Powerbook and P2 Cards

[eppdidit]

I am curious to know how we the whole P2 card process works. How do we load footage up from the cards? Is there a seperate program that we need to buy or is there a simpler way to load up footage.

I will be using a Powerbook along with an external HD.

epp

[Barry_Green]

If you have a PCMCIA slot on the powerbook, you just plug the card right into the slot. It'll appear on your desktop as an external hard drive. From there you can copy the contents over to your hard disk.

If you don't have a PCMCIA slot, you can do the same thing through firewire -- put the HVX in "1394 DEVICE" mode, and plug it into the Mac. The HVX will show up as two external hard disk drives -- one for slot 1, one for slot 2. Then copy the files over.

When using the footage in FCP you have to "ingest P2", which converts the native .MXF files into Quicktime files.

[evinsky]

Barry, do you happen to know how long this takes? Can it be done simultaniously with a transfer from the P2 to a HDD? I didn't get to see any of that.
Thanks, hope your book is coming along well.

[Barry_Green]

From what I remember, I believe it can be done simultaneously as the copy to the hard disk, and I think it takes a little less than a minute per gig. But most of the footage we were using was taken from the PC hard disk copied to the Mac, so most of the time he was importing files that were already on the hard disk. That took about 2.5 to 3 minutes for 4gb. I would guess it would take less time coming from the card, since the card is a lot faster than any laptop hard disk.

[Cees Mutsaers]

Barry, is a powerbook G4 powerfull enough to do NLE with FC studio without getting irritated by high processing times???? or do you really need a power PC G5?

[Barry_Green]

I'm not an FCP user - yet. So I don't know the answer, although I do know that I've seen it being edited on a powerbook G4 and it seemed to work fine. Best to ask current FCP users though.

[eppdidit]

"Ingest P2" ?

Can you explain this in a little more detail? Will this require a seperate program to do the .mxf to quicktime conversion?

[doccutter]

I have FCP 5.03, and under File>Import in FCP, there is an option for Panasonic P2. You choose the .mxf file, and FCP removes the mxf wrapper and makes a .mov quicktime file. I don't know how long this process takes, and I'm not sure if it just goes into the capture scratch folder. No other software required. Also, I have been editing with a powerbook 1.5 for about 2 years now. It runs OK with DV codec stuff, and when attached to an external FW drive, can even do some basic RT effects. I think cuts only on a powerbook with DVCPROHD should be OK, but I wouldn't hold out hope for HD RT effects.