P2 – Billy Gates style

[Accountneedsrealnameupdate]

I’m running Xpress Pro HD and I’m still a little confused myself. The whole process does work, but it sure seems to have a touch of drunken monkey to it. If you haven’t seen it, the avid tutorial is here: https://learn.avid.com:8080/content/tutorials/P2/tutorial.html . All seems just great, if you want to edit from the P2 cards, but if you actually want the data on you machine it’s a little more complex. First, attach the camera to the Avid via the USB cable, then go to the bathroom while you wait for it to scan the cards. Now open the media tool and drag the footage into a bin. You now need to close avid, then use windows explorer to copy the MXF files from the CONTENTS\AUDIO and CONTENTS\VIDEO P2 directories to Drive:\Avid MediaFiles\MXF\1, you might want to go make a sandwich while you wait. Now, be sure to disconnect the camera before restarting Avid. Once Avid loads, again, all the clips should be there.

I had someone tell me to use consolidate from inside media tool, but that never quite worked for me. I hope I’m either just missing something obvious or I hope this process improves on future versions of Avid as it does seem needlessly time consuming.

Am I missing something?

[Geo Cohn]

I haven’t been able to find much useful documentation. Here is how I have been doing it:

1. During a shoot, copy each full P2 card to a separate folder and erase the P2 card. You can basically select/cut/paste everything from the P2 card to a new folder. Just make sure it is a fresh unique folder each time. Doing a cut ensures that all files get erased from the P2 card. When you put the card back into the camera, the camera takes care of reinitializing the card with a new Contents folder, etc.

2. After the shoot, use the P2 viewer to consolidate all of your P2 card folders into a single, huge virtual P2 card.

3. Set your new virtual P2 card folder up as a shared drive, and then map it as a network drive. It will have a Contents folder and lastclip.txt at the root.

4. Bring up Avid, making sure it is configured to see media on network drives.

5. Use the media tool to find your clips and bring them into the project.

One of the benefits of doing it this way is that you preserve your metadata. Another thing I like about it is that it handles clips that are split across P2 cards. I shot a continuous 1.5 hour clip a few weeks ago by hot swapping 2 8 gig P2 cards, and it shows up in Avid as a single clip.

geo.

[Mark 05403]

The contents files were copied, but the lastclip.txt files were discarded when filming.
Is there any way to recreate lastclip.txt files?
Is there any program that can read the contents files without the lastclip.txt files?

[Accountneedsrealnameupdate]

Are you using Avid or FCP?

[Bherring]

I don’t see the file/folder management capability in P2 Viewer that you describe. How exactly are you using p2 viewer to consolidate your p2 folders into a single, huge virtual p2 card?
I have a 40 minute clip spanning 2 p2 cards that’s in 4 files; Avid is only seeing the first even though MediaTool can “see” the filenames in the Avid MediaFiles folder.

[Geo Cohn]

During the shoot, copy each P2 card to its own folder. Afterwards, fire up the P2 viewer and set up each folder that has P2 card information as a virtual P2 card. Then create a new destination folder and set it up as a virtual P2 card. Set up the Primary Bin to show all virtual P2 cards. Set up the Secondary bin to show the destination folder virtual P2 card. Then just select all, drag, and drop.

Then proceed to step 3 from my earlier post.

geo.

[Geo Cohn]

Somebody on another forum pointed out that you can use the “subst” command to map a directory path to a drive letter. That is much simpler than what I was doing, namely sharing the directory on the network and then mapping it as a network drive.

geo.

[Bherring]

Thanks for the info, Geo. I’ll give subst a try.