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Mac G4 Laptop – P2 Location Work Flow
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I’ll add a couple of tips to the pipeline because I just completed an HVX200 shoot and it went off without a hitch.
1- Use FW800 or E-Sata external drives to hold the footage- this is a must. FW400’s are going to slow things down for a few dollars saved.
2- When the transfer from P2 to hard drive is complete, make sure to unmount the P2 card on your desktop before physically ejecting it. Either Apple-E it or drag it into the Trash to eject. Make sure it’s totally unmounted before popping it out. If you don’t you could possibly confuse the OS that it is still mounted and when you put in the next P2 card it will think it’s the same and not bother to copy it. That’s an incredibly rare but nasty gotcha.
3- Copy the lastclip.txt and Contents folders separately. Don’t ask me why but we found dragging the entire P2 card contents at once vs. two copy operations made the transfers go 2-3 times faster.
I totally respect the idea of going with a PC as a transfer station but we found it not necessary on our last outing. And if you’re ultimately cutting on an FCP system, the added bonus of instant access in FCP to your footage IMHO outweighs the benefits of a PC as dedicated ingest station. You also face OS to OS issues with having one hard drive formatted PC and the other Mac OS.
We found the P2 to Powerbook workflow to be rock solid for many dozens of P2 transfers. If you have a newer MacBook Pro with Expresscard, you’ll want an Expresscard to PCMCIA adapter or use a P2 Drive to move the P2 cards to your hard drive.
-Noah
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Thanks Guys for all the insights!
Barry….you make a really good case for using a PC Laptop for field work. I’m going to look into buying a dedicated PC Laptop as a workstation. Noah also makes a good case for the new Mac Power books with 800 firewire support. Decisions…decisions…. since I’m a long time Mac guy it would be great to have a Mac solution that works easily, so I can use the computer for other applications. Has anyone tried a hybrid approach….using a Mac in PC mode? -
Problem with that is that there are no intel Macs with the PCMCIA slot. So then you’re left trying to use the Duel Adaptor, which a) adds cost, and b) is bulky, and c) so far people keep reporting issues with it.
A $500 PC laptop is 1/3 the cost of a P2 Store, and that’s the way I look at it — doesn’t matter if it’s a Mac or a PC or Linux or whatever, it’s just an offloading tool.
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Or a used Powerbook- runs FCP, has the right slot and is semi-disposable at the used price.
Noah
Unlock the secrets of the DVX100 and Final Cut Pro!
https://www.callboxlive.com -
[dgadirector] “Frank, are you talking about reformatting the cards while in the PowerBook? If so, I didn’t know that could be done. That would be great. How would I do it?”
I was actually referring to re-formatting the cards in the camera, however on one shoot I did, I had to shoot for over 2 hours continuously in 24pn. I have 4 x 8gb cards (only 84 minutes) so I did have to “format” the cards in my G4 PB during the shoot. There isn’t a format tool as such so what I did was transfer the data to an external FW drive. Once I verified in the import window of FCP that the footage was there and played OK, I deleted the contents and lastclip.txt file from the card. I then emptied the trash while holding down “option” so it would delete the locked files. This worked ok and I would hot swap an empty card back in the camera while still shooting.
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It could, but what about the issues with having to reboot, and having to write-protect, and not running P2 Viewer, and using older technology instead of a brand-new dual-core system?
If someone needed to run FCP in the field then yes the used Powerbook is probably the better way to go.
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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)
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