Barry Green
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1. Thinner tape (as is necessary to cram more tape into the same-size cassette) is more susceptible to crinkling or breaking.
2. 64MB is about all you’ll ever need.
3. No timecode breaks or anything will ever happen with P2. Every new recording starts at exactly where the last one left off.
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You can change the clip’s icon too, of course. P2 Viewer lets you assign the clip’s icon from anywhere in the file. P2 Viewer’s coming to the Mac soon, as part of P2CMS (P2 Content Management System). I’m pretty sure P2 Log lets you assign a new icon too… er, well, at least I think it does…
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Different types of projects will adapt to different workflows better than others. For someone shooting on a deadline, P2 slays — you can shoot your project, edit it, finish it, meet the deadline, and then — after the time pressure’s off — you archive. Overnight, even. For someone shooting news or TV commercials or, well, anything with a quick turnaround, P2 is much faster. But those type of projects usually aren’t shooting hours of footage per day, either.
For doco work, it ends up saving a notable amount of time, but perhaps not when you’d want it to. Here’s an example: if you shoot five hours of tape a day, you put those tapes on a shelf and go to bed, sure. No archiving, no offloading at night, etc. But someday you’re gonna face the piper — someday you’re going to have to go through those tapes and log them and transfer them to the computer, and that’s a realtime process.
With the P2 system it’s already computer data, and (depending on what mode you shot in) you’re going to be transferring that to the computer at 2x to 8x faster than realtime. My laptop copies a 16GB card in about 8.5 minutes, so 1080 footage = 2x faster than realtime, DV footage = almost 8x faster than realtime. If you shoot 300 hours of footage, you’ve potentially saved 300 hours to 1200 hours out of your whole production schedule. But, you’ve put that time that you did spend into the middle of your shoot, instead of queueing it all up at the end of the shoot (such as would happen in a traditional tape-based workflow).
But the time savings is there and very real, because you can offload those cards in one big batch at night. If you’ve shot the four 32GB cards, you plug ’em in the slot reader and say “copy”, and go to bed. When you get up, the cards are copied and ready for formatting. So not only did you trim 300 hours out of your production schedule, you also trimmed another 300 hours out of your schedule by multitasking (doing the offloading while you sleep). And because P2 is a no-moving-parts solid-state system, you can actually tell the system to make two copies for you simultaneously, without even slowing down to any significant degree.
It becomes a very real issue when you reach the editing stage. With one workflow you start the editing stage with 300 hours of tape that needs to be digitized before you can start editing. With the other workflow, you just start editing immediately.
So yes, the amount of work being done by the computer is comparable. But it’s *when* that work gets done, and what attention you need to pay to it, that makes the difference.
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The point isn’t that you shouldn’t use FCP. The point was that you don’t have to put up with that limited import window that frequently doesn’t work. You can have your cake and eat it too. Use FCP all you want, just don’t use its log & transfer function — use Raylight or P2 Log instead. Either will get around all the issues that FCP’s import window exhibits.
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… or a USB keyboard… but no, none of that is possible. On the HPX2000 there’s a software keyboard that pops up and lets you type in a name. Kind of clumsy a bit, but hey, at least it’s there.
On the smaller cameras you have to load the name in through the SD card. You can pre-load some metadata files with the base names you think you’ll use throughout the day, and swap to the appropriate one by just loading new metadata off your pre-loaded SD card.
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[begin broken record]
Get Raylight.
[/end broken record]
Raylight can automate this process for you, if you use the Type II metadata User Clip Name feature. The camera can generate a unique name for each clip based on what you specify, and auto-increment a counter (so you set a base name of, say, “Day 4 Shot “, and the camera creates “Day 4 Shot 1”, then “Day 4 Shot 2”, etc).
FCP doesn’t use the metadata. Raylight can use that metadata and name your clips according to the User Clip Name. It may not be a perfect solution, but it will certainly get you closer.
For info on the User Clip Name feature, see this article:
https://dvxuser.com/jason/P2-Name-article/For info on Raylight, see http://www.dvfilm.com/raylight
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Blu-ray works; it’s just a large optical disc format.
Pros are that the discs have decent capacity, should be permanent storage, and are fairly inexpensive.
Cons are that writing to Blu-ray is quite slow; it’ll take about 90 minutes to archive an hour’s worth of footage. And the discs are very expensive on a per-gigabyte basis when compared to data tape (like LTO2 or LTO3 or DLT).
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PCMCIA’s been around for quite a while, and it’s plenty fast. The P2 card is fast enough to support six streams of HD simultaneously, streaming off the card. And the PCMCIA bus is almost twice as fast as the maximum speed of a P2 card. PCMCIA’s capable of 133 megabytes per second. The “other” storage you’re hearing about uses ExpressCard (which is a faster interface, true) but the underlying memory doesn’t even exceed the speed of a PCMCIA card. The SxS cards are pegged to run at 800mbps (or 100 megabytes) per second, which would easily fit within the PCMCIA specification; they certainly didn’t need to go to ExpressCard for that.
The P2 card has the potential to be much faster than it currently is, but still be 100% backwards compatible. Right now they make the cards by RAIDing together four SD cards. I would guess that as technology advances, they’d be able to RAID together six SD cards and get a 50% speed boost, or even RAID 8 cards together and get the speed all the way up to the PCMCIA maximum of 133 megabytes per second. Don’t know when or if they’ll do that, but one thing you can count on is that new cards will be backward compatible with old equipment.
Keep in mind Panasonic’s been offering this format for around four years now. They’ve got massive customers out there like NDTV (hundreds of cameras) and the Fox network and the Australian Broadcasting Company, and it’s highly anticipated that the BBC’s going to go with P2 as well. They wouldn’t/couldn’t make it backwards-incompatible even if they wanted to, at this point.
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[Peter Corbett] “I don’t know where these guys who say it SAVES time are coming from.”
Er… it comes from the guys who don’t use FCP… 🙂
FCP’s implementation of supporting P2 is goofy and limited, at best. Every other editor on Earth lets you edit straight from the cards — no importing, no ingesting, no capturing, no digitizing, no anything. Shoot & Edit, that’s it.
If you’ve been offloading your footage to hard drives throughout the production day, every other editor lets you plug in that drive and edit. Only FCP requires that you import/ingest.
You can get around that. You can start saving time immediately. Just go to http://www.dvfilm.com/raylight and get the Raylight plug-in. It does for FCP what Avid and EDIUS and Liquid and SpeedEdit do natively, and what it does for Premiere and Vegas — it lets you have immediate access to the MXF files. If you want to save a tremendous amount of time between shooting footage and meeting your deadline, give Raylight a shot.
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Short recording times are a temporary limitation. As the cards become bigger, recording time issues diminish.
As an example, when the HVX200 first came out, people said there was no way to use it underwater; 8 minutes of recording time just wasn’t enough, you’d have to surface and change out the cards and etc.
But today, with two 16GB cards, you can have 80 minutes in-camera. Now the recording time will last longer than any tape, and it’ll last longer than your air tank will. So the appearance of 16GB cards opened up that market.
32’s are due in a few months. An HPX500 with four 32GB cards can record five and a half hours of footage, without ever swapping cards. That’s going to be possible in just a few months… so is there really a big reason to put a tape in there? You can offload the cards at night while you sleep and be ready for the next 5.5-hour shoot day in the morning.
Next year when the 64GB cards come out, that number jumps to 11 hours. And about two years from now the 128GB cards come out, and that pushes the HPX500’s record time capability to 22 hours — all without ever swapping a single card. If you have more cards and can swap, that increases the recording time infinitely.
Short recording times are a temporary inconvenience.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db)