Today we had a visit from a couple of product managers from Panasonic - the BBC has committed to their P2 system for DV, standard-def, and high-def acquisition. It is very well engineered with commodity parts. The PCMCIA format card (which has error correction and data striping inside) contains four SD cards - so currently they will sell you an 8 gigabyte one (as well as four) which holds eight minutes of DVCPro HD at 1920x1080 (yes - Panasonic supporting something better than 720 lines!) or half an hour of DV res. It records in native DV codecs (4:1:1 and 4:2:0 supported) wrapping it all with an MXF header. Avid supports it out of the box and they have a cute little play/review app (see the picture above) that means that moments after you've ejected the card from the camera you can be watching or editing natively. It has all the groovy auto meta-data you'd want (including a GPS receiver and cameraman voice-recording) and seems just the right mix of off-the-shelf and innovation. It's a pity it's all DV-type codecs - 100mBits for HD is kinda bad (compared to HDCam's native data rate of 270mBits). Even against IMX or BetaSX (which are long-GOP formats) it's not going to look better. Still - if the Beeb like it......
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