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P2 Workflow and Backup Solutions
Hey Gang – I’ve been shooting with the HVX200 for a few months and just capturing straight from the camera to my old Discreet NLE. Recently bought a Matrox Axio LE system which handles P2 MXF natively. Now I’m finally able to import P2 footage directly into the box via USB.
Question is, how are you all dealing with workflow, storage and archiving? Most of the work I do is :30 spot work. Some of the footage will live on the raid for months, sometimes years. Other footage will be used short term and purged.
Having been dealing with tape based acquisition for two decades the whole P2 workflow is a bit overwhelming yet. I’m curious to hear what works for those of you doing spot work. What drives are you using? What methods are you implementing for archiving P2 assets?
I want to get started down the right path before I start too many projects and find myself in a bind trying to back up and recover footage the hard way.
Thanks!
~Mike~
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2 Replies
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LTO 3 or 4 drive and tapes seem to be winning out on the archive method, they are pretty fast and good $/GB and a lot more secure than BU to hard drives.
Easy way to think about the RAW P2 files is to think of them as tapes, if you would keep the tape if it was shot on it, you would BU to LTO the RAW footage, this way it can be transfered into any NLE down the road.
There are several post that do into it more but that is my take on it.
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I have been shooting on P2 for about a year now. As mentioned, one of the most reliable solutions would probably be LTO/DLT for long-term storage. You must also take into account your budget as a LTO system will end up running you around $4K to $5K.
What I have been doing is buying CalDigit VR Firewire drives. Single enclosure external unit with 2 drives in it. I set it up as a mirrored RAID and offload my raw P2 cards directly to it. This makes 2 copies of the raw footage, one set on each drive. If a drive fails down the road, I will always have the backup.
The key to P2 is file management. I have been shooting my stills digitally since ’99, so I was used to backing up files.
The most important thing is to make sure you are using an offload program like P2 Genie or HD Logger. DO NOT DO DRAG AND DROP! This may work for a while, but eventually you will lose files since it randomly writes files and does not do a file-for-file verification of the card. Hope this helps!
John
HPX-2000 w/AVC board
P2 Mobile with AVC board
MBP 10.5
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