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Need cheap P2 card ingesting solution…quick!
Hi there, first post here so I hope I’m doing things right.
I am heading off to Belfast tomorrow morning to shoot a documentary, with the main bulk of my footage being shot Monday and Tuesday. I am a student so have a very limited budget. Here are my equipment specs and then I’ll get to the crux of the issue in a second:
Shooting on 2x Panasonic HPX 171
Each camera will have 2x P2 cards = roughly one hour per camera
Using Macbook Pro to ingest files, with P2CMSOkay so here’s the deal. When collecting my equipment I forgot to get a card reader off the technician, so now I have to work that bit out myself. I’ll be running both cameras simultaneously for my main interview so will really only have an hour’s worth of footage at a time, thus I need to be able to ingest the footage fairly quickly onto my external hard drive so I can format the cards and start over.
I’ve thought about just getting a FireWire cable and plugging it into the camera directly, but I’d prefer to be able to use one P2 card at a time on the camera so that the other can be ingesting in the meanwhile, therefore giving me a quicker turnover. Does that make sense?
My Macbook Pro does not have a compatible card reader, so I was thinking of just getting a card reader from Maplin or something. I need to know:
– Can you recommend any cheap P2 card-ingesting solutions that would be available at a regular old Maplin store or equivalent? Haven’t got time to go ordering things…
– Failing that, how quickly will FireWire ingest the footage? I think the good-quality card readers my university uses take about half an hour for two cards (or was it per-card?) – I assume a lower-budget version wouldn’t work quite as efficiently?
– Basically, what cheap and easy solution would you recommend?Finally, is there anything you’d warn me about when ingesting the footage to make sure it gets uploaded properly? I have no way of checking it as my Macbook doesn’t seem to want to read HD files, and I can’t afford to get back to the studio to find half of the footage I’ve already deleted from my cards wasn’t ingested properly in the first place…
Hella nervous!
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6 Replies
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Hmm- Cheap, Quick, P2 Card Ingesting Solution…. pick one.
Noah
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There is no card reader that is available and any retail store. There is no cheap solution, the cheapest reader was Duel Adapter ($130 US) Does not work with Snow Leopard but it is fast. It goes you from there. From there it jumps to a couple of grand for the multi slot panasonic reader, but that is probably what you need.
You can record into a computer BUT you cannot shot 24pN if you are using FW.
Hooking up the camera and transferring to a external HD you are looking about about 1GB/min. This is a straight file dump. So if you shoot an hour is will take about an hour to overload the card. But you need to do some type of verification before deleting the card.
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Thanks for your help. I normally shoot 720p25pn, should I now shoot 720p25p or something? What other format would you recommend me shooting in for FW?
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PC Laptop with Vista and a PCMCIA slot. That is about the only thing you are going to find that is cheap-ish and something you can go out and buy at a store now.
Shane
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Hey, thanks for your help but what format should I shoot on in order to be able to ingest via FireWire?
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I don’t work in PAL, I don’t know if 25pN goes through FW, with NTSC everything needs to be “over 60” so the pN modes don’t work.
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