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Transferring via the Mac OS finder
I’m just curious… I have heard some talk about the dangers of transferring P2 cards by way of the Mac OS finder.
I have been transferring the P2 cards using a Duel Adapter and a MacBook Pro to a Raid 1 System both in the field and in studio settings. I make sure the card is locked, then drag and drop to the Raid 1. Once the entire contents (including the lastclip.txt) have been copied over, I rename the folder to whatever current naming system I am using. I then eject the P2 card and do a quick check in FCP to make sure all the files appear to be readable. Once that is done I reformat the P2 card. I have transfered over 500 cards worth of data and never had a problem with corrupt files. I had one experience where the files did not appear to my satisfaction in FCP and I simply re-transferred them.
I have P2 Genie but haven’t used it much because it didn’t really save me any time and I heard all the horror stories. I have downloaded P2CMS but not used it yet. I have heard a lot of talk about Raylight but have not yet used it either.
My question is this… What problems have people run into transferring via the finder? Do you feel I’m destined to have some failure down the line? I simply love the P2 workflow and intend to keep using it but don’t want to run into problems in the future.
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6 Replies
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[Dave Neyman] “What problems have people run into transferring via the finder?”
Zip, zero…none. I have had no problems transferring in the Finder. Never had. Never heard of any issues doing this.
[Dave Neyman] “Do you feel I’m destined to have some failure down the line?”
Nope.
Shane
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I use P2CMS because; 1) you get a visual indication that all the clips on the card are in the database (ie, copied) and 2) it has a verify option for the copy process (which I don’t believe Finder does)
Raylight is worth it to me primarily for 3 reasons:
1- no QT conversion time – it lets FCP read the MXFs directly
2- adds metadata from the shoot to your workflow
3- if I ever need to reload the FCP project once media’s offline, I can simply bring back in the archived MXFs & Raylight files, it’s ready to go -
Yep- I wish I could say zero problems but once in a blue moon a P2 card didn’t finish copying and needed to be recopied. Luckily we caught it. But that said, P2CMS is great because- a. it’s free, b. it verifies the copy actually went through perfectly. Just a bit of extra piece of mind.
Noah
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Thanks gentlemen. I appreciate the input.
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I’ve also have used the Finder to copy. Although I’ve never had troubles copying from the card, I have from one drive to another, until I started locking files on the drive. But I’m about to move from a Powerbook to a MBPro, which will surely have Leopard, and therefore may behave differently.
If I move to P2CMS, how do I target an external drive? I’ve searched but cannot figure it out.
Thanks in advance.
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Yeah that P2CMS User Manual is one funky piece of literature.
The translation team at Panasonic come out with some doozies!
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