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The most basic editor that accepts P2?
Hello all,
I work in a promotions department, and our news department just re-fitted with all P2 cameras. Now we’re struggling with workflow. They use Edius for editing. We use FCP. Now, for us producers, we’re on very basic Dell machines. We just want to be able to log the video and maybe put it on a timeline to spit out as a single, logically named clip. So what is the most basic PC software that will read P2? Can I do it with Premiere Elements, or something of that quality? Again, we don’t need much. Thanks!
Chris
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3 Replies
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Panasonic has free software for PCs called P2 Viewer. Check into it as it might do what you need expect for putting it into a timeline.
On the mac look at P2 Log, it’s not free but does similiar things and will export an xml to FCP for quick and easy import. Also, it does not use any sort of timeline as it’s not editing software.
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Thanks for the quick reply.
Quite frankly, I’m not sure how the workflow is going to work in the news-department… and that’s what’s killing me. How to organize all of the data from our photogs so that it’s viewable in P2 Viewer. As it is right now, they pull the data to the network server. But to organize things more efficiently, they put it into different folders. As an example, some stuff is brought in for a daily story and the raw content is deleted after 3 days. Some stuff, for the more in-depth special reports, is kept on the network for an undetermined amount of time. As far as I can tell from an earlier post… if I try to bury my card-data folders in a few layers of folders, the Viewer won’t work.
And since us producers are on Dell PCs, the logger won’t work (while it’s very cool)
All I’m looking for is a very simple edit program, so us producers can view the content… drop some clips to a timeline… and make a single DV file that I can send to my editor. Since P2 is such a professional format, I think my request is not likely to happen, but it’s worth a shot.
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Sounds like you have a conundrum there and you should hire a consultant to bring this all together for you. I wouldn’t think that you as producer should be editing, but who am I to tell. the free p2 viewer should work on your pc. With whatever logger you have, you can log and rename files so it’s easier to hand over to your editor in a ‘logical’ way.
You can bury the folders, you’ll just have to tell the viewer where your P2 card folders are and make sure the each p2 card is in it’s own folder, if you start throwing all p2 media together, you’ll get bit. So if you have one huge folder with everything in it and then inside that folder you have a folder named P2_RawFiles or something, then inside that file you have a bunch of folders (Card1, Card2 etc.) and in each of those folders is a lastclip.txt file and a contents folder with all p2 related media/metadata. if you need to keep a card then throw that card’s folder and it’s entire contents to wherever your longer term network storage is. You can name the containing folder anything you want (LucysCatStuckInTree for example).
Hope that helps, but it sounds like you need a specialist who can sort this out and also come up with a data backup plan for you as well.
Jeremy
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