[Seth Patterson]

Frank,

First off, I know how frustrating this can be. With the amount of money we invest in such things you’d like it to just ‘work.’

But I suppose that is rarely the case.

It does sound like one of your Duel Adapters is defective. If it won’t even transfer information from p2 to finder there is something wrong. I’d personally ask them to replace it, and have read in various other places where people have done just that with defective Duels.

The second unit, I noticed that when I ‘eject’ the p2 card it ejects the entire duel adapter (not just the p2 card), requiring me to restart before it will accept the duel adapter again.

When you plug the duel adapter into your macbook you should see a new icon appear up next to the blue-tooth/wifi icons, this is the PCI-Express notifier icon. When you eject the p2 card check and see if it disappears. If so, then you’re ejecting your duel adapter as well as the p2 card.

What I suggest doing is just hot swapping the p2 cards within the duel adapter. Meaning, don’t eject, just unplug one and plug the next in. There shouldn’t be a problem with this (though OSX might complain?). I can’t test it as our setup is in Arizona and I’m in Texas… but it should work okay. Though one thing I made a habit of doing was setting the protect switch to enabled on the p2 cards before plugging them into the duel adapter.

[Seth Patterson]

Hello again everyone!

Panasonic called me back this morning and we talked about the problem at hand, nice gentleman. We came to the conclusion that this issue doesn’t seem to be Duel’s problem and it doesn’t really seem to be Panasonic’s problem. So I think it landed on simply being MY problem. Which is kind of a slap to the face… but hey… sometimes those slaps get the old ticker ticking.

So basically we agree that it’s an unknown problem which he had never heard of before and couldn’t really help me with. Looks like there are a few of us out there with this problem though so what do we do?

Well, after thinking about it and knowing so many people seem to be running Duel on a macbook pro with P2CMS just fine, I had to ask myself what makes me stand out?

Brilliant. I bought this laptop through the broadcast company we purchased the camera through and they recommend I upgrade the ram with the company they are an authorized retailer for vs. paying apple for 4GB (2 x 2GB) upgrade.

So the first thing I did–before even turning the laptop on–was remove the stock 2GB (2 x 1GB) and install the 3rd party 4GB’s of ram. The computer seemed to be fine.

Well I just removed the new ram, reinstalled the stock ram, rebooted… inserted the duel adapter… inserted the p2 card… opened p2CMS… imported the 20 clips… and presto.

100% perfect transfer, no crashing.

So for all of you out there scratching your heads about why your macbook pro seems to be the only one crashing with p2cms and a duel adapter–check your ram.

Thank you everyone!

[Seth Patterson]

Dave, thank you so much for your reply and insight. I agree that P2CMS seems more trouble than it’s probably worth but for my purposes it–unfortunately–seems to be the best solution.

We’ve given an old pro (82), who spent his life shooting 16mm and the last few years playing with an XL1, a HVX200ap and a laptop. He is bound for the remote canyons of Arizona, Mexico, and eventually central and South America.

He’s never used a computer before–ever. So I have to get him up to speed and capable of simply dumping the p2 footage using the laptop. Which with it’s verification system, p2cms seems the only option… I’m not even going to show him how to open FCP.

So for those purposes I was really banking on P2CMS. :/