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Corruption/dropout on all video files after using p2cms
I Initially copied my first six 32gb cards on a pc laptop, then tranferred them onto a standard external (ntfs). Deciding to move to mac and fcs2 I was happy that p2cms worked well on a 3ghz imac and I viewed all my 6 hours of footage from my HPX500. I went through p2cms ingest, but when I played the P2 video from the copied contents folders on the mac’s drive, every one has dropouts – large grey boxes in the same arrangement.
No matter I thought, must be a freak copy problem could be anything. Then I went back to the ‘master’ folders on the external and played with p2cms and to my HORROR every last video file played the same – huge dropout areas exactly the same across all video files in all different folders. Ok no problem I thought it must be the program, so not having fcs2 yet I played the footage the only other way I can, on quicktime, and to my dismay this time, i found them the same.
So are hours of valuable footage randomly ruined? Or being new to Mac am I missing something?
I have no other way of checking the essence to see if it’s actually damaged than playing it with with p2cms or quicktime. Could the essence just be being misread, or is it definatly corrupted, if it is, is it reparable or beyond hope? Grateful for your help.
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6 Replies
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Hi Steven,
Just reading thru your post but when you say “large grey boxes” in the DVCProHD video – did you download our Calibrated{Q} DVCProHD Decode for OSX? The watermark for the demo version is gray rectangles over the video. In the Library/QuickTime folder there would be a CalibratedDVHDCodec.component.
Greg
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Hey Greg,
thank you so much I knew there had to be a simple explanation. Being new to Mac, I downloaded everything I could find related to P2 including of course your Codec.
One other question about P2CMS: After Ingest, reading from the P2CMS created folder, my clip thumbnails remain yellow. What does this signify? Like everyone else I didn’t find the instructions for the program very revealing. In this case it just says the clips change colour after ingest, not how. Thanks.
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[Steven Moore] “One other question about P2CMS: After Ingest, reading from the P2CMS created folder, my clip thumbnails remain yellow.”
In P2CMS the Ingest tab is to select clips and add them to the database. The other (err… “Database”?) tab is to browse clips that are in the database.
Yellow clips in the Ingest tab signify that they have already added to the database… so if you use the Ingest tab and surf back to the P2CMS database of ingested clips, then of course everything will be yellow.
Basic workflow would be to mount your P2 cards or drives, use Ingest to view clips, modify metadata, make selects, and import into the P2CMS Database. Then switch to the database viewing mode and use the metadata checkboxes to display the clips you wish to view or export.
Note that if you’re using FCP without some third-party tool to access the MXF files directly, you will have to Export selections of clips from the P2CMS Database for FCP to import. The database uses a different folder structure than the standard P2 card structure, so FCP cannot import directly from the database. I’ve found that when you are in the database, right-clicking a file will show the Export function greyed out, but it IS available from the File menu. Export will copy the selected clips (with verify if desired) to another location, and place them in a standard FCP-friendly folder format. I keep my P2CMS database on an internal drive and export selects to my RAID for editing.
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Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor -
You are a star Adam, you nut-shelled that for me and anticipated my next problem, thanks.
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I was recently given a drive from a shoot where they used P2CMS to transfer the footage. I have never used that application before. After getting over my initial shock at there being no lastclip.txt file, I downloaded P2CMS to export from the database as you described. But when I try to open P2CMS it asks me to create a database, otherwise I am forced to quit. I of course don’t want to create a database. I want to read the one that already exists on the drive from the shoot. When I try to double click that database I am told I don’t have the application to read the file. So I am going around in circles. How do I access that file? Is there a magic word?
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You may need to create a dummy database somewhere just to make P2CMS happy, but once you are in, the Database menu has an item “creation & modification” – try opening the database provided with the footage.
Another option would be to create a new database, and then ingest all the clips from the client-provided database. Note that this will take time and copy all the files to the new DB’s location. Then you can Export all the clips you desire and they will be placed in FCP-friendly format. Of course this option would be far less efficient but it should get the job done.
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Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor
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