P2 + Duel Adapter + P2CMS = Crashing Leopard?

[Dave Neyman]

Seth,

I have pretty much the same gear and workflow that you are trying to use. The only difference is that I don’t use the P2CMS software. I just use the finder and copy the entire card over to a Raid-1 hard drive (Mirrored). Once the transfer is complete I rename the NO NAME folder to whatever is appropriate and I pop into Final Cut Pro to make sure everything appears to be recognizable. I started to use P2CMS once but felt like I had more control doing it manually. I realize that I have an extra step checking the footage in FCP but it lets me sleep better at night. I have filled a lot of hard drives with no data loss (knock on wood). I think based on what you are describing and my experience… P2CMS is the issue. Just eliminate that and see if everything else functions properly.

Best

Dave

[Seth Patterson]

Dave, thank you so much for your reply and insight. I agree that P2CMS seems more trouble than it’s probably worth but for my purposes it–unfortunately–seems to be the best solution.

We’ve given an old pro (82), who spent his life shooting 16mm and the last few years playing with an XL1, a HVX200ap and a laptop. He is bound for the remote canyons of Arizona, Mexico, and eventually central and South America.

He’s never used a computer before–ever. So I have to get him up to speed and capable of simply dumping the p2 footage using the laptop. Which with it’s verification system, p2cms seems the only option… I’m not even going to show him how to open FCP.

So for those purposes I was really banking on P2CMS. :/

[Seth Patterson]

Hello again everyone!

Panasonic called me back this morning and we talked about the problem at hand, nice gentleman. We came to the conclusion that this issue doesn’t seem to be Duel’s problem and it doesn’t really seem to be Panasonic’s problem. So I think it landed on simply being MY problem. Which is kind of a slap to the face… but hey… sometimes those slaps get the old ticker ticking.

So basically we agree that it’s an unknown problem which he had never heard of before and couldn’t really help me with. Looks like there are a few of us out there with this problem though so what do we do?

Well, after thinking about it and knowing so many people seem to be running Duel on a macbook pro with P2CMS just fine, I had to ask myself what makes me stand out?

Brilliant. I bought this laptop through the broadcast company we purchased the camera through and they recommend I upgrade the ram with the company they are an authorized retailer for vs. paying apple for 4GB (2 x 2GB) upgrade.

So the first thing I did–before even turning the laptop on–was remove the stock 2GB (2 x 1GB) and install the 3rd party 4GB’s of ram. The computer seemed to be fine.

Well I just removed the new ram, reinstalled the stock ram, rebooted… inserted the duel adapter… inserted the p2 card… opened p2CMS… imported the 20 clips… and presto.

100% perfect transfer, no crashing.

So for all of you out there scratching your heads about why your macbook pro seems to be the only one crashing with p2cms and a duel adapter–check your ram.

Thank you everyone!

[Oliver Schietinger]

Seth & everybody

Just had a very similar problem on a brand new 17″ MBP Leopard 2.6Ghz with 4GB RAM and FCP/Studio and P2MCS and Duel Adapter.
It caused the screen to go blue and force a restart.

After upgrading to the recently released P2MCS I’ve narrowed down the problem to one of my two Duel Adapters. (BTW, I called Duel at first and the said it wasn’t the card, it was transferring over 2GB via the P2MCS; in other words, Panasonic’s software). This one particular Duel Adapter caused crashes without P2MCS or just wouldn’t recognize the P2 card (on the desktop or in the system profiler).

I have another adapter that recognizes the P2 card but won’t recognize a second card after you reject the first. The solution is I have to reboot after each card transfer.

As to my RAM, the authorized Apple Reseller says its all factory RAM (even though its not the original 2GB) so I haven’t tried to remove 2GBs yet and see how it performs.
I have tried it on a second identically configured machine with the same results.

BTW, earlier I had contacted Duel when a friend was having this problem on an older Tiger Mac laptop and Duel’s response was that their adapter works with some laptops but not with others.

So at best, I have one partially working adapter – I, like you, don’t want to accept this. Either that or I rent P2 60GB Store and just use that for transfers.

[Seth Patterson]

Frank,

First off, I know how frustrating this can be. With the amount of money we invest in such things you’d like it to just ‘work.’

But I suppose that is rarely the case.

It does sound like one of your Duel Adapters is defective. If it won’t even transfer information from p2 to finder there is something wrong. I’d personally ask them to replace it, and have read in various other places where people have done just that with defective Duels.

The second unit, I noticed that when I ‘eject’ the p2 card it ejects the entire duel adapter (not just the p2 card), requiring me to restart before it will accept the duel adapter again.

When you plug the duel adapter into your macbook you should see a new icon appear up next to the blue-tooth/wifi icons, this is the PCI-Express notifier icon. When you eject the p2 card check and see if it disappears. If so, then you’re ejecting your duel adapter as well as the p2 card.

What I suggest doing is just hot swapping the p2 cards within the duel adapter. Meaning, don’t eject, just unplug one and plug the next in. There shouldn’t be a problem with this (though OSX might complain?). I can’t test it as our setup is in Arizona and I’m in Texas… but it should work okay. Though one thing I made a habit of doing was setting the protect switch to enabled on the p2 cards before plugging them into the duel adapter.

[Oliver Schietinger]

Thanks – I’ll try the hotswapping when I get it back.

The express card slot is definitely good – I sent it to an authorized repair vendor but they don’t want to figure out what the mystery is.

I’ll have to initiate the replacement with Duel which is annoying because it takes a while and hopefully get an answer that way.

I wonder if your download will work with the full 4GB installed using the newer P2MCS version 1.2.7 that just came out? Have you tried that yet?

(I know you definitely have to have the write protect switch ON as this causes other problems Mac AND PC- lost files/footage – but I can’t even get that far)

[Oliver Schietinger]

UPDATE: with the new P2MCS version and the new Duel Adapter, and hot swapping, everything has been working without a problem.

[Oliver Schietinger]

My other friend had to do the following
Clean Install his MacBook (to delete any corruption/ preferences)
Boot with a good Duel Adapter inserted
When desktop is up, insert P2 Card
Restart
After this, hot swapping P2 Cards should work
(of course using the latest software and not installing drivers on the latest OS)

[Jim Keen]

Hey Seth:
I’ve got the same problem with Lepard crash during injest with
p2cms. I’m putting the download system with a duel adaptor and macbook pro. I’m searching the net and your experince sounds the same as mine. What did you find?
Regards, Jim.

[Steve Phillipps]

Just a note to say that I was having this exact same problem – just got a DuelAdapter today and it crashed after transferring about 1gb of data through CMS. I then installed the latest P2 Drivers from Panny and it works fine so far now.
Steve