Panasonic to introduce new 32 GB P2 cards

Panasonic announced yesterday that it would commence the shipping of 32 GB P2 cards in November. These would retail at $1,650 with the older 16 GB cards presumably staying at $900.

Panasonic proudly points out in its press release that it has quadrupled the storage capacity of its P2 cards in just one year. I remember the days when the 8 GB card was $1200. Back then it was a rip-off but now I think 32 GB is pretty decent for that price when you consider that a 40 GB Firestore is about the same price. The Firestores, however, have the disadvantage that they are not solid-state which means that they can be damaged if they are jostled and bumped in the field (which is very likely on most shoots).

They say that with 5 cards, you can get 2.5 hours (3 on 24p) on AVC-Intra 100 or DVCPRO HD and 5 hours (6.5 in 24p) in AVC-Intra 50 or DVCPRO 50 modes. If you already have installed the firmware update required for the 16 GB cards, you're fine, if not, you'll need to install it before you can use the 32 GB ones.

The full press release is here. Looks very promising.

Red One ships today

The first 25 Red cameras are shipping today. Whilst the first shipping models are not fully feature complete, Jim has promised that there will be weekly firmware updates to gradually roll out the features, and that it should be fully complete by October.

Everyone here is really excited about what this will mean for the industry. We're hoping to get our hands on a rental model in the not-too-distant future so that we can get to grips with the workflow and ensure everything runs really smoothly on our system, as we know a lot of our customers are interested in using this camera.

We'll keep you posted on how everything goes. For anyone who isn't sure what the big deal is with this camera, go to the Red site and look at the specs. And then look at the price. Yep, that's not a typo.