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Does the P2 card really save time?
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Someone posted this link on this forum about 8 months ago but I thought I’d post it again. The article was written when the 8 gig cards were all that was available (32GB cards by end of year!). The article demonstrates a method of planning and shooting on a tight schedule with a large crew with P2 media.
We all can all relate to the home movie watching experiences of the past on vhs as oppossed to the present experience with dvd. Even digital tape is linear when it comes to locating a clip. It’s a rocky road but the move away from tape is a good thing.
“everything is broken”
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As I mentioned above, we use FCP and our P2 workflow is very fast. However, it depends on a person in the field dedicated to off-loading P2s while the shoot continues.
And if you use a MBP with a Duel Adaptor, a 16 GB P2 will off-load in 8 minutes, not 16.
For the Exabyte idea, here’s a link to an Imagine Products page re a couple of new Quantum drives that are P2 aware. https://www.imagineproducts.com/quantum.htm
John
Dual 2.5 G5 4 gigs RAM OS 10.4.8 QT7.1.3
Dual Cinema 23 Radeon 9800
FCP Studio 5 (FCP5.1.2, DVDSP4.1.1, Comp2.3, STP1.1, Motion 2.1.2)
Huge U-320R 1TB Raid 3 firmware ENG15.BIN
ATTO UL4D driver 3.50
AJA IO driver 2.1 firmware v23-28
Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neuman U87s, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN -
Sorry, should have referenced the thread below, not above: “how to p2 on documentary..manpower”
John
Dual 2.5 G5 4 gigs RAM OS 10.4.8 QT7.1.3
Dual Cinema 23 Radeon 9800
FCP Studio 5 (FCP5.1.2, DVDSP4.1.1, Comp2.3, STP1.1, Motion 2.1.2)
Huge U-320R 1TB Raid 3 firmware ENG15.BIN
ATTO UL4D driver 3.50
AJA IO driver 2.1 firmware v23-28
Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neuman U87s, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN -
Hi Barry,
My beef isn’t with ingesting the P2 footage. I am using Raylight and it seems to work well. Shooting is the issue. It’s tricky enough shooting all day on a few 8-gig or 16-gig cards and backing up to laptop or P2 Store, but will it get easier when the bigger cards arrive? If you are location shooting where you do more than two hours of 1080 a day on five 32-gig cards, just imagine the back-up time to hard-drive back at the office or location. Or four hours daily of P2 1080 footage on a doco shoot or long-interview corporate? As I said I love the Panasonic broadcast cameras but the backup time issue is something that is rarely mentioned in these threads.
Pater
Peter Corbett
Powerhouse Productions
http://www.php.com.au -
[Barry Green] “FCP’s implementation of supporting P2 is goofy and limited, at best. Every other editor on Earth lets you edit straight from the cards — no importing, no ingesting, no capturing, no digitizing, no anything. Shoot & Edit, that’s it.
If you’ve been offloading your footage to hard drives throughout the production day, every other editor lets you plug in that drive and edit. Only FCP requires that you import/ingest.”
Perhaps, but no other editor has ProRes 422. The more I work with it, the more anmazed I am with it.
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.comApple Certified Trainer: Final Cut Pro 5
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The point isn’t that you shouldn’t use FCP. The point was that you don’t have to put up with that limited import window that frequently doesn’t work. You can have your cake and eat it too. Use FCP all you want, just don’t use its log & transfer function — use Raylight or P2 Log instead. Either will get around all the issues that FCP’s import window exhibits.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
Different types of projects will adapt to different workflows better than others. For someone shooting on a deadline, P2 slays — you can shoot your project, edit it, finish it, meet the deadline, and then — after the time pressure’s off — you archive. Overnight, even. For someone shooting news or TV commercials or, well, anything with a quick turnaround, P2 is much faster. But those type of projects usually aren’t shooting hours of footage per day, either.
