P2 to laptop woes

[danslak]

OK, I'm officially confused and really need your help and can't quite find the solution in the threads. I'm using a macbook pro OS 10.4.6 and can't find out where I'm screwing up:

1. Formatted portable firewire drive from the camera to download P2 footage.
2. Downloaded footage from P2 cards to portable drive.
3. Installed P2 driver on laptop drive.
4. Plugged portable firewire drive into laptop.
5. Portable Drive UNREADABLE by macbook.

I'm in dante's 8th circle of hell: if I format the portable drive to take the P2 Media, then it's not readable by my mac. If I initialize the portable drive, it's not readable by the camera. What huge step am I missing? The manual is now a blur, and thinking of setting it on fire.

Hep me hep me!

Dan

[Barry_Green]

Any Mac should be able to read that drive; it's a FAT32 drive. No driver necessary.

Do you have BootCamp? Can you try it in the Windows partition? WinXP should be able to read it too. But both should.

[danslak]

First, GREAT FREAKIN' BOOK Barry. A real life saver. OK I'll try Bootcamp and I'll also try plugging the portable drive into my desktop G5 and see what happens.

Back in a minute...

dan

[danslak]

While I'm waiting for the footage to go back on the camera formatted drive, and have the 200 Master handy, I have a question about work flow: if I can only load P2 cards 15 times onto a drive, does that basically mean at the end of a shoot day I have to take the footage from the portable drive, transfer is to another drive, then re-format the portable drive again for the next days shooting?

[danslak]

No go. Neither Bootcamp nor Mac desktop can read the camera initialized drive. Since I can't seem to go directly into that drive and still read it, any ideas on how I can transfer footage to an external drive connected to my macbook? Can I capture footage from the camera directly into Final Cut Pro without affecting the 1080/24 I shot in?

Dan

[Barry_Green]

Something's wrong though. You should be able to format the drive from the camera, copy a partition onto that drive, and then directly plug that drive into any WinXP or Mac OS computer and read the contents immediately.

Did you copy a card over to the drive from the camera? If you haven't copied a card over yet, then there's nothing on the drive for the computers to see.

And yes, you can only copy 15 times to a drive before it's "full" of partitions; if you want to keep using that drive you'd have to empty it off and reformat it in the camera.

And yes, you can capture 1080/24pA directly into FCP; just be sure to use 1080/24pA mode.

[danslak]

Did you copy a card over to the drive from the camera? If you haven't copied a card over yet, then there's nothing on the drive for the computers to see.


Yes, a few times now while trying to figure out what I did wrong...which is Apparently nothing! I've been monkeying around on the P2 site with drivers and whatnot. Maybe they have an anti-voodoo driver.

Thanks so much for the info! I wish it were something I was doing wrong though!

Dan

[BenB]

I'd like to know if your Mac can read the P2 cards, either in a card slot of directly from the HVX. That'd clear up some possible problems figuring this out. You really should be able to read that drive with a Mac. I know two other Mac users doing this workflow just fine.

[danslak]

I'm not sure how I'd go directly into the mac from the HVX. If I go via firewire, it seems I would have to still format the drive through the HVX, which will wipe my macs internal drive. Is my thinking wrong here?

I would love to plug the cards directly into the mac, but it uses a different size slot, and there seems to be no adapter available. ... yet.

For my shoot coming up, I've decided to rent panasonic's 60 gig P2 drive and hope I can get the footage in that way, which at this point is scarey as hell.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Would you mind asking your friends who are successful at this, the exact process they've gone through to get it to work?

Thanks so much,

Dan