Will the HVX be available to FCP as a firewire capture device off P2?

[Jan Crittenden livingston]

[Dale McCready] “When shooting to P2 cards on the HVX, once you’ve shot can you plug in firewire and enable to transfer of shots off the camera to FCP like any old DV camera? Does it need to be in MCR mode or PC mode? Will FCP recognise this camera through Firewire to read off P2 with it’s thumbnail setup or does it just ignore that?

FCP will see the P2 Camera as a drive, open FCP, Import P2 and the files will now be resident on your system. Edit. If you wish to stram live to FCP, open the capture now window, Capture now.

>I’m mainly thinking of this to cover things until the P2 is readable in my G5 or powerbook. If using the powerbook, make sure your drive is a 7200rpm or you may experience dropped frames.

>Also for Jan if you’re reading, how does the MXF wrapper effect use of files straight off P2?

It is essential for editing off of the P2, but in the case of FCP, it is simply unwrapped and you files have to move from the P2 card to the HD before you start to edit. In the systems that deal with MXF on the front end, they are able to start editing from the card. This really is noteworthy in a time constrant business like news where every minute seems like an hour when you are waiting to have things happen.

>Is it up to FCP to import and use the wrapper to identify files? Or will drives like the AJ-PCS060G just show up as many drives with many folders…?”

The P2 store will mount like a drive or shall I say a number of drives. Each P2 card stored will be its own drive. In the case of the P2 store you don’t edit from this one anyhow, this one needs to be transferred, I believe, before you start to edit. My experience with the P2 store is more limited.

Hope that helps,

jan

Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems

[Dale Mccready]

Thanks Jan, that does help.

[Barry Green]

[Dale McCready] “When shooting to P2 cards on the HVX, once you’ve shot can you plug in firewire and enable to transfer of shots off the camera to FCP like any old DV camera?”
Yes, you could do that. But that’s not the only way to do it, nor is it necessarily the best way to do it. You can just plug the card right into your computer (PCMCIA slot on a powerbook, or get an under-$100 USB-to-PCMCIA adapter for your desktop). That way you don’t have to tie the camera up when copying the card data over.

[Dale McCready] “Will FCP recognise this camera through Firewire to read off P2 with it’s thumbnail setup or does it just ignore that?”
FCP doesn’t recognize the MXF files yet, I don’t think (maybe it does… but I don’t think so). There’s an “Ingest Panasonic P2” command that copies the files over to your hard disk and unwraps the MXF wrapper and re-wraps it as a QuickTime wrapper. A future update to FCP should allow for full native MXF support, which would give you the ability to directly edit right off the card.

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