For doco work, it ends up saving a notable amount of time, but perhaps not when you’d want it to. Here’s an example: if you shoot five hours of tape a day, you put those tapes on a shelf and go to bed, sure. No archiving, no offloading at night, etc. But someday you’re gonna face the piper — someday you’re going to have to go through those tapes and log them and transfer them to the computer, and that’s a realtime process.
With the P2 system it’s already computer data, and (depending on what mode you shot in) you’re going to be transferring that to the computer at 2x to 8x faster than realtime. My laptop copies a 16GB card in about 8.5 minutes, so 1080 footage = 2x faster than realtime, DV footage = almost 8x faster than realtime. If you shoot 300 hours of footage, you’ve potentially saved 300 hours to 1200 hours out of your whole production schedule. But, you’ve put that time that you did spend into the middle of your shoot, instead of queueing it all up at the end of the shoot (such as would happen in a traditional tape-based workflow).
But the time savings is there and very real, because you can offload those cards in one big batch at night. If you’ve shot the four 32GB cards, you plug ’em in the slot reader and say “copy”, and go to bed. When you get up, the cards are copied and ready for formatting. So not only did you trim 300 hours out of your production schedule, you also trimmed another 300 hours out of your schedule by multitasking (doing the offloading while you sleep). And because P2 is a no-moving-parts solid-state system, you can actually tell the system to make two copies for you simultaneously, without even slowing down to any significant degree.
It becomes a very real issue when you reach the editing stage. With one workflow you start the editing stage with 300 hours of tape that needs to be digitized before you can start editing. With the other workflow, you just start editing immediately.
So yes, the amount of work being done by the computer is comparable. But it’s *when* that work gets done, and what attention you need to pay to it, that makes the difference.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
[Barry Green] “The point isn’t that you shouldn’t use FCP. The point was that you don’t have to put up with that limited import window that frequently doesn’t work. You can have your cake and eat it too. Use FCP all you want, just don’t use its log & transfer function — use Raylight or P2 Log instead. Either will get around all the issues that FCP’s import window exhibits.”
I’d be interested in hearing what limitations you’ve discovered. I use it every single day without any issues (it’s never failed to work) and fail to see any limitations.
Raylight looks interesting, but we could never edit off the card, since we use multiple cards on every shoot, so we still need to copy to the HD. I see an advantage to having someone else do that during the shoot.
I also use HDlog. Is P2 log trustworty at this point? There were some issues with it earlier…
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.comApple Certified Trainer: Final Cut Pro 5
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[Mitch Ives] “I’d be interested in hearing what limitations you’ve discovered. I use it every single day without any issues (it’s never failed to work) and fail to see any limitations.”
The limitations are 1) it throws away the metadata, 2) you can’t keep the files in a cross-compatible file format (i.e., the Quicktimes can’t be used on Windows systems at least without additional software), 3) you require double the storage space, and 4) you cannot edit directly from the footage as it was intended.
If you’ve got 600GB of P2 MXF files offloaded onto hard disks, you’re going to have to convert all those files (and have another 600GB worth of hard disks). That isn’t necessary; Raylight gets you around that completely.
Whether you find those limitations to limit your workflow, that’s something you would answer for yourself. But they are limitations that FCP imposes on you because of the way they’ve chosen to implement their MXF support.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
[Barry Green] “If you’ve got 600GB of P2 MXF files offloaded onto hard disks, you’re going to have to convert all those files (and have another 600GB worth of hard disks). That isn’t necessary”
Ahh…and this brings us to the basic arguement that I have with Barry. I WANT THAT BACKUP. The MXF files are my master tapes…I want to import them then put the drive on a shelf. I need that backup.
WHY? Hard drives fail…fact of life. And I do not want all of my footage that we spent thousands of dollars to get to be lost if a drive failed. A $300 hard drive and one hours time and your footage is backed up. That is security that I like.
Even if I did want to edit the MXF files natively (which I can see people wanting to do), i’d STILL back up my footage.
Shane
Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net
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