[Isaac Brillant]

Hi Shane,

Thanks for the reply – Sorry I hadn’t seen it till now…

I did get it to work– thanks for all the info. Now I’m just trying to figure out how I’m going to deal with archiving. Thanks for your help!

Isaac

[Isaac Brillant]

Hi,

It turns out that all the drivers I need (I think) came on a CD in the box. Although the manual says that its compatible with OSX 10.4.8 and mine is 10.4.11

Is that a problem?

Thanks

[Isaac Brillant]

Hi Shane,

I’m trying to figure out which drivers I need for my powerbook G4 to read the P2 cards, but I’m not sure I understand all the terminology on the Panasonic website. I suppose I could download all of them, but I dont want to bog down this old G4 with stuff it doesnt need…

I know you’re not like Panasonic Technical Support or anything, but if you have a chance, could you clarify this for me? Sorry that this is a long post, but I’m copying from the site.

First off, do I need all of the following (listed on the panasonic link that you posted)

1) E Series P2 Card Compatibility
Download the latest firmware to ensure your P2 product is compatible with the new E Series cards

2) P2 Products Firmware Updates
All the info you need to know about upgrading your P2 product (camcorders, field recorders and workflow tools), including 32GB and 16GB P2 card compatibility.

3) P2 Driver for PC/Mac
Download the latest driver software to enable your PC/Mac system to use P2 cards (including 32GB and 16GB).

4) P2 Contents Management Software
View the contents of your P2 cards on compatible PC/Mac systems.

And then, on link 1) above, it says (I’m only listing the parts that I think MIGHT apply to the powerbook G4 running Tiger):

The following devices are supported by P2 driver packages:

AJ-PCD20 1394b Driver – ver 1.21
AJ-PCD35 PCIe Driver ver 1.10-
CardBus Driver ver 1.5- － CardBus Driver
P2 Card Formatter Software – ver 1.00 Only for AJ-PCD20, PCD35, CardBUS
AJ-PCS060G USB Driver – P2 Store Manager – ver 1.00/1.10 ver 1.00/1.14

So, uh, which of these are relevant to me? Is the CardBus the slot on the mac?

And then under that it says:
“No Need the following driver for Mac
USB : No need Driver ／1394a : No need Driver
AG-HPX170 series

So, what does that mean? I dont need a driver?

Also, in addition to the drivers, theres “Software for P2 Products(Firmware)” Do I need that too?

Thanks!!

Isaac

[Isaac Brillant]

Thanks for all the answers Shane.

I’m going to reply to a few of them:

[Because of the…uhm… highly technological reason that I’m sure an engineer would be able to tell you. Just know that 1080 is too high of a bandwidth to be able to do this. I think… ]

: ) Got it.

[Yes. More resolution. DVCPRO HD is an anamorphic format, the AVCCAM format isn’t. But what you gain in resolution you lose in chroma sampling. There are give and takes, but both cameras are good cameras.]

I think I understand. But despite the fact that the HPX is anamorphic and the HMC150 isn’t, the picture is still sharper on the HPX because it handles the color and contrast better?

Thanks!

[Isaac Brillant]

Hi John,

Regarding holding on the AVCHD files for archival – a B&H sales person told me that you can’t delete individual junk clips from the AVCHD folder, as you might do with P2 clips. Not just “in camera,” but also when it’s on your computer. Is that right?

Thanks again

[Isaac Brillant]

Hi Shane

I was looking over your posts on this and was wondering – Do ALL Powerbook G4s have that PCMCIA slot? My old Powerbook G4 is from 2006.

I’m not sure what the slot looks like, but would it show up when I click on “About this Mac”? What mine says is: PCI Cards, and next to that it says PCIXXXX-00

Is that it? It kind of looks like the slot on my MacBook Pro, but twice size

Also, my powerbook only has 1.5 gigs of RAM. Is that enough?

Thanks very much

[Isaac Brillant]

Oh, also…

Do you do any sort of backup archival on DVDs or Bluerays? I’m wondering if thats a common workflow, when completing a project, to burn all the AVCHD files to DVD. It ought to be something like 2 or 3 DVDs per hour of footage? I guess it wouldn’t be as easy with ProresLT or DVCPro (if using an HPX) though.

Thanks

[Isaac Brillant]

Hi John,

Thanks for running that test. So, when you opened log & transfer, and changed the preferences to transcode as Prores HQ , and selected the offline sequence and asked it to batch capture, were you batch capturing from the ProRes regular clips to ProRes HQ, or from the AVCHD clips? It makes sense that it would keep the timecode from Prores regular to Prores HQ, but I’m trying to avoid having to archive all this Prores material.

Also, similar question regarding your post on our other thread, where you wrote:

“Don’t use Prores LT as a final codec, it’s designed for offline editing. You can import everything as LT for space reasons, and then media manage and recapture your final timeline as Prores……
You don’t want to be transcoding and changing frame sizes and frame rates, things will get ugly real fast.”

So, when you say media manage and recapture as ProRes, do you mean recapture form the original AVCHD or from the ProRes LT?

About the frame size, maybe it’s cheating, but the reason I was thinking about capturing and editing in 1080, and later downconverting the sequence it to 720, was so that in a talking head interview, I could – in a pinch, blow up the Medium CU by 30% and cheat it as a new CU shot, so that I can cut from one shot to the same shot, without it being obvious.

So I figured if I was working in 1080, but ultimately ending up in 720, once in 720 you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference unless you’re really sensitive to the optics of lenses.

In what way do you think it would get ugly? Aliasing or artifacting?

Thanks for all your input.

Yitz

BTW, where do you work in Vancouver? I was just there in August for a few days, and my short film played at the Jewish Film Festival there earlier last year.

[Isaac Brillant]

Hi,

Has the issue with shooting Variable Frame Rates using the E-series cards been solved yet, since the last posting here in August?

Thanks
Isaac

[Isaac Brillant]

“So what I do understand you to be saying, is that my timecode based video from my HMC-150 will not maintain TC sync in Prores??? Would I (or you) be better off simply paying to go to Adobe instead????”

Hi,

Right. It won’t maintain the timecode. I’m not an expert at all, but based on the research I’ve done I’ll try to answer:

Someone else on a thread said that I’d need a capture card if I wanted to consistently maintain timecode when going from AVCHD to ProRes. And the people at Neoscene also told me that in their test the AVCHD from the HMC150 didn’t maintain the timecode in Prores. If you only plan to do that conversion once, and then stick to Prores and archive the Prores files, then it makes no difference. But if you ever plan to redigitize from the AVCHD files, then it would be an issue.

But, even though right now it seems like you’d need a capture card to do it, in a few months, there will probably be some way to do it with software like Neoscene. So I guess it would just pay to hold onto any of your transcoded Prores files that you think you might possibly ever need, and your AVCHD files until they come out with a software solution. And then when they do and you’re able to dump your unused Prores footage, you’ll find yourself with a lot of new space on your harddrive.