Review: Panasonic AG-HPG20 'P2 Portable'

We've had the new P2 Portable in-house for just over a week now and, while we're still running some tests to see exactly what it can do, it appears that it's going to be a very useful addition to the Visual Edge inventory.
For the camera owner, the P2 Portable offers the ability to make your production a P2 based experience, and improve the quality of the captured image, while using the camera you already own. Connecting via HD/SD-SDI the HPG20 can be mounted to the back of a 2/3" camera or can sit independently. The P2 Portable will then take your 1080 or 720 signal and can encode it to AVC-Intra 100, AVC-Intra 50 or DVCProHD. If you're outputting an SD-SDI signal from your camera (NTSC or PAL) you can choose to encode to DVCPro50, DVCPro25 or DV.

The 3.5" LCD monitor gives you or your producer a live view of what's being shot and also enable clip viewing for playback. An external HD or SD monitor can be connected via the built in HD/SD-SDI or composite video outputs and the P2 Portable has both a built in speaker and RCA audio outputs. Waveform and Vectorscope are included and can be used with both the incoming signal and the recorded ones.At the end of the shoot the HPG20 can directly connect to a hard drive and transfer your footage with verification. A large improvement over the previous model is the P2 Portable's ability to play back the files DIRECTLY from the hard drive and display them on either the onboard monitor or an external HD monitor. In addition, it's easy to name each card, or even shot, that you transfer to the drive which makes for a more streamlined post-production process. Finally, the HPG20 gives you the ability to edit and load metadata and text notes, enabling the post-house to identify the camera, shooter, location, etc.

The HPG20 offers other features, although they appear to be of limited use in the field. The HD/SD-SDI output is a welcome addition for monitoring but the down/up/cross-conversion functions are only accessible through that port -- as such, it is not possible to to shoot in 720p and then output 1080i to your client's hard drive without the use of a "black box." The included Firewire 400 port does not allow transfer of AVC-Intra encoded footage and cannot be used for data transfer to a hard drive. You can, however, stream directly for recording through Firewire which, in essence, makes the HPG20 a more stable and versatile version of the Firestore.
The biggest problem with the HPG20 is the time it takes to transfer directly to a hard drive: it's abysmally slow. Switching verification off results in a nearly 60% improvement in transfer time although it is still slower then using the Duel Adapter with a Mac Book Pro and a hard drive attached through Firewire 800. Using the HPG20, with verification on, to transfer a 16GB card via USB 2.0 to a LaCie 250GB Rugged drive took 30 minutes and 47 seconds. That's nearly twice as long as the total recorded time on the card and you can bet I'm glad I didn't test this with a 32GB card. Without verification the transfer time was 12 minutes and 38 seconds. Using a Duel Adapter, Shotput P2, a Mac Book Pro and the LaCie on Firewire 800? 8 minutes and 10 seconds.

Overall, the P2 Portable is going to be excellent for tape-based Panasonic camera owners who want to extend the life of their camera and expand the services they can offer their clients. The awful data transfer time is a real problem that needs to be addressed by Panasonic going forward, but just having the ability to transfer footage in the field and play back that footage without needing a laptop is a very welcome feature.