P2CMS – don’t want per-clip folders

[Barry Green]

Before you go to FCP, select the clips you want from the database and EXPORT them, using “hard link” as the option, to a new import folder. That’ll do what you want — put a hard link to all those MXF files into one big folder, which you can then import all at once into FCP.

[Adam Smith]

Ahh.. so rather than actually having it put all the clips in one folder, this method would allow P2CMS to store them as it prefers and then I’d have it make an alias pointer to the selection of clips I want to access with FCP.

Thanks much, that does solve the FCP problem… I was hoping I could actually copy all the selects to one folder, to make it easier to back up and just cause it seems better to have one directory rather than hundreds of directories, but I suppose I could live with this.

Strangest thing tho… after I spit out a couple clips just to test the feature, I can’t get P2CMS to export anything now, in any manner… I was going to try exporting by copy with verify, but it won’t copy/link/move anything now.

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Video Photographer / Avid Editor / Final Cut Neophyte

[Adam Smith]

Rebooted and fixed it.

I got the export-by-copy to work, but on second thought, I suppose having the database may be useful and I can still back up projects with my packet-tape drive if I build the DB with sub-folders by project.

Thanks for the help!

-Adam

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Video Photographer / Avid Editor / Final Cut Neophyte

[Bo Skelmose]

Had the same problem – wonder what the “ingest” buttom are for. Why can’t the panasonic software copy the files to a specified directory and the delete the files on the P2 cards ? I think that would be a very normal way to do things – now you have to do everything manually.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Thanks for that Barry.

Is there a way to get the User clip name in FCP without going to another program such as P2 Log or is that metadata busted in FCP?

Jeremy

[Barry Green]

Busted in FCP. User Clip Name is the one field they don’t allow you access to. You can get it by using Raylight though.

[Barry Green]

[Skelmose TV] “wonder what the “ingest” buttom are for”

P2CMS can make a large master database of your clips, and “ingest” is how you copy those clips off of your cards or hard disks and into that database.

You don’t have to do that, but it’s a way of working if you want to keep all your footage in one big large database.

[Skelmose TV] “Why can’t the panasonic software copy the files to a specified directory and the delete the files on the P2 cards ?”

It can. If you plug a card in and select the contents, you can tell it to “export” (not “ingest”) those files into a specified directory. Then you can either tell it to delete those files off the card, or (on the Windows version) you can tell it to format the card.

[Adam Smith]

[Barry Green] “Busted in FCP. User Clip Name is the one field they don’t allow you access to.”

Well that sucks, but maybe I don’t have to bother setting up new Metadata presets for every shoot, since the rest of the data is easy to modify afterwards.

One last P2 workflow question – how does FCP identify an MXF clip?

Specifically, if I were to duplicate a P2 directory and then modify/rename/delete clips in that copy before importing to FCP, would the original P2 files still serve as valid Relink replacements?

-Adam

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Video Photographer / Avid Editor / Final Cut Neophyte

[Shane Ellis]

Is there any convenient way to rename the generic letter & number names given to MXF files from a P2 card? The workflow we would like to use is:

1. In the field, copy P2 card to MacPro/Firewire drive
2. In the field, review and rename clips
3. Return to studio and copy clips to Xsan
4. Editors load pre-named clips into FCP from Xsan

Raylight works great, but of course the problem is when you copy everything to the Xsan, the links are busted. According to Raylight’s folks, their software is dependent upon QT to make these links work, and they are absolute, not relative in nature, so even leaving the links in the same folder with original MXF files does not work.

P2 Log works well, but still costs us alot of time doing the conversion in the field.

So again, our problem is two-fold: 1. renaming the clips so that they appear in the Finder as the descriptive names we give them, and 2. being able to copy those files to the Xsan and open them in FCP6. Any ideas?

[Marcus Van bavel]

1. Change the UserClipName in the field with P2 CMS. Note the card
must be un-write protected to do that. You could also do it with
a copy of the CONTENTS folder that is on a backup hard drive.
2. enable the UserClipName feature in Raylight
3. The editor makes his own Raylight links, the UserClipName is automatically
used for the link name. Takes just a few seconds to make the link.