Sony and Panasonic went head-to-head to take videotape out of the acquisition equation at last year’s NAB, with no clear winner declared. If you’re heading back to Las Vegas this April, get ready for round two.

Sony’s XDCAM system, which records directly to an optical disc via blue laser, has been in the field since September, with beta sites checking out 18 demo sets consisting of 66 different pieces. Sony says XDCAM will be a fully commercialized product by NAB, with 250 pieces scheduled to ship in March.

The XDCAM workflow includes the PDW-510 and PDW-530 cameras, the PDW-1500 compact recorder, the PDW-3000 studio recorder, and the PDWV-1 mobile deck with flip-up LCD screen. XDCAM records a 2 Mbps proxy stream to disc for editing purposes along with the 19-20 Mbps full-resolution video. That means you can actually edit the proxy video and then record your EDL back to the disc- saving your decisions to the same media as the original content.

Noting that discs are burned inside the camera at nearly 1000 degrees Fahrenheit, Sony execs say the XDCAM actually has a wider operating range, temperature-wise, than tape. And during a high-speed 360-degree turn that was recorded as part of a torture-test demo for the new cameras, the XDCAM didn’t miss a beat- but a DigiBeta tape dethreaded.

The XDCAM initiative is now being spearheaded by John Scarcella, president of the Sony Electronics Broadcast and Production Systems Division (BPSD), and Rob Willox, general manager of content creation systems. Scarcella and Willox succeed retiring BPSD President Pat Whittingham and Content Creation Senior VP Larry Thorpe, respectively.

Even as the XDCAM plays to Sony’s experience in optical disc, Panasonic is capitalizing on its strength in SD memory cards, DV and DVCPRO. The company’s IT News Gathering system, ING for short, is based on the Professional Plug-in (P2) card- essentially four 1 GB SD cards stacked on a single PCMCIA card. The ING workflow includes a P2 cam, a Toughbook-based P2 editor, a P2 deck with optional DVD-RAM/-R drive, and a five-card P2 drive based on USB 2.0.

The beauty of the P2 card is that a single media type can handle DV, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50 and DVCPROHD. The main drawback is current capacity- 4 GB on a P2 card is not a lot of storage, especially compared to the 23.3 GB that a single Sony Professional Optical Disc holds. That’s why the P2 camera has no fewer than five hot-swappable P2 card slots, for a total of 20 GB of storage- 90 minutes of DVCPRO video. (The camera doesn’t support DVCPROHD mainly because of capacity issues; Panasonic says when bigger SD cards become available, it will build new cameras that can use them.)

Panasonic’s key design advantage is that a P2 camera has no moving parts at all- an attractive feature for camera operators who know all too well how easy it is to bang around an expensive camera in the quest for a perfect shot. At IBC last year, Panasonic announced P2 partnerships with European broadcasters including France’s TF1, Germany’s ZDF and MDR, Spain’s Sogecable Group, and the UK’s ITN, BBC and Reuters. Stateside, P2 has gained verbal endorsements from execs at the likes of Raycom Media, Fox Entertainment Group and Thomson, which is designing the P2 card into such Grass Valley products as its M-Series iVDRs and the NewsEdit nonlinear editing systems. The P2 line will ship in the second quarter.