P2 card reader

[Tom Klein]

Yes, more cost effective add-on solutions will come no doubt by third party suppliers, Pana products are great, so is the cost. with the exception of the cameras, they are a very cheap Bang for Buck solutions.

cheers
Tom K
olinevideo.com.au

olinevideo.com.au

[Michael Sacci]

I always keep to Duels on hand. I have had an adapter go bad on my twice, and one other one that was not mine. I ruled out software since I can put in another Duel and it works fine and the bad one will not work in any computer. But at the price you can afford to have a back up.

The good news is there are pretty fast. I full 32 GB card copied to a FW800 drive takes about 19 minutes.

[Dave Neyman]

It’s great to hear the experiences of other users. Thought I would chime in here as well. In general I’ve had great luck with mine although it has its quirks. I find that rebooting the MacBook Pro seems to be the best solution. Then I can download card after card. If I pull out the adapter it sometimes needs a reboot. It has been rock solid in terms of reading the data correctly though and it is pretty fast.

[James Mulryan]

I have replaced three dual adaptor over the past two years. My current one has to hang over the
side of the desk at a certain angle to work. The last one had to hang over the side of the desk to work too. I think there must be a problem with the angle of the cable, a short of some sort, or perhaps the blade mating with the mac pro, my Sonnet Tempo Express card has a more positive fit with the port. Have tried this port issue with another MacPro and still needed to dangle the dongle to get it to work.This has happened repeatedly with several adaptors, with several OS versions, definitely not a software issue. Also find inserting my card into an already booted macbook pro causes crashing on a regular basis. Must shut down and restart card. Pretty funky solution, but one tenth the price Panasonic’s firewire based solution. Pretty unnerving when you absolutely have to have that download–now. Only recourse is to hook firewire into camera and download that way, tying up the camera, and one firewire port.

James Mulryan
Sunset Park Media, LLC
Santa Monica, CA
info@jamesmulryan.com

[Matthew Romanis]

We all must remember that attaching the Duel adapter and then slotting in the P2 card when the Mac Book Pro is running is like attaching a drive to the Mac pro tower via SCSI or eSata and expecting it to work with out re booting.
The Express port is like an extension of the main bus of the lap top, it must go through a reboot for it to be recognised. We are all too used to firewire and USB hot swap connections.
Once the Duel adapter’s host control chip is recognised then it becomes a matter of ejecting and inserting P2 cards.
The odd thing is how unreliable the Duel adapter seems to be after this. I use a Sonnet eSata express card with my portable 2.5TB Taurus drive (the speed is unbelievable) and it never has a problem.
The Duel adapter however will create a kernal panic at odd intervals meaning a hard restart and all the problems that go with that.
I control the updates on all my computers, nothing happens without it being tested in isolation first, so I feel that software is not the root of all the issues. My feeling is that the Duel adapter is a flakey bit of hardware. The current one I have is the second one in as many years, and reading about the other failures in this thread confirms to me my gut feeling.
Can’t another supplier make something more reliable, preferably 1394b bus powered? One slot is needed, two would be nice.

[Tom Klein]

Hello mathew,

I would have to disagree with you on the causes of flaky performance of the duel, I have spent many many hours on Leopard Kext files (Drivers) , and considering the duel is built to a price not a standard, it’s a wonder it works at all.
A simple $25 PC card reader in a Tiger OS PPC Mac is not an issue, BUT, when Apple went Intel/PCIe and to leopard OS, they ball game changed, apple Kexts (drivers) are very complicated and there are very few people with skills to be able to write them succesfully, there is even a 4gig Ram limit on the Pana mac P2 driver (Apple development advised me of that during my tests).
I have a working Kext set in my test Macpro with the Amtron Reader on OS10.5.6, it ingests about the same as described earlier, 32gig in about18mins.
my tests have proved it can be done at a relative cost, but the market for these products is so small manufacturers are not interested.
This argument has been well thrashed out in many forums.

I’ve found most users want a Mercedes for the cost of a Scooter, and have it “plug n play” as well, (Not going to happen).

If your budgets are there , get either of the Pana card Readers.

cheers
Tom K
olinevideo.com.au

olinevideo.com.au

[Matthew Romanis]

Hi Tom,
I don’t doubt for a second what you are saying about the kext files, X-86 project work groups say the same thing.
I would imagine the market place for the Sonnet eSata card would be very similar to the Duel, yet they can put to market a device that works every time. Just because something is cheap doesn’t mean it’s OK if it doesn’t work.
I have a PDC 20, and in the next work station purchase I have to work out if I can afford the extra space on the pCle bus for the eSata board to enable the PDC 35.
I just wish that at the portable field use level there was something that was reliable. It doesn’t need to be cheap, $129.00 AUD for a single slot Duel does seem like a bargain compared to the rough $3300.00 AUD for a PDC 35 5 card reader, so I’d be prepared to pay up to $1000.00 AUD for something I could rely upon in the field, and it would be nice if it had a Panasonic badge on it, be bus powered, and at least one slot (2 would be nice).
BTW, are you based in Victoria?

[Tom Klein]

Hello Matthew,

yes a 2 slot P2 device (USB2 / FW800 / FW400 / esata )for under $1K would be Nirvana, I personally would buy one or even two. (I’d love to make one if time permitted)
More than that is too rich for my needs, and the needs of many other P2 users.
yes “Vic” I’m in the top LH corner, details on my site.

If you want a challenge, download Apple Xcode and try write a driver for yourself you can spend many many many hours going in circles.. It will make you apprecieate how much is in a simple apple kext driver.

Cheers
Tom K
olinevideo.com.au

olinevideo.com.au

[Matthew Romanis]

Ahh, Mildura. Nice spot. I’ve had a couple of nice jobs up that way over the years, and some great meals at The Grand Hotel. Still warm there?

[Tom Klein]

Nice and dry at the moment, temps this summer peaked at 47c (in the shade) on the day of the Black sat fires, from memory we had over 20 days straight of over 40c, I did many yarns re the heatwave for Seven.
P2 is great for dry area shoots , no head clogging heat does not effect the camera (not yet anyway), some days it got to over 55c in the sun.
Most vison I dump into the Macpro with the Amtron Reader cut small packages and send FTP direct to the networks, other larger ones I feed “Live”.
then in between all this I test many readers and play with various kexts.

Cheers
tom k
olinevideo.com.au

olinevideo.com.au