Panasonic Launches New High-Speed P2 Cards

Panasonic has announced a new line of P2 solid-state recording media, the F series, that will support recordings up to AVC-Intra Class 200 of the AVC-ULTRA codec family and substantially faster transfer speeds.

F Series P2 cards offers transfer speeds up to 1.2Gbps, which Panasonic is billing as "substantially faster than most professional solid-state memory cards offered by other manufacturers."

The F series cards, which are already on sale, come in three sizes: 64GB, which has a suggest list price of $730, 32GB ($499) and 16GB ($399).

In addition to AVC-Intra Class 200, the new F Series supports all currently available codecs for existing P2 cameras and recorders, including AVC-Intra 100/50, as well as DVCPRO-HD/50/25.

However, Panasonic camcorders, such as the previously announced AG-HPX600 P2 HD shoulder-mount, that will support AVC-Intra Class 200, are still under development and are not yet available for purchase.

The AVC-Intra Class 200 codec is designed for ultra high-end mastering and mezzanine workflows and offers visually lossless compression, which Panasonic believes makes it ideal for migrating current HD tape masters to a file-based format without degradation.

The codec also offers a far smaller file size than many platform-specific mezzanine formats.