Some Initial FCP 5.1 Oddities

[nsoltz]

Just got HVX and Firestore today for evaluation and whoever last used the camera was kind enough to leave 2 P2 cards full of some very nice New England sailing footage. I tried several FCP 5.1 experiments first. Having heard of various individuals experiencing freezing with P2 cards in Powerbook 1.67 models, I attempted multiple insertions/removals in the Powerbook. Not a single freeze. Copied files to firewire 800 drive as well as imported directly from P2 without a hitch.

Things were not so smooth with my Dual G5, 2 ghz with 2.5 gb ram and a 2 TB SATA raid. Put camera in PC mode (after forgetting to turn off thumbnails at first, would not go into PC mode and I'm having visions of Jan banging down door with SWAT team for breaking eval camera) and card mounted. Of course, mounts as "no name" on Mac desktop and unable to unlock the .txt file to erase the card as when inserting P2 card in powerbook P2 slot.

Card 1 copied perfectly to raid via finder. Card 2 consistently hung up and froze computer during copying.

Next tried directly in FCP. For first couple of attempts, FCP would freeze when importing. Then brought P2 files I had copied on Powerbook firewire drive over to desktop by mounting the FW drive and acquiring from there. No problem at all.

Next, I switched to rear firewire port on desktop G5. One and only test was successful. Now there have been reports about the front firewire port on this first generation of G5 dual 2.0's, but I never had a problem with this machine.

Tomorrow I'll do some shooting both with P2 and firestore and attempt some additional captures.

I have not done the usual FCP maintenance of trashing prefs. I do believe the problem resides somewhere in my system since I have not heard of this issue before.

Played out some of that footage and it is gorgeous.

Ned Soltz

[BenB]

Don't let the Mac erase your P2 cards. ALWAYS let the HVX200 do that for you!

It's a trick I found evaluating the HVX200 and FS-100 for an article I'm writing, too.

[davidmichaelphelps]

Ben, can you explain in more detail why we shouldn't let the Mac erase P2 cards?

[nsoltz]

Ditto, Ben. Curious why. Meanwhile, the format P2 function in camera is so fast that it doesn't present any issues.

Ned

[Justin Reade]

Yeah, I mean, if the camera can erase the P2 cards quickly and efficiently, why willingly engage in a process that is more cumbersome? As far as the unlocking issue of your .txt file, you'll have to get unfortunately accustomed to MAC OS's new wonderful lock/unlock feature which makes expunging .mxf files (en masse) a complete nightmare. I have found that you have to do a multiple file "get info" and attempt to unlock, and sometimes that doesn't work. A friend of mine who works for Apple showed me a nice, convoluted way of "changing the file flags" in the OS Terminal, which does the job, but is beyond my sphere of computing comprehension.

I guess my point is: erase files from the camera instead of the Mac. Do what's easy, unless you like to complicate your life. And as far as unlocking files in the MAC OS, join the ranks.... there are some "automator" applets that purport to unlock the files, but I have not found this to be functional. My trashcan is overloaded currently until I can figure this out, or have my buddy write me an lock/unlock script.....

[Cut2muz]

what about when continuiously shooting and dumping P2 to computer? Can you erase one P2 while recording to the other?

Don Wilson

[Justin Reade]

I mean, the cards are hot-swappable, so if you have two cards, and one becomes full, it would probably be efficient to offload the footage from card 1, while shooting to the second, so that you have a continuous round-robin effect of shooting without having a huge off-load delay break...

[SPZ]

Any Pal 720p support in 5.1.1?

[nsoltz]

The main fixes in FCP 5.1.1 are Intel related but most important is the fix for duplicate frames in rendered P2 24pN footage. Just installed and no problems at all.

Ned Soltz