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Problems on P2 copying—but not FCP importing?
Here’s a wierd one.
I am an HVX owner and as such I am trying to learn everything I can about workflow and the post situation with P2. I’m a longtime DP, film and HD, and for me this is like showing up for a shoot with the camera–and also the lab. But I digress.
I have a long project coming up this month. The producer and I have been talking and are testing our workflow. In the field our footage will be copied to FW hard drives and backed up. The question is how. One option is to go directly to FCP as that’s how the show will be edited. However the current recommendation from Panasonic and Apple (and everybody else) are to take the footage, oops, data, to our HD storage as direct copies of the card material rather than having them converted to QT by FCP. I understand why this is better…however today I found this creating its own issues…
Today I sat down at my computer with my P2store, which had the contents of 6 cards on it, some 4GB, some 8GB. I have a G5 Mac, dual 2.5, 3GB of RAM, running 10.4.7 with FCP 5.1.1. I also have installed demo versions of Imagine Software’s P2 Log and Anders Holck’s P2 Genie to see how well they work.
I am able to take any of the P2 ‘cards’ from the P2 store and copy it directly to an external FW800 drive. It works great and is surprisingly fast, under 10 mins for a full 8gb card. Once there I can import any of the footage into FCP, no issues.
I can also import directly into FCP from any of the material on the P2Store.
I can use P2 Log to view everything on the P2 store before I do anything to it, but footage sometimes stalls out, when playing, probably due to the USB connection. Everything works fine, every clip I try opens without fail.
When I copy the individual ‘cards’ as a Disk Image via Disk Utility, four of the six work great. The copy is FAST and the verification when I open it only adds a minute or two. HOWEVER the other two cards cause the P2store to throw up an error and the transfer to stall as an ‘in out error.’ This has happened twice now with the two affected ‘cards.’ The computer had to be restarted in order to ‘see’ the P2store again.
I had a similar experience with P2 Genie, a handy utility for batch-copying the P2 material. It copied four cards fine, then stalled out with an Applescript error message: ‘Can’t make text item ‘2’ of ‘1’ into type Unicode text. (-1700)’ The supposed numbers varied each time, at each point P2Genie indicated it was copying the lastclip.txt. (Both those files appear to be fine, they’re identical to the others.) In fact the third time it stalled out with that message at the *first card* which had copied fine before. Each time the P2store had an error and both it and the computer had to be restarted to work together.
As I said, the actual clips are fine, and I have not found a clip I can’t import directly into FCP. But the direct copy method, via disk image, is supposedly the best, safest way to deal with your original material and that just ain’t working here. What is funky with my clips or the associated files that is causing disk image AND P2 Genie to choke on them? Or is it something else?
Thanks for your help…and my apologies for any imprecision in my terminology.
Alan
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4 Replies
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Watch thsi tutorial for the way that I have successfully done it:
I have also used the P2 Genie, and pretty much have it do things, but the workflow is the same. P2 card to folder on external hard drive, THEN import. I never import footage then toss the MXF files. Those are the master tapes…in essence.
Shane
Alokut Productions
http://www.lfhd.net -
Hi, Shane. Thanks for your quick reply—and for your indispensable tutorial. But my problem is more complex. I am trying to copy the data to the external drive. It’s just that two of the ‘cards’ on my P2store will not do so. Yet if I import that footage it works fine, so nothing is wrong with the clips themselves.
I am starting fresh this morning and something else is up. I’m doing a straight copy of the ‘cards’ one at a time, and my first one (7.21 GB) has now taken 20 mins and is not even half done. It was MUCH faster yesterday. Nothing has changed that I can see.
Puzzled,
‘Al’
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I should clarify…two of my ‘cards’ would not copy successfully via the disk image method, and neither of them seemed to work with a ‘batch copy’ via P2 Genie; in both cases the transfer was aborted and the P2 store quit with an error message: E1-2-3 solid red, E4 blinking red.
Material off those cards imported directly into FCP with no issues. I am now manually copying the cards from the P2Store, one at a time. The first card took an hour though, much longer than yesterday.
‘Al’
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Even wierder. A friend points out that the lastclip.txt files should be unique for each partition. Having successfully copied the two odd partitions (‘cards’) to my external drive this AM, I compared all six cards. All do have unique lastclip.txt files, as they should.
BUT when I just now powered up the P2store, six partitions (NO NAME) show up on my desktop–and when I open lastclip.txt on them they ALL have the same text.
WT…um, heck. I’ll be using the P2 store to copy these partition into a different computer today; that should show whether the problem’s in the P2 store or not.
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