P2 card with Mac Book Pros?

S

sethro

Member
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I am going to be shooting a 30 second short and I have the oppurtunity to use the HVX with 16gig p2 card. The only problem is I'm not sure if I will be able to upload the footage onto FCP because I have a mac book pro (no PCIMCA port). I would also be using a Fantom 500GB external drive to temporarily store the footage, but this drive does NOT have firewire, only USB 2.0. So ultimately I am trying to find out if it is possible to use the HVX under these circumstances:

Mac Book Pro w/ FCP 6
external drive w/out firewire

If it is possible...what's the procedure?

Any help would be appreciated, Thanks.

:kali:
 
You will need to purchase an pcmcia to Expresscard/34 adapter so you can import your footage to the MBP (about $60.00). The drive you mentioned will work but will not give you enough bandwidth to get smooth playback after rendering. If this drive had a FW800 port on it you would be better off. Yet still, there are better options than FW800, but it works, cause I have done the same thing with a FW800 drive and my MBP when not at home where I could have used my Quad G5.
 
Short answer: yes, it will work.

longer answer:
A USB drive is less than perfect for editing, but you said temporary so you may not be using it for the actual editing (USB interface is just too slow). You will be able to connect the hard drive to the laptop via USB, and connect the camera directly to the laptop via firewire (4-pin to 6-pin). It's not ideal, but it will certainly work fine for ingesting.
 
Sethro,

I believe that only the Duel brand will work with the P2 card. (see David S url above). However, if you can't get one quickly, the HVX200 will connect directly to the MBP via firewire...see the manual.

USB is not a good choice to connect the HVX to MBP. USB works with Windows PCs for that.

Sounds like your MBP to external disk is via USB if that is the only interface the drive has.
 
ok...

ok...

alright so lets say I decide to go ahead and connect the external to the laptop via USB, then hook the HVX up to the laptop via firewire 800, so i don't need the expresscard. Is there anything I will need to do to format or prepare FCP to upload the footage? I am running FCP 6 on a mac book pro 10.4.10, 2.33 GHz, 2-core, on 2GB memory. The Fantom drive is 7200 RPM (500GB) so I think it should be able to handle a good load, but again, it is ONLY USB 2.0, no firewire.

On a separate note, My other option is simply shoot this with a GL-1, obviously it wouldn't be as good quality, however this short will mostly be viewed on Youtube. I want it to look as good as possible, but does anyone know what the conversion from HD to youtube does to the image? and if its even doable/ worth it?

Thanks for the continued help guys/(gals?), I appreciate it...
 
sethro said:
alright so lets say I decide to go ahead and connect the external to the laptop via USB, then hook the HVX up to the laptop via firewire 800, so i don't need the expresscard. Is there anything I will need to do to format or prepare FCP to upload the footage? I am running FCP 6 on a mac book pro 10.4.10, 2.33 GHz, 2-core, on 2GB memory. The Fantom drive is 7200 RPM (500GB) so I think it should be able to handle a good load, but again, it is ONLY USB 2.0, no firewire.
Click to expand...


You should be good like this with out the Expresscard/34 adapter and connect the HVX200 via the firewire port to the MBP to do your injesting. You can simply do a batch/capture from FCP 6.0. It takes a little more effort than pulling the clips off directly from the P2 card via the P2 import but it still gets the job done nicely.

As far as YouTube's conversion method and quality settings for their clips, somone here might have more information than I do but I think they convert to flash but as to the quality settings, that is something I do not know. I normally convert my flash videos to 800 Kbps for good clear quality for streaming on the NET but I think YouTube converts to a lower setting because comparing mine to any of theirs, well its a big difference...

I hope this helps...
 
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you tube has an automatic compression scheme, that recompresses whatever you post to it, so no mattter what it will look like crap. Some better than others, but all still crap. Vimeo provides the same service and has an excellent compression scheme. But both of these sites use turn key compress and post set ups with no end user input controls.

you could also spend $100 on a year worth of hosting with a dotcom through godaddy and host it yourself at what ever compression you desire.

as far as the card goes. I would definitely recommend the duel-adapter. You can offload your cards at a rate of about 2GB perminute to the laptops internal drive and then dump them to your usb drive later.

Just a quick speed note. FW400 400mbps, USB 2 480mbps, FW800 800mbps
obviously faster is always better - but USB and a MAC are not always the best combo.

Plus portable USB drives, specifically if they are running of a power bus a s a device rather than standalone, will have major issues with large writes. These occurance of these changes but once you hit the 2.5GB+ transfer size you start to see an increase in transfer failures.
 
One suggestion...before dumping your footage onto the USB drive, make sure it's formatted as a NFS drive, not a FAT32 or else you will have a 4gig file limitation.
 
Bob Fagan said:
One suggestion...before dumping your footage onto the USB drive, make sure it's formatted as a NFS drive, not a FAT32 or else you will have a 4gig file limitation.
Click to expand...
That's not a problem if the material came from FAT32-formatted P2 cards -- there won't be any files larger than 4GB.

However, NFS is more robust and efficient, so I would use it anyway unless you need to access the files from a PC as well.
 
Okay I was burned recently by what I think was a FAT32 problem. I copied some P2 cards over to a cheap FAT32 volume (not knowing it was FAT32) and found I couldn't read any of the copied volumes in FCP. Had to use P2 L O G Pro to recover them. May have been that one particular hard drive, but since then I've always reformatted a new drive so don't have any more experience in that area.

While P2 cards are FAT32, when copied to a FAT32 hard drive will the spanning information for files over 4 GIG hold okay? Not sure how that exactly works.
 
Yes, the information needed for spanned clips will be intact, all of it is contained in the XML files in the CLIP folder underneath the CONTENTS folder.

The XML files contain TOP, PREVIOUS and NEXT information that indicate the first (TOP) and next/previous clip for spanned recordings.

Whatever problem you had has nothing to do with the FAT32 file system.
 
Makes sense, I just immediately blamed the DOS formatting as the problem since it was the only thing that seemed different and being a lowest common denominator format, I figured that must be it.

So you've moved P2 cards to FAT32 hard disks on OSX and you've experience no problems bringing them into FCP?
 
No, I don't even use a Mac.

All I'm saying is that since the P2 contents originate on a FAT32 volume, none of the files will be too large to fit on a FAT32-formatted hard drive, and that spanning isn't affected either because spanning is managed through the XML files that accompany the MXF files.
 
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