their flash cards might be because they do not make Computers. Sony,Apple,Generic PCs,Hp and others build there machines to work across their product line. If you are a manufacturer that does not have such a product line then you build everything to your system and maybe you make it proprietary. This is why technology convergence for some companies is very scary.
 
Oops my mistake. But my opinion still holds true if they were making desktops capable handling the type of workload needed to be matched with their cameras maybe they would not be so proprietary.
 
Couple of questions:

This codec is amazing. Incredible that it's even possible. Considering that, how come no one else is creating it? A codec that brings 4k down to 27mb/s with little, if any, loss in resolution??? Unheard of. I mean, the idea is such a leap from the norm that it just doesn't make sense to me that no one else would have ever tried it. Isn't DVCPRO-HD 17mb/s?

As I understand it, compressing data when it is still in RAW bayered mode has major advantages that Greame is cleverly exploiting. All of that changes when the RAW data is debayered to RGB, which is why the data rates for 1080i may be considerably higher than 4K RAW.
 
I remember reading an article somewhere about the reason for the added expense of the p2 cards. It was stated that they were like mini computers and had more in them than ordinary flash cards. Don't know if thats true or not?
I take it that ordinary flash cards will contain buffering capacity for pre-record, i certainly hope so.

Michael
 
As I understand it, compressing data when it is still in RAW bayered mode has major advantages that Greame is cleverly exploiting. All of that changes when the RAW data is debayered to RGB, which is why the data rates for 1080i may be considerably higher than 4K RAW.

Might not be as bad as you'd think. The DCI digital cinema spec does pretty well compressing 4K RGB (using JPEG2000, a wavelet codec like REDCODE).
 
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