P2 download to PC's - Q & A

H

huge1

Member
I was not able to find any threads on P2 downloads with PC's. Can any of you who have used these workflows chime in your experiences and answer a few questions:


1) Putting P2 on PC and then (back at the ranch) getting it onto MAC system for editing.
2) Adding an external PCMCIA cardreader adaptor for PC without one
3) Download times on PC's for P2 cards
4) Any major problems as appear to be showing up bigtime with mac laptop users trying to transfer from P2 (see threads--many crashes after a few P2 cards)?
5) What type of external harddrive connected to PC that would be mac compatible and be powered by pc? (the idea being it could run on battery for field work if needed.--and have much more storage that could potentially just plug into mac machine for editing...)

I realize this is all a bit clunky but some of your larger lobed individuals should be able to smarten up the topic and get a good thread on PC to P2 downloads.
cheers
 
1) Sounds like you need the P2 Genie. Check out www.p2genie.com (shameless selfpromotion - I know!).

2) They're coming - but not quite here yet AFAIK.

3) My Dell laptop downloads a 4 Gb P2 Card in about 4 minutes.

4) Nope - on Windows offloading P2 cards just work ;-)

5) What you want to do is copy onto a FAT32-formatted drive that you'll be able to read on your Mac. NTFS should work too, but you'll only be able to read from it on your Mac.
 
There are no threads about it because, as tlorenzo says, it just works.

Put the card in, copy it over. You can use Windows Explorer, or you can use P2 Viewer, or you can use tlorenzo's excellent P2 Genie. It's just a simple file copy. There are no hassles, there are no problems, there are no incompatibilities, there are no workarounds, it just works.

As far as an external PCMCIA reader -- if you don't mind putting the card in the back of your desktop you can get a really inexpensive PCI->PCMCIA reader. Or if you want a USB reader you can get the Panasonic ones ($1900 and $2500).

As far as transfer times, it depends on what you're transferring to. My Dell does a 4gb card in about 3:40, and it can offload twice (once to internal drive and simultaneously to an external drive) in 4:08, so it's barely any slower to make two copies at the same time.
 
Great info for pc

Great info for pc

This is great info. It's particularly sexy because I have 2 dell laptops sitting around.

Any particular drives you guys recommend for the pc that is tried and true? I am sure I could find the info somewhere else but I think one PC string with the info would be very useful.

I AM SOOOO THANKFUL FOR THIS RESOURCE ON THIS STUFF! It is impossible to get good information through any vendors because no one knows and worse still--they think they know but are completely wrong based on multiple field uses throughout these threads---not brown nosing but seriously...how much pain this user group has saved me... may 50 virgins await you in the afterlife.

cheers
 
Amigo...the genie for pc at $33 promote away! I was terrified after reading the threads in here about P2 download problems... I am not a kiss-ass until I try it but if you save my footage and time and do it cheaply you will get my bucks and a kiss-ass.

Shocking how much people are fighting this--especially when you can go online and pick up a used dell for cheaper than a harddrive!!! I love a mac but I love things that work right much, much more!!!!!!!!

And what is the deal with your genie on macs? You are selling them but isn't there a lot of issues using them on the macs?
 
I wouldn't recommend any external drives as all drive manufacturers have their problems ;-)

The problem with P2 Mac offloading is that there seems to be some driver problems with either the Apple or Panasonic drivers. This problems means that some cards won't mount and P2 Stores might not mount all of its partitions - which could be catastrophic in some cases. It appears that this problem is non-existent on Windows.

I'd have to agree - $33 USD for the P2 Genie surely is a bargin considering all the time you will save by not having to copy cards the manual way ;-)
 
There are not "a lot of issues" on the Mac, and the few that there are, the P2 Genie goes a long way towards solving.

What there is is, whenever there's an issue, it's always on a Mac. The PC platform is more reliable for managing/copying/working with P2 media. But there are far, far, far more people using the Mac than PC (by my estimate at least 80% of HVX users are using the Mac right now) so statistically we're much more likely to hear about a Mac user having problems because there are so many more Mac users.

I believe that there is something that needs to be updated with the Apple workflow, and hopefully (hoping beyond hope) they'll address it in FCP 6. Until then there are just some things you cannot do on the Mac that you can do on the PC. Importing straight from the card, for one -- on the Mac this will occasionally cause glitched frames, whereas it never does on the PC. And card copying appears to be trickier on the Mac, apparently you're now supposed to do a "disk image" instead of a Finder copy; on the PC it doesn't matter how you copy the card over, it always works. The P2 Genie automates some of those tasks and really makes working with a Mac/P2 system much more pleasant.
 
We use the following workflow for P2:

Capture footage through Toshiba laptop running XP and P2Genie to external Seagate Barracuda-class (7200 rpm) USB 2 HDD. I don't capture to the internal laptop drive. Instead, we pull a simul. to a second Seagate drive for safety using P2Genie's "2nd Destination" feature-set.

If you have a clapper-loader and down time over the shoot, setting up virtual P2s in P2Viewer to confirm footage is desirable.

Doing reality, we shoot higher ratios than you'd see on a typical film set, so we devote a two drives per day as "raw stock".

Each day and each associated drive gets a master destination folder like this: unsigned_29aug06

We download based on REELNUMBER rather than NAME & DATE, so under each directory, you'll see cumulative folders 001, 002 and so-forth.

The Seagate enclosures are labeled with the following log information:

PROD NAME: unsigned
DESTINATION FOLDER / DATE: 29aug06
DP: J. STANTON
FILES: 001 - 012

e
 
Regarding the copy to the second external drive, another option would be to use a single external drive enclosure with RAID1 support.

AMS has an external enclosure in their Venus line that supports both RAID0 and RAID1, and which uses drive caddies so that you can swap in other IDE drives as needed if you need additional capacity. However, this enclosure does not support USB, though it has support for both FW400 and FW800.

AMS Venus DS3R Data Sheet
 
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