[Mix4pix]

I can help with this one…

I’m a sound recordist. For the past three days, I’ve been on set with a project shooting with the Panasonic HVX200, which writes onto P2 cards.

I was monitoring audio from camera via a breakaway cable plugged into my mixer, as per usual when shooting video. Every time we rolled on this particular card, there was a very low-level, random yet constant beeping in my headphones. While trying to troubleshoot, we played back the take (so easy to do with this camera!) and I could hear the low-level beeping on playback, as well. We only had this problem with one of our three P2 cards. We fixed it by reformatting (erasing) the P2 card.

I’m still not sure if the beeping actually found its way into the captured footage, or if the beeping is just the sound that bad card made whenever it was reading/writing. I think the beeping was captured, though.

Anyway, it’s NOT the camera, it’s the card, and you should try switching cards or reformat the card, which takes about a minute. You can even dump the card down to a laptop before reformatting, in case the take was good for picture and you real wanted to keep it.

I’m not sure how common this problem is, but suffice it to say that when shooting on P2, I’m going to crank my headphones way up every time we start a new card to listen for the low-level beeping.

Also, this is REALLY odd, but I ONLY could hear the beeping when using external mics. I was NOT using any wireless–just a wired boom mic. We switched over to the camera mic while troubleshooting, and I didn’t hear any beeping there. This could be related to the fact that P2 cards by default record audio into FOUR channels (stereo camera mic and external mics) when you have external mics plugged in, but (I think) only onto TWO channels when there are no external mics present. Not sure how that would alleviate a bad card. (Maybe I just couldn’t hear the beeping because the internal mic is so crappy!)

Long story short, try reformatting or swapping out the P2 card.