If a card is partially full, the deck will record only until it is full.

This limits recording time only by power supply and the available number of cards. Cards are recorded in sequence, and when a card is full, it can be swapped out while another card is recording. To solve this, camcorders and decks using P2 media employ multiple card slots, with the ability to span the recording over all slots. At introduction, P2 cards offered low recording capacity compared to competing, video tape-based formats (a miniDV tape holds roughly 13 GB of data, and an S-size HDCAM tape holds 50 GB). The cards can also be used directly where a PC card (PCMCIA) slot is available, as in most older notebook computers, as a normal hard disk drive, although a custom software driver must first be loaded.Īs of early 2010, P2 cards are available in capacities of 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64 GB. The system includes cameras, decks as drop-in replacements for videocassette recorders (VCR), and a special 5.25-inch computer drive for random-access integration with non-linear editing systems (NLE). The P2 card is essentially a RAID of Secure Digital (SD) memory cards with an LSI controller tightly packaged in a die-cast PC Card (formerly PCMCIA) enclosure, so data transfer rate increases as memory capacity increases. It features tapeless (non-linear) recording of DV, DVCPRO, DVCPRO25, DVCPRO50, DVCPRO-HD, or AVC-Intra streams on a solid-state flash memory. P2 (P2 is a short form for 'Professional Plug-In') is a professional digital recording solid-state memory storage media format introduced by Panasonic in 2004, and especially tailored to electronic news-gathering (ENG) applications.

P2 micro p2 card reader