Pinnacle Systems and Panasonic Work Together to Integrate Networking Solutions for Tapeless Acquisition, Editing, Playout

Pinnacle Systems, Inc. announced it is collaborating with Panasonic AVC Networks Company to deliver interoperability between Panasonic's DVCPRO P2 series, solid state memory-based professional products and Pinnacle's IT-based networked media solutions for broadcast news, sports, editing and content delivery. The alliance between these two industry leaders will enhance workflow and reliability for broadcasters by providing them with a completely tapeless system in which they can directly play back and edit video content captured on the P2 cards using a broad range of Pinnacle products.



Together, Pinnacle and Panasonic will explore integration of Panasonic's P2 technology for video with Pinnacle networked media products, which include Vortex networked news systems, Pinnacle Liquid editing systems, Team Sports solutions, MediaStream servers and Palladium Store shared storage systems.



P2 cards are professional plug-in cards containing Panasonic SD (Secure Digital) Memory modules and are compatible with PCMCIA slots on personal computers. The initial P2 card will allow 18 minutes of DVCPRO or nine minutes of DVCPRO50 recording on a card using the PCMCIA type II form factor. Panasonic anticipates releasing a range of DVCPRO P2 series devices, including camera-recorders, VTR style recorders, and a 5.25-inch drive bay unit. The goal of the alliance is to enable material gathered with cameras and other devices using P2 storage media to be instantly usable for production and playout simply by plugging the card into a card reader. This integration would further speed time-to-air, particularly for environments such as broadcast news and sports.



In addition, from the view point of customers' investment, Panasonic will expand the product range through the enhancement of SD-memory capacity, namely the migration from SD to HD recording and playback. Panasonic plans to build a 128GB P2 card in the near future. That is more than two hours of HD at 100Mbps on a single P2 card. The ability to record DV, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50 and DVCPRO HD on the same P2 card is also an important testament to the strength and consistency of the DVCPRO compression scheme and the clear migration path from SD to HD.