Support for Panasonic's Professional Plug-in ("P2") solid-state memory-based acquisition system continues to gain widespread industry acceptance from many of the major players. First Thomson and Avid Technology announced their support for the format at the European IBC conference in September, then Pinnacle Systems came on board in October, and now Quantel has said that it too is building interoperability into its NLE and server products.
Thomson, Avid Technology, Pinnacle Systems and Quantel have announced their support for Panasonic's P2 solid-state memory-based acquisition system. The companies plan to offer interoperability between their products and the P2 card.
All of these new products with P2 compatibility will be on display at each companies' respective booth at the upcoming NAB convention in April 2004. The new alliances between these industry leaders will improve workflow and reliability for broadcasters by providing them with a completely tapeless system in which they can directly playback and edit video content captured on the P2 cards. This integration will also minimize time-to-air for broadcast news and sports applications.
In the most recent announcement, Quantel said it would offer interoperability between its generationQ editing and server systems, enabling material acquired on Panasonic P2-equipped camcorders to be either directly transferred into Quantel editing and server systems at faster than real-time rates via a standard PCMCIA interface. Images can also be played back from the P2 cards and edited directly with the Quantel user interface.
Richard Taylor, Quantel's Executive Chairman, said that one of the major bottlenecks in digital news production has been the transfer of raw material from the acquisition device into the server environment. Panasonic's P2 system makes it so much easier, he said.
Late last month, Pinnacle Systems announced its support via the company's IT-based networked media products for broadcast news, sports, editing and content delivery. Pinnacle said it would integrate the solid-state technology with its Vortex networked news systems, Pinnacle Liquid editing systems, Team Sports solutions, MediaStream servers and Palladium Store shared storage systems.
While Thomson Broadcast and Media Solutions initially announced its support at the 2003 IBC conference in Amsterdam in this fall, it revealed a distribution agreement last week in which Panasonic would integrate the Thomson Grass Valley line of Profile XP Media Platform servers and M-Series iVDR products, into its systems solutions worldwide. Those products will now include integrated drives designed specifically for the P2 SD card.
At NAB2003, Avid Technology announced that it was collaborating with Panasonic to further the interoperability between Avid editing products and Panasonic's DVCPRO50 format at all frame rates. Avid later confirmed its support for the solid-state P2 system.
As a result of this collaboration, customers will be able to transfer media from Panasonic products directly into Avid's new editing systems via a single FireWire (ITU 1394) cable and maintain the original acquisition quality.
Avid's Media Composer and NewsCutter editing systems have supported DVCPRO50 native compression since 2002 and the company recently announced SDTI support in its new Avid Digital Nonlinear Accelerator (Avid DNA) media processing hardware. This will further expand interoperability with Panasonic's DVCPRO50 products, including P2-compatible acquisition products.
Offering the benefit of no moving parts and (eventually) low-cost storage, the P2 card consists of Panasonic's SD (Secure Digital) memory cards that provide approximately 18 minutes of DVCPRO recording on a PCMCIA card. At the NAB2004 convention, Panasonic will release a range of P2 card-based camera/recorders, VTR style recorders, and a 5-inch drive bay unit.
For more information visit www.panasonic.com, www.pinnaclesys.com, www.quantel.com and www.thomsongrassvalley.com.
