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P2 spanned clip
I’m trying to import some spanned P2 clips in to FCP 5.1.4. Following up on an earlier post I gave them all the same name: Arthur 001. There are three clips in the batch. The second and third say “spanned”. When I import, FCP does not create one clip with the name Arthur 001. It gives me three clips named Arthur 001, Arthur 002, and Arthur 003. They all play as though they have dropouts in them.
What am I missing?
Also, any background on why the clip might be spanned in the first place? We shot hours of footage for this project and this is the only instance that I can see of clips being spanned. Even the other footage of this same interview is not spanned (once we switched to our second card).
I’m on a MacbookPro with a 2.33 Duo, 2 GB RAM, OS is 10.4.8. P2 files were copied to G Drives from the camera on day of shoot.
Thanks.
Michael Skinner
Pendragwn Productions
Washington, DC -
6 Replies
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Spanned clips happen for two reasons: if a single video file size on the P2 exceeds 4 GB (since P2s are formatted in FAT32…and I always thought this limit was 2 GB, but the FCP manuals say 4 GB), OR if a single video recording begins on one card and continues on the second.
When pulling spanned clips in to FCP (clips A and B for example, A being the first half of the clip), you don’t have to import both clips from your different P2 reels. FCP and the P2 Import Window recognize that A and B are spanned clips that together make up one clip, despite the fact that the occur on different reels/cards. If you import both A and B, you will get two clips in FCP that are exactly the same, although they will each be named their respective name. You only need to import A or B, and it’s best to change the reel name from “Spanned Clip” to a name that is more recognizable if you ever need to pull the footage in again.
Not sure why you’re getting dropouts though. I just checked some of our recent P2 footage with spanned clips and nothing dropped.
-Ben
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Thanks for that info, Ben. I’m still in search of an explanation for these apparent drop-outs. I’m going ahead with my edit, hoping that someone sees this and can give me some ideas of what I could do to prevent it/repair it.
Is it possible for a P2 card to “go bad”? We were working with a couple different cards. Maybe the presence of spanning is just a coincidence?
Michael Skinner
Pendragwn Productions
Washington, DC -
I don’t know about them going bad, but I would think it’s pretty unlikely. They’re solid state memory – it would be like a USB memory stick going bad. Something major would have to happen to cause that, and the P2 cards are designed to be very indestructible.
What kind of dropouts are you getting? Missing frames, or just flash frames in between your segments?
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The clip plays normally but there is periodic noise in the image. It seems to vary in how often and how much. The noise is evident as small squares of various colors that appear in different places on the image.
It is my hope that I am doing something wrong with the import process or that I have some setting wrong. That would mean that once I figure it out, I could hope to get a clean image.
Michael Skinner
Pendragwn Productions
Washington, DC -
That sounds like digital artefacting…usually caused by dirty tape or recording heads… which don’t exist with P2. I don’t know what would be causing that unless the data was either encoded wrong as it was being written or transcoded wrong as the MXF was ingested.
When you play back the footage in the P2 Import window, are the drop outs present, or only in your ingested quicktimes? If the dropouts are in the P2 window when you’re playing directly from your P2 MXF CONTENTS archive, then the bad data is probably recorded in your original footage.
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[pendragwn] “The noise is evident as small squares of various colors that appear in different places on the image.”
Move the contents and lastclip file off the p2 card before importing.
Turn off ‘remove duplicate frames’ in the p2 import window preferences (the little gear on the top right)
Jeremy
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