-
Working with P2 in Premiere
Hello All …
First, I’d like to thank you all for your help and direction. This community is truly amazing.
Our archive system is to have a designated P2 card for b-roll: when the card is full, we back it up on an exterior hard drive, as well as a BluRay disc.
Our projects are short, so we never fill up a P2 card in one day. In fact, the card may have b-roll from 6-8 different projects, shot over a period of weeks.
OK — so — I understand the work flow: bring the p2 contents folder onto our hard drive (editing straight from the card won’t work for us). Then injest whichever clips we need for the particular project.
Here’s my question: Do we have to bring in the entire P2 card contents if we only need a few clips from the card?? That means we’d have to load up our hard drives with clips from other projects — again and again — every time we need a few clips from the card! That’s a lot of file duplication! Isn’t there a better way?
Thank you in advance for your help.
-Lori
-
10 Replies
-
I forgot to mention … I’m using CS5 on an HP workstation running Windows 7, 64 bit. Thanks
-
Hello,
The short answer, based on your description is yes. You have to copy the entire folder structure to your drive every time.
TEST THE FOLLOWING CAREFULLY:
If you’re building UP a card over time, then it is possible that you could copy the P2 Card to the same place on the Hard drive every time. Files that you had copied last time would simply overwrite themselves. So Premiere Projects that you’ve created based on that media SHOULD remain as they were (that’s your test). Files that you’ve added to the card since the last time you used it would simply be added in.
Alternatively there is a company called imagine products (https://www(dot)imagineproducts(dot)com) that makes some software that allows you to manage P2 media and make clean and independent folder sets. Maybe this is a route you’d prefer.
How do your Premiere Projects work? Are you progressively adding media to the same project over time, or are you making new projects every time you ingest media to the computer (because, say, the subject matter has changed). In either case remember that the location of where you copy the P2 media on to your hard drive can be completely separate from how you organize the Premiere Pro Projects, so you have have multiple projects in various folders on your hard drive importing media from the SAME P2 media folder set that grows over time until you reach the time where you archive it. Make sense?
Hope that points you in a good direction. If I can help more, lemme know…
Alex
-
Thank you so much for responding — and so quickly. Really — you can’t know how grateful I am.
Thanks for the tip about Imagine Products. Looks like it only works with HD files, and many of our projects are still in SD. But I’ll definitely look into it.
OK — so you’re saying to import the P2 card to our hard drives OUTSIDE the project folder, and injest into various projects from there. That way, several projects could have access to that particular import. Got it.
So, your suggestion is, when clips are added to the card, simply re-import the card to the exact same place, overwriting the previous import. But won’t this break the connections to that media from projects in progress? Is it a simple thing to re-link? (Obviously I’m new to Premiere. I’m coming over from Avid by way of FCP…and I’m afraid I don’t know any of them very deeply.)
Thank you again, Alex.
-
Oh, wait …. I get it … the question that I posed in my previous post about losing the link when I overwrite the card … THAT’S the test you suggested. Got it. I’ll try, and get back to you. Thanks so much!
-
Bingo.
As far as PPro is concerned it’s the same files, in the same location, with the same names. It doesn’t know or care that additional files have been added.
Of course I wouldn’t do the copying with PPro open.
At worst, I would think, you might need to relink. But even that really shouldn’t be the case.
Alex
-
As far as I know, PPro doesn’t rely on an intermediate database like Avid does. It’s just the File path to the media. Simple.
🙂
Alex
-
Alex, thank you so much! I’ll try it this week! Enjoy what’s left of the weekend!
-Lori
-
Why do you need to fill up the card before you transfer it to Hard Drive?
We have been using P2 for over 2 years now.We just dump the contents folder into a “project” folder and then reformat the drive.
as long as you put each CONTENTS into a separate folder.. there is no issue and you don’t have clips from different projects to worry about.
-
@ Brian – sorry it’s taken me so long to respond. We fill up our P2 card because we have a card designated just for b-roll. We’re still in SD, and we don’t shoot a lot, so when the card is filled we archive it onto BluRay discs. I understand you can back up the cards by creating different folders. But the discs are pricey, so we want to fill them as much as we can.
-
@ Alex – sorry it’s taken me so long to respond. I followed your protocol and it works like a charm! Thank you!
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up