Very disappointed with P2 right now

DBoz699

DBoz699

Veteran
Today I was at the beach on a music video shoot. I shoot on the P2 card at 720pN and fill up the P2 card.

I go back to the car, fire up the laptop, wait until it finishes loading then pop in the P2 card. I open up P2 Viewer to view the P2 files..and the damn computer starts crashing on me EVERYTIME I play a file.

So then after restarting a few times, I skip the P2 viewer and just copy the CONTENTS and LASTCLIP text file to the hard drive in a special folder. I'm working on an 8 GB P2 card...it took 15 MINUTES to go..and halfway through the copying, it would say like 2 minutes left...and like 5 minutes would pass and the progress bar never moves. I don't know why this happened. It never happened before to me. For some reason when ever I want to copy the P2 files off the card...the whole damn computer freezes up. So after restarting the computer because it froze from copying...I eventually got the rest of the files in the folder.

So now...I open up P2 Viewer and create a virtual P2 card so it plays back the stuff on the computer...and when I do the computer yet again freezes up. Once I get a file to play, the framerate is the same but the sound is like a million times higher in pitch and faster. I dont know why it does that. Then I put the card back into the HVX to format it so it deletes everything...I see like 3 X's on my footage. Now when I go back to play those files in P2 Viewer...they dont play at all...I'm ready to throw out everything and quit. This happened today every single freakin time I went to offload stuff to the laptop.

Today Murphy's Law kicked my ass with the P2 problem and computer....Very rough day today.


Could someone help me out with the problem? The laptop has an Intel Pentium Centrino processor at 1.04GHz...and 632MB of RAM...60GB hard drive and Service Pack 2.

P2 Viewer is very unstable.
 
The only way to really test this and see if the issues exist on another laptop.

If they do, it is likely card related.

If they don't, it is laptop related.
 
I checked on another laptop today when I got home...same problem and the laptop is newer and faster..

The antivirus software is Norton..and I dont think it writes to the cards.

and no..the card isnt in protect mode.


The software P2 Simple Checker says there isn't any problems and the firmware is up to date.
 
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No it isn't -- it is for the 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB cards. It hasn't been updated for the 16GB cards yet. I have run it on my 8GB cards.
 
Yeah but if it does scan it..how do I turn it off? and why would it slow down the transfer rate from 5 minutes to 15?
 
blckhawk542 said:
Yeah but if it does scan it..how do I turn it off? and why would it slow down the transfer rate from 5 minutes to 15?
Click to expand...

There should be a small icon for Norton in your system tray. Double-click that icon and select the options to disable (temporarily or permanantly) the Norton programs. FWIW, I always leave Norton in a "dissabled" state.

good luck
JohnG
 
Just give me your stuff :)


seriously.... in a big pinch, like a "thats it, were going home" kind of catastrophic failure, you can always bump your 720p down to DV in camera, including Variable frame rate stuff. dont for get that. it saved my ass a couple times when our laptop freaked, and we had noway of fooflading P2 cards. the final target was Webcast so the drop in res didnt matter for that days footage. just a option. plus the HVX's SD performance is CRAZY good.
 
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I was thinking that...but I wanted a HD master with the 4:2:2 color space. I eventually got the footage to my external hard drive after copying each individual folder...the AUDIO..CLIP..VIDEO..MEMO..etc.. to a folder I made called CONTENTS.

It was a pain in the ass...I hope I wont have to live through this pain again on Wednesday when we shoot more stuff.


I dont know what else the problem can be...must be some kind of card error because it happened on another laptop that doesn't even have P2 Viewer installed on it.
 
Well once I copied the files..I put back into the HVX and formatted. Thats how I've been doing it all day.

Shoot..offload (without throwing laptop into the ocean)...format..continue. ..maybe thats my error? not supposed to format?
 
try formatting in the computer. do a test right now. right clik the drive name, and select format. also uninstall P2 viewer, and reinstall it.
 
Ok, I did both..formatted the P2 card first..then uninstalled P2 Viewer then reinstalled.

I hooked up my external drive to the laptop and copied one of the CONTENTS folder back to the P2 card. I disconnect it and go to copy the folder from the P2 card to the hard drive....same problem..

I'm starting to think its the card itself. I tried it on another laptop and it froze up too.
 
maybe somebody already said this (I did not read the entire thread carefully) . . . do you have access to another P2 card you can compare with?
 
Blckhawk,

If I'm not mistaken, a friend of mine had a similar problem with the P2 cards, and if I remember correctly he put the card in read-only state before he dumped them and that solved his problem. when he had them read/write his dumps would have artifacts, etc...

Give it a try.

Also are you PC or Mac. (my friend was PC)

I have an FS-100 and no problems so far. :)

Good luck.

Luis
 
dregenthal said:
maybe somebody already said this (I did not read the entire thread carefully) . . . do you have access to another P2 card you can compare with?
Click to expand...

No I don't unfortunately..


I'm on PC.

How do you put in read only state?

Oh..and I think I temporarily solved my problem. It seems that when I uninstall P2 Viewer from the computer...the card copies fine with no problem. If I go to do it again though...thats when the problem starts up again..same thing on another laptop.
 
the cards I believe have a little tab that if you move to one side is read/write and to the other is read only.
 
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