Omneon, Grass Valley, For-A sign on as Panasonic P2 partners

By Ken Kerschbaumer

Omneon, Thomson Grass Valley, FUJIFILM and For-A are now working with Panasonic to develop third-party systems and peripherals that are compatible with the P2 HD Series of equipment and will expand the use of the system.

Both Thomson Grass Valley and Omneon will support P2 on their servers With Omneon’s new 5600-series MediaPort modules for the Omneon Spectrum media server and the Omneon MediaDeck integrated server providing realtime encoding and decoding of HD material using the AVC-Intra codec.

Thomson’s Grass Valley video servers will be supporting DVCPRO HD and AVC-Intra. Combined with Thomson’s already completed AVC-Intra support in their EDUIS line of non-linear editors, Grass Valley will offer in the future a complete end-to-end workflow based on P2 from direct editing on P2 cards, to playout.

For-A will be able to ingest and manage P2 content via its proprietary media management system. Expected for release in 2008, it can also be linked with an AVC-Intra-compatible non-linear editing system via network, to provide a shared storage for media materials, or function as an archive system.

Meanwhile FUJIFILM will introduce a series of P2-compatible solid-state memory cards for broadcasting purposes to USA, and European market next spring.