-
P2 Viewer Missing Clips (Long)
Is there P2 Viewer Help/Tech Support available?
I’ve looked for documentation for the P2 Viewer utility but it’s either non-existant or tucked away very deeply in one of Panasonic’s many web sites.
Does anyone know of a way to contact someone at Panasonic for help with this app?It has been very useful in filling some of the gaps in the P2 work-flow. It’s pretty straight forward and I am comfortable operating it, however I am now in a situation were it is exibiting a strange behavior.
To wit: There seems to be a limit on the number of clips I can work with on an external drive (set up as a “virtual” P2 card.)
I am currently using a pair of Maxtor external HDDs as intermediate or long-term storage of some clips. These drives are 200 GB and 250GB, respectively, and are formatted FAT32. The clips are camera “originals” straight off a 4GB card recorded in a SPX800.
This behavior has, at one time or another, exibited on each of the Maxtors. What happens is that the Viewer will, at some point, refuse to copy a clip (or clips) from a P2 card to one of the “virtual” card HDDs. The program warns that it is “Unable to Copy Clips” (or something similar.) From this behavior I would have expected the destination drive to be full, however Windows shows plenty of space available.
By way of troubleshooting, when the problem next occured I copied the clips directly from the card to the HDD using Windows. I was able to successfully copy the files and place each MXF component file in it’s appropriate folder. Windows performed to operation without incident and accurately tracked the changes in used versus available space on the hard drive.
When the P2 Viewer utility restarted, it only displayed 2 of the 16 new clips I knew to now be on the hard drive. I tried this experiment several times and each time only a couple — if any — of the clip thumbnails were displayed. The number of clips shown in the bin header corresponds to the number of clip thumbnails displayed. I double checked the filtering and it is not on.
At this point I started deleting expendable clips via Viewer. I discovered that for each clip I delete, one of the previously “invisible” clips appears — up to a certain number.
So it looks like there is a maximum number of clips that can be managed in a Virtual Card by P2 Viewer.
FWIW, here are some other technical details:
The P2 Viewer version is 3.0.1.4. The previous 2.x version had the same issue.
The P2 Viewer appears to be working in all other respects.
The PC is running Windows XP Pro 2002 (5.1.2600) SP2
The PC is a Dell Optiplex GX270 with 512 MB RAM that — to the best of my knowledge — meets or exceeds Panasonic published minimum specs for Viewer
The hard drives are Maxtor On-Touch IIs, one 200GB and one 250 GB, formatted FAT32.If anyone has any thoughts, please chime in. I need this to work. In the brave, new P2 world a rock-solid browser/file mangement utility is essential.
Thanks and best regards,
Joe
-
2 Replies
-
Hi Joe,
The P2 card has limitation up to 1000 clips since many clips causes slow response on P2cam. Unfortunately, ‘virtual P2card’ in P2viewer has same limitation. So, you cannot store more than 1000 clips in a folder.
So with that infor, just start a new folder and it will work once again.
Best,
Jan
Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems -
Jan,
Thank you (once again) for your help!
Whatever Panasonic’s paying you, it isn’t enough.
Cheers,
-joe
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up