Chapter 5 Working with Panasonic P2 Cards 107
Panasonic P2 Card Format Specifications
A P2 card is a PC Card containing four Secure Digital memory cards ganged together in
a RAID 0 array, providing quadruple the capacity and transfer speed of a single Secure
Digital card. P2 cards are formatted using the FAT32 file system, which limits the size of
a single file to 4 GB. For example, if you record continuously on an 8 GB P2 card,
a single shot will be broken into two 4 GB media files (known as a spanned clip).
The Panasonic file system organizes clips, media, and metadata into the following
file hierarchy:
ÂCONTENTS: This is the root folder of a P2 card, containing folders of all recorded
media and metadata.
ÂAUDIO: Contains audio media of each clip, wrapped within MXF container files.
ÂCLIP: Each clip on a P2 card is defined by an XML file identifying which video and
audio MXF files are part of the clip, where the thumbnail (icon) file is located, and
additional metadata describing the clip’s media.
ÂICON: Contains thumbnail files for each clip, usually in BMP format.
ÂPROXY: Contains optional, low-resolution MPEG-4 files representing each clip. Used
for reviewing footage or previewing before transfer.
Note: The Panasonic AG-HVX200 camcorder does not record proxy files.
ÂVIDEO: Contains video media of each clip, wrapped within MXF container files.
Common Panasonic codecs such as DV, DVCPRO 50, DVCPRO HD, and AVC-Intra are
supported.
ÂVOICE: Contains optional voice annotations that can be associated with each clip.
Note: The Panasonic AG-HVX200 camcorder does not record voice annotations.