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Seeking advice for run and gun shoot- laptop + HVX200
Hi all,
Next week I’ll be working on a film shoot that’s going to be fairly down and dirty (48 Hour Film Project). As the editor, I’ll be armed with my laptop (Powerbook G4, 60 gig internal hard drive), an external drive (lacie and maybe another, somewhere in the realm of 5-700 gigs of storage) and that’s it. Firestore, etc, are unavailable. We’ll be shooting with 2 of the HVX’s, and in 720p. I’ve been browsing through all the past threads, so I know to do the following-
-Update my OS to the latest version
-Update FCP to 5.1
-Make sure I have the latest Quicktime version
-Download/install the appropriate viewers/drivers from PanasonicI’ve also read up on all the workflow methods and feel reasonably prepared for the shoot with what I’ve got.
My question about the laptop is, since I’ll be performing some serious back ups before the shoot, should I partition the laptop drive to store P2 media? I’m trying to be prepared for a situation where plugging in the external drive might not be available (I hate this idea as much as you do) and I would only store the media there UNTIL I got it over to the external (ie- no editing in Final Cut whatsoever until the media is moved).
The very nature of the festival means that really, optimal editing conditions cannot be guaranteed whatsoever. I’m not thrilled about it, but there’s little I can do other than be prepared. If anyone has any additional advice about editing with this camera and a laptop, please feel free to share!
Thank you!
nicole -
7 Replies
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Get another hard drive for the P2 Media. I use both Acomdata firewire drives (two firewire ports) and Lacie Porche drives. FireLite drives are good for this too. You need THIS drive to store the master CONTENTS folders and LASTCLIP.txt files. This, in essence, is your Master Tape. Prepare by making folders beforehand. CARD 1, CARD 2, CARD 3…ETC. And drop the entire contents of the P2 card into each folder. Then change the color of the folder to RED so that you know it is full. Next card goes into the next folder.
THEN you import the footage from that drive into your MEDIA drive.
Watch my tutorial at P2 Workflow Tutorial
Keep that first drive as that is your master tape. Put it on a shelf.
Shane
Alokut Productions
http://www.lfhd.net -
This is my first post (ever), so please advise if anything is out of line…
I second Shane’s good advice. I also use Acomdata 80GB bus-powered portable drives (dual USB/Firewire), they are available for $200 or less. Most of my workflow has been with a PC for field capture which gives the added benefit of a Panasonic P2 viewer to verify that the clips are successfully transfered to the portable field drive. To my knowledge, the Panasonic viewers will not work with the Mac. You will either need a 3rd party viewer or to pull up the card in FCP and verify that it can see the underlying clips. Pre-creating subdirectories for each card is also my workflow and a real plus. I try to always have two separate copies of the entire P2 card contents. If, like me, your budget does not allow you to permanently archive the portable drive as a “master tape”, after you have transferred your files to your larger drive, you can create DVD back-ups (you will have to split the files if using 8 GB cards and single layer DVDs – be sure to preserve the entire structure and “lastclip.txt” file). Then you can erase the drive and use it on the next shoot.
I don’t try to store any of the cards on a laptop internal drive except in emergency and duplicate the portable drive to the larger storage as soon as practical. You will have a single copy of the clips for a brief time until they are transfered, but after shooting about 80 cards worth of data in the past couple of months I have never had a single problem.
Rob Ikenberry
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May I ask how much horsepower your PC laptop has and how much time it takes to tranfer a full 8 GB card?
Even if I’m working with FCP for editing, I’d consider a PC laptop in the field if it’s faster (none of the new MacTels has a PCMCIA slot). Shouldn’t be a problem in the future since the next MAC OS will probably support NTFS completely.
TIA,
Uli
Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.
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I have a relatively old (3 yrs?) Dell Inspiron 8600 with a 1.4 GHz Pentium M and 0.75 GB memory. Transfer of a full 8GB card usually takes about 8 min. This PC will play clips full speed in the P2 viewer in the window but does not have enough resources to play full screen (even at half speed or half resolution).
In my opinion, any inexpensive PC should be fine for field file transfers so long as it has a PCMCIA slot and multiple USB connections or a firewire port.
Rob Ikenberry
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Thanks for the tip on setting up the file hierarchy beforehand. I know that will definitely come in handy. And I made sure to watch your tutorial before I posted, and I’ll make sure to watch it once more before the weekend.
Can’t wait for the madness
Thanks!
Nicole
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“I have a relatively old (3 yrs?) Dell Inspiron 8600 with a 1.4 GHz Pentium M and 0.75 GB memory…. This PC will play clips full speed in the P2 viewer in the window but does not have enough resources to play full screen (even at half speed or half resolution).”
I’m trying to get a handle on how much/little laptop to buy. Are the clips your talking about HD, SD or both.
Thanks,
Kyle
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Kyle:
I was speaking strictly about HD clips. I have had little occasion to use the P2 cards for SD shooting.
The inability to play full screen never created a problem for using the computer as a field tool to download cards and verify that the data was captured. It just doesn’t work well for verifying focus.
It’s time to replace my laptop, let us know what you decide and, if you can, why…
Robert
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