transferring p2 card footage to external hard drive

[Steve Eisen]

Any external hard drive will work. Look at Other World Computing (macsales.com). Those are the types of drives you should be using. Make sure your data is backed up on multiple drives. Hard drives will fail. Better to be safe than sorry. Reshoots are very expensive and time wasted.

There are plenty of P2 workflows available. There are also a variety of ways to offload P2 data onto a hard drive.

The least inexpensive and slowest is to connect the camera via FW or USB to your computer.
The Duel Adapter if you have a MacBook Pro or PC with Express 34 slot
PCMCIA slot from a Powerbook or PC laptop
P2 card reader (most expensive)

Shot Put Pro from Imagine Products is highly recommended for offloading any type of digital media. It will do the work for you.

Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group

[Jan Terry]

Thanks for reply:
What if I need to dump footage on to an external hard drive direct and it needs to be both mac and pc friendly to send off to avid editors ,not knowing which computer they are using etc… Thanks, just very new to P2 media etc… Jan

[Julian Williamson]

You can’t do wrong using the “drag and drop” method with FAT32 formatted Western Digital Passport drives. I use MacBook Pro with Express slot, Duel adapter. Make a folder on the Hard Drive, “Card 1” or some such, then drag the entire contents of card to that folder. Check sizes of folder vs. card to ensure all material transferred. If using FCPro, the editor can use the “Log and Transfer” tool. Avid people can use whatever tool Avid people use these days.

Fastest transfer: Duel to Firewire. Only slightly slower: Duel to USB2. Fastest transfer from camera (HPX-170) … USB port, believe it or not. Glacially slow transfer: Firewire from camera through laptop to USB2.

Caveats: Treat the Duel adapter carefully. They stop working; I’ve had several. I now keep it in a padded sleeve. Once you’ve removed the Duel from the Express slot, you have to reboot computer to use it again.

Julian Williamson
https://www.blueslandfilms.com

[Niklas Wikman]

I’m using a MacBook Pro, a Duel adapter and the HD Log software from Imagine Software. (For offloading ShotPut P2 would work, but that program did not exist when we started go P2).

Using the HD Log software, I offload to two Western Digital MyBook Passport edition 500 GB disks.

Then any of the disk is used for Log and Transfer. The same disk (or the other disk) is then backed up on other disks.

[Arlene Williamson]

CALL HOME, or your sister ASAP.