Please share your P2 horror stories

[Tim Kolb]

[Noah Kadner] “Is that really a serious question? For every “horror” story you might get I can present 10 success stories- the same as with any successful camera.”

Agreed. I’ve found that most P2 problems are caused by loss of data due to confusion or inadequate redundancy. It’s an IT workflow (data files as opposed to tape) so some thinking about your methodology is probably well-advised before you simply flip a switch one day and switch from tape, but P2 is pretty well wrung out at this point…I’d consider it proven.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

CPO, Digieffects

[Greg Koronowicz]

The first time I directly used the P2 system was the worst time.
I’ve heard people losing data before and it certainly seems it’s a confusion of workflow and data maintenance…as was my misadventure.

I come in to my edit bay and receive 2 cards from the shoot crew that’s been working all morning.
I copy both cards to the HDD. I check the footage and it’s all there. Being that it was my first time doing this and importing into FCP, I had to figure out how to import the footage. I downloaded all the proper codecs and procedures. I was importing in FCP and for some reason I was having audio issues.

I decided to wipe my clips off the canvas window and delete them and start over…not knowing that if you DELETE in the import window of Log and Transfer, it DELETES THE MASTER FILE TOO! I lost all the footage. The DP had already re-formated the cards and that footage was lost too.

I started to do recovery with Data Rescue 2 but had no luck from the cards. I kept getting files with the .gz extension and whenever I tried to open a .gz file, a new one would emerge. It was a never ending cycle.

I kept Data Rescue working for the next 14 hours trying to recover files from our RAID but by that time the crew re-shot.

Download your cards to at least 2 HDD’s. Keep one as a backup and then use the other one as your source material.