If you came by the Panasonic Q & A booth at NAB 2008, you probably saw the HPM110, P2 Mobile recorder, a six P2 Card, “Swiss Army knife” of HD video tools. It still provides outstanding support for an old Varicam and can provide more features than you can shake a stick at for a video village. At about $15K, without cards, it is quite a deal.<\/p>\n
At the same time, the HPG10 was available for about $4K (list) and it played back DVCProHD in the field and recorded Firewire DVCProHD onto P2 cards. Everyone asked when it would record HD SDI.<\/p>\n
Well surprise of surprises; the HPG20 is now out for $5,300 (list) and it not only records HD SDI, but it also records the AVC-Intra CoDec as well as DVCProHD, and copies single clips or whole cards to FAT32 drives. You can hang this baby on the back of your Varicam and get 10-bit, full-format recording in the field on P2 cards, or sit it on a table next to your camera and copy cards to a hard drive all day long, or get two and do both.<\/p>\n
What will they think of next?<\/p>\n