How do I import Panasonic P2 Media in to Avid

[Job Ter burg]

Joe wrote: “As to your comment on the P2 path for media, what is your workflow? I try and backup everything to a spare drive that I label and shelve, but I don’t feel it’s a perfect solution.”

I wish I had one.

I’ve only been involved in one P2 project, but it was rather large (almost 4TB of DVCPRO-HD 1080/50i). It was even more of a mess since they had started it in FCP, then needed to do the final cut with me in Avid.

They loaded off footage to a Firestore (which caused problems for spanned clips), and they backed up to WD eSATA drives (double backup). They had imported everything into FCP in DVCPRO-HD. So in the end we had 3 copies of each clip, one on Backup One, one on Backup Two and the imported FCP clips.

When moving everything to Avid (reimporting), we found that one one backup disk, some files from two shooting days were missing. The second backup disk had gone haywire by then. So we decided to export-import the QT’s from FCP to Avid, manually adding source TC after import.

So in short: P2 filebased shooting in my humble opinion sucks, unless you spend a fortune on hardware RAID rigs to archive your footage, or playout everything to HDCAM first.