Posted By Nathan and Martin:
Nathan McCann is a shooter I use on projects, and I have always been pleased to work with him. He makes his living shooting news for local tv station. He website is currently under "reconstruction" to use his words. But he shoots for NBC 12, and they shoot on Panasonic's P2 technology and I wanted to see his opinion of what it is like to use this relatively new technology. 
Here is what he has to say:
My name’s Nathan McCann and I shoot the news with
Richmond’s NBC station, WWBT. Martin
wanted an inside view of Panasonic’s P2 technology from someone familiar with
it. I’m not an engineer so I can’t give
you all the mind-numbing technical low-down, but I’m shooting with it all day,
every day as a news photog so I can give you that perspective.
P2 is fantastic. I
started shooting on mini-DV, then shot on BetaSP tape at my first news
job. I switched to P2 when I started at
NBC12 and for what we do there’s no substitute. I’ve got no ties to the company, I’m just a happy user.
Here’s a brief run-down of the gear we use. We’re shooting with Panasonic’s
broadcast-style P2 camera, the AJ-SPC700. We each carry three 8 GB P2 cards which gives us 101 minutes at the
video format we shoot in (DVC 25). We’re editing non-linearly on desktop PC’s at the station and on laptops
in the live trucks and satellite truck.
Basic workflow is pretty simple. You shoot on the card just like shooting to
tape. The camera breaks each shot into
its own separate clip. If you want to
watch your footage in the field, you just pop out the LCD screen on the
camera’s side and each clip is shown as a thumbnail. Think of the thumbnail view in a non-linear
editor. You can view each clip, copy
clips to other cards, and delete clips all in the camera. When you get back to the station to edit there’s
a special drive built into the computer with five P2 slots and you just click
your cards in. You open a bin and all
your clips are there, thumbnail style. You can select the clips to download and then you just drag them in to
your project folder for transfer to the hard drive. Transfer is significantly faster that
real-time. I’m not sure the exact speed,
but it’s close to 5x real-time.
Those are the basics. Where P2 really shines is in the little techniques you can use to speed
up your day. Here are a few examples:
1) There was a major incident at a local high school a while
back. Three of our news teams showed up,
all shooting footage at the same time. We quickly realized it was nothing that deserved six of us (a student
had let off some mace) so two teams decided to leave. One team was staying to do a live shot,
though and wanted the footage of the other two teams to cut into the story
going out to air. One team had shot all
their other footage for the day so they just left the live crew with the single
P2 card of the school footage. I didn’t
want to leave my card because I had other stories to shoot, so I used my camera
to copy all my school footage onto one of the cards that was staying on scene. Then I wipe my original card. So the live crew gets all their footage and I
get to save all my disk space for later.
2) I was going to do a live shot in front of where city council
was meeting. The meeting started at 6 PM
but the producers wanted stories in the 5 PM and 6 PM shows. I needed video for the 5 and 6 stories so I was
going to grab file video and use it to cut the stories in the live truck. In the old days you’d grab a tape labeled
“City Council B-roll.” Yawn. Instead, I used our archive system to pull
into an edit bay copies of our most recent Council stories. Then I exported the stories as .avi’s
directly onto a P2 card. The card can
act, basically, like a big thumb drive. So when I got on scene I popped the P2 card into the computer and
downloaded the clip, treating the P2 card like an external drive. Downside, you can’t view the file clips in
the camera. Upside, you’re not carrying
around a bunch of tapes and you’re transferring the file at
faster-than-real-time.
3) I’m shooting football. I know nothing about football, I’ll be honest. I basically aim at the ball and hope someone
runs near me with it. Because I’m
totally clueless I have no idea when a big play is shaping up. Enter the Pre-Record function. Setting the camera to Pre-Record makes it
dump everything it sees onto a buffer. The second I hit Record, it starts recording a clip BUT it also tacks
all the footage in the buffer on to the start of that clip. So the play starts, but I don’t hit Record
yet because I have no clue if this is a big play or not. I watch the play and five seconds in the
quarterback gets tackled. I hit Record
two seconds afterward then stop recording when the play’s over. The buffer holds sixteen seconds, so the
footage of my final clip actually starts sixteen seconds before I hit Record. As long as I had the camera pointed at the
play, I get the footage of the entire thing. Not only is it great for sports, it’s also good for shooting lightning. Just aim at the sky and hit the button after
the strike, you don’t have to burn tape just waiting for it to happen.
4) Shooting on a tight deadline happens all the time in
news. There are days I get back to the
station five minutes before air time and have to bang out a quick piece for the
start of the show. Times like this even
the 5x real-time download with kill my chance to make air. With P2, though, I have the option to skip
the download and edit straight from the card. Pop the cards in the computer, open up the bin, and all your clips are
there. Instead of downloading them, you
just treat them like they’re already downloaded. Drag them in to the NLE, trim them, then
paste them to the timeline. So why
bother to download at all? Simple: when
you edit straight from the card, the NLE copies to the hard drive only the
footage you put on the timeline (with handles). For a quick job that’s no problem. If you’re doing a longer piece, though, you’ll probably end up going
back and moving your edit points around. If you move your points beyond the handles of the original clip you have
to redo the entire edit.
A couple other observations about P2:
The cameras and cards are completely solid-state, no moving
parts. This stuff is rock-solid. I’ve seldom seen it just up and fail. True, the cameras aren’t much more than a
year old, but keep in mind how we use them. These aren’t wedding cameras. They’re at fires and out in the heat and bouncing around police
cars. They see the world. And I haven’t seen more than three or four
examples of things breaking.
Some stations have selected direct hard drive capture (ie
Firestore) over P2 technology. The big
advantage of P2 over things like Firestore, in my experience, is the ability to
put different footage on different cards. If I shoot two interviews for two different reporters I can just put the
footage on two separate cards. Back at
the station I just give each reporter their specific card. Not exactly an option with a single drive.
P2 cards fit in the standard PCMCIA card slot. With the right software you can just pop a P2
card in a laptop and start editing. You only
get a single card’s worth of footage at a time, but you don’t have to worry
about a separate card reader.
The biggest downside for P2 is the cost of the cards. Shooting on tape, if you wanted to save some
footage you just stuck the tape in your desk and left it there. Not so with P2. With P2 you develop a sort of psychic link
with your cards. You know exactly where
they are at all times and who has them, because if they get lost that’s lots
and lots of money. Of course, with the
dropping price of archiving systems saving file footage to the network isn’t
that big a deal anymore so the downside will be less of an issue in the future.
and 
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