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Media 100 and P2 media
I work for a TV station. The newsroom is upgrading there entire workflow to an Avid Newsroom and every single news photographer is getting a new P2 camera. However, what I do is on the production side of the business and make commercials for the station. We do use news footage from time to time though. In fact, we use it everyday to build an intro for each news program and make promos for up coming stories.
Here’s where it’s about to get complicated. Our Media 100 system is v8.2.7, I think. I know it’s a v8 though. I know it is outdated and so do our engineers. But up until now, we haven’t had a reason to upgrade. The problem that I think we have is that we won’t be able to edit the P2 media. The newsroom won’t be shooting HD. It’ll still in standard def. And from what I’ve gathered is that Media 110 v11 is the first to have support for P2 media.
I’m not that well versed on Media 100. I can edit with it but I don’t know the ins and outs or the history of it. My expertise lies in Avid and Premiere. So what I’m getting at is how big of a problem will this be and what solutions would anyone have?
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2 Replies
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Hmmm…
A lot of “what if’s” and “maybe’s” in there so…it’s hard to say.
Theoretically, IF you got yourself a clip of video from your P2 media as a QuickTime movie in the DV/DVCPro/DVCProHD codec from one of the Avid systems and IF you had a compatible copy of the DV/DVCPro/DVCProHD codec.component installed in the QuickTime Library on the Media 100 i machine, then Media 100 i should be able to import that media.
This isn’t something we’ve tested (and frankly, we just can’t test it) so I really can’t say if it will work. You may also run into what some call “version-itis”. Depending on what version of OS/QT/Codecs/etc the Avid systems are running, it’s entirely possible that the movies still won’t be compatible with the version of the codecs needed for Tiger and QT 7.1.3 (which was the last “official” version for Media 100 i).
I CAN tell you for sure that as of v11.6 (latest is 12.7.1), the new Media 100 systems (including the software only Producer) can import directly from your P2 media.
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Erik,
the Media 100 i systems, while being great systems at their time, are showing their age today. P2 files are not supported in these systems as a native editing format; I think the P2 format did not even exist when V8 of Media 100 was released.
Current systems can work with the native P2 files (DVCProHD for Hi Def and DV/DVCPro formats in Standard Def), which of course would be a pretty easy and quick workflow.
Still, there are some workarounds that you could use with your Media 100 i system. The P2 files are basically DV or DVCProHD files wrapped into a container format. There are tools to convert these files into other QuickTime codecs, and when installing the Media 100 i codecs on a Mac you could use this station to convert the P2 files to Media 100 i native files, which would fast-import without conversion into your Media 100 i system. Or you could use e.g. this device as a deck that you could hook up to your Media 100 i system via SDI to digitize the media files from your P2 disks like from e.g. a DigiBeta deck. Or you could import the files digitized by your Avid (or whatever) system into your Media 100 system if you have the correct codecs installed (although the conversion would be not too fast on a Media 100 i system, since it uses a hardware codec integrated into the Media 100 i P6000 board, which is pretty slow compared to todays CPUs).
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