P2/Mac PCMCIA trouble - I think I figured it out.

Interesting.

When consulting with clients to help them devise their workflow, I've always recommended that the moment a card comes out of the camera it must be write-protected. And the P2 Offload Technician (which may be the same person on a small budget shoot!) should not accept a card unless it's write-protected. Once the offload is complete, the card gets unprotected and erased.

That way if anyone's ever holding a card with the write protect switch set, they know that there's original data on there.

Using this workflow we've never encountered any scenario where card contents have been scrambled; it appears that the write-protect tab is doubly important now.

So to summarize: you're saying use 10.4.8 and not 10.3.9, and you're saying to always write-protect the card before putting it in the Mac. Would you say that your degree of confidence is approaching or nearing 100% with that workflow?
 
That's the way I have done it with my HVX, and I was using a Powerbook G4 with 10.3.9 and I never had any P2 corruption or FCP scrambling of any kind and we did probably almost 100 P2 dumps.
 
I have had one small incident of the glitch on my 1.25 GHz non-Intel Mac powerbook. I was wondering if two things I do contribute to the problem: 1. Memory. I have 2 GB of non-apple memory. 2. I use a Lacie PC card to run my deck so the driver software for that card is installed and I wonder if it could interfere with other uses of the slot, such as offloading P2 cards.

Thanks for the tip about the erase tab. I use it but will do so with more discipline going forward.
 
Great info. So far we've had no issue using a G4 powerbook, but we'll start locking all cards before transfer, just to be SAFE.
FYI: we have no additional software on the laptop other than FCP Studio and Adobe CS2. Not sure if anti virus or other 3rd party software can contribute to P2 corruption.
 
Overlook said:
I use a Lacie PC card to run my deck so the driver software for that card is installed and I wonder if it could interfere with other uses of the slot, such as offloading P2 cards.
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I have the same card and associated driver in my G4 PB and haven't had a problem with it.
 
JimmyTheSaint said:
This was done using an 867 PowerBook G4 with 768MB of ram, FCP 5.0.4 and operating systems 10.3.9 AND 10.4.8.

After all of my problems with the P2 card and my Mac, this is what I've found:

I tried them both and found that 10.4.8 is far more stable with P2 media than 10.3.9.
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I hope this didn't come as a surprise to anyone. Hell, I can't remember how long ago 10.3.9 was in use by us...
 
Barry_Green said:
Interesting.

So to summarize: you're saying use 10.4.8 and not 10.3.9, and you're saying to always write-protect the card before putting it in the Mac. Would you say that your degree of confidence is approaching or nearing 100% with that workflow?
Click to expand...

Barry, 10.3.9 is so old it had a different code name. That was Jaguar. Starting with 10.4, it was called Tiger and the list of changes would choke this board. It's like 10.3.9 was XP and 10.4 was Vista. I know of no one... yep no one still using 10.3.9. Why would anyone stay with 10.3.9? 10.3.9 was long gone before Panasonic started shipping the HVX.

FWIW, I never use the write-protect tabs during shooting and have not had these issues. My degree of confidence isn't approaching 100%, it is 100%. Zero problems on countless shoots and terabytes of P2 files... over the last full year. I've used 10.4.3 (out when the HVX shipped) through the current OS 10.4.8.
 
I tried updating my powerbook to 10.4.6, but it crashed my mac. Had to revert to the original installed 10.3.9. P2 transfers worked fine in 10.3.9. Just recently updated to 10.4.8. So far so good. P2 transfers also worked fine with 10.4.1. Only glitch I got was the squares and pixels first frame on an import, but since it was just the first frame, it was not a problem at all.
 
But that means you did get the glitch. You just got lucky that it was on the first frame. Please keep us posted on whether it happens again.
 
SPZ said:
I tried updating my powerbook to 10.4.6, but it crashed my mac. Had to revert to the original installed 10.3.9. P2 transfers worked fine in 10.3.9. Just recently updated to 10.4.8. So far so good. P2 transfers also worked fine with 10.4.1. Only glitch I got was the squares and pixels first frame on an import, but since it was just the first frame, it was not a problem at all.
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I admire your patience... it's still a problem if it happens at all. Let us know if 10.4.8 works for you. I assume you have the most recent QT... 7.1.3? What version of FCP are you using?
 
I am considering this workflow and would be buying a Powerbook which one are you all using for this task?
 
denall said:
I am considering this workflow and would be buying a Powerbook which one are you all using for this task?
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I believe none all of us are using any particular one

For offloading, the main issue is whichever one has a Type II Card Bus slot, which means 15-inch and 17-inch PB G4s
 
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denall said:
Would you be willing to suggest a particular one?
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As I said, the main issue is whichever one has a Type II Card Bus slot, which means 15-inch and 17-inch PB G4s.

12-inch PBs do not, and neither do the iBooks.

This is used just for off loading, so if it has the Type II PC Card slot, which is most 15 and 17-inch titanium and aluminum PBs, then the issue is condition and price.
 
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