P2 Workflow in the Field (aboard a boat)

[Dale Mccready]

I’ve just been importing P2 media from an HVX202 at 1080i50 (25P shot). I transferred the P2 through my G4 laptop to a firewire 800 drive and then imported into FCP off the duplicated files. I found that the files are easily played back in realtime using safe RT in FCP to edit without rendering. Easy-Peasy. So I think you are only really limited by the throughput of your drives. I’d suggest a couple of drives. A media drive to back up your P2 media to as MXF wrapped files, and another perhaps to be your scratch disk for FCP. that way you can reuse your P2 and still have files in two places and not choke your laptop. The DVCproHD files are relatively small.

Thanks to Shane Ross for the walk through to make this work

https://www.proapptips.com/proapptipsvideotutorials/194F4DC2-ACBB-4DD6-A1D0-F46D7D8DCAFC/739BE552-5A0A-474C-8792-537C4082427B.html

Dale

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Dan Kowalski] “To review material in HD do we need an AJA Kona card which implies having the big PowerMac aboard?”

Either that, or a 1200A deck ($30,000 fully populated).

As far as storage backup, I’d look into a cheap SATA enclosure and buy enough hard drives to have a master and a backup. I just got a 2 bay Firmtek enclosure from Maxx Digital. It works well, but you’ll need a P2 store to transfer the footage as the PCMCIA port is taken up by the SATA card. Then you should consider a backup to your backup. Since you’ll be on a boat, it’ll be hard to run out and get replacements for failures. At the very least, you might want to consider backing up your footage on to mini-dv as a just in case. The nice thing about the SATA enclosures is that you can swap out drives and back them up. Drives are so cheap and plentiful, you can buy them buy the 10 or 20 pack these days for a song and the cool part is that you can buy all different sizes for your needs. Anywhere from 80-500 Gigs per drive. There’s all different kinds of workflows to be be explored, but since you will be kind of isolated, I’d look into this double back up system.

AS far as monitoring on the boat, your best bet will be a G5 and Kona setup. You can use the same enclosure or get another one (they are super cheap in terms of storage) and use that to edit from. Matrox just came out with that little box that converts your DVI into uncompressed HD/SD through SDI or analog component. it’s brand new and don’t know if it works, but it might be possible to use this with a Powerbook. As far as a monitor, how critical do you need it to be? You can get yourself a Dell 2405 which accepts analog component HD to use to watch stuff with, but there’ll be no color correcting on it. You could try and find a Sony PVM 20L5/1 or a 14L5/1. The best HD monitor for the buck, but it’s big, heavy, and discontinued (read: hard to find). Panasonic makes a 17″ ‘pro’ LCD that’s pretty handy (has analog/digital hook ups), but I’m not sure how much I’d trust it for critical color viewing. You have a lot of options and choices to make, but I encourage you to test test test and make sure you are comfortable with everything BEFORE you get on the boat. NAB just started, maybe you’ll want to see what shakes out before making any purchases. Perhaps the ‘perfect’ HD monitoring solution is yet to be announced.