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p2 footage off external drive
I am about to start post for a guy who will be shooting on p2 cards. As I have yet to have the privilege of working with p2 footage (I know I’m behind the times) I have a couple questions. The videographer states that he will deliver the footage in, “…P2 (.mxf). I would deliver to you on a hard drive formatted FAT32”. Aside from the fact that I am not a fan of FAT32, will this work fine into a FCP workflow. I guess what I’m asking is will I easily be able to edit the HD P2 footage without a P2 camera?
I know there are several articles out there about using P2 stuff with FCP and I plan to read it. My concern is getting the .mxf footage into FC without a camera.
Thanks
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7 Replies
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You don’t need the camera…not at all. All you need are the P2 card offloads or “dumps.” I hope he gives you them with the complete card structure.
Here…I have a video tutorial you can watch…
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
He’s going to deliver the mxf files to you so you won’t have to worry about having a p2 reader. What you will have to worry about is the fat32 drive as you won’t be able to use it. You will need to copy the footage off of this drive to an OSX Extended hard drive that you own. OSX will read the fat32 drive and copy from it (I believe). It won’t be able to write to it very well when it comes to large file sizes, though.
the other thing you can ask your DP to do is get a program called MacDrive. That way he can format a mac OSX extended drive on his end and you will be able to use it normally, but some people won’t want to do this.
https://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/
Jeremy
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Jeremy..they don’t have to worry about the Fat32 drive…all they will be doing is plugging it in and then using LOG AND TRANSFER to import the P2 footage and that will copy it onto their Media Drive. I would hope that you have a separate drive to use for this…as the Fat32 drive is the “master tape” as it were.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
[Shane Ross] ” I would hope that you have a separate drive to use for this…as the Fat32 drive is the “master tape” as it were. “
And if you have to give that drive back to your DP, then I’d make a copy of it the p2 cards that he is going to deliver, despite the log and transfer.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “And if you have to give that drive back to your DP, then I’d make a copy of it the p2 cards that he is going to deliver, despite the log and transfer.”
Word.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
No worries about fat32, in general terms. I’ve got 1 lacie drive formatted fat32 that I swap back and forth b/w windows and osX for when I’m doing stuff in AE or Premiere CS3, and taking footage to/from FCP….always in SD, and haven’t had an issue with it….capturing, playback, et al. Just gotta make sure you keep your clips under 5 minutes, though I don’t know how long a p2 clip could be before it chokes with the file size limit.
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Thanks guys. Looks like I will be in good shape as long as the DP copies the entire card structure (I’m sure he will. He has worked on several big name projects-hope I don’t screw something up haha). I’ll talk to him just in case.
Thanks
Nathanp.s. Props to Shane for the Dharma icons in the tutorial.
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