A little help with offload

S

steffenmeister

Member
Just did a big boo boo. I was offloading content from card in camera to computer. The hard drive didn't have adequate space and stopped halfway through the process. When I realized what happened, I made more space on the drive and went back to repeat the process. Oops! There was nothing on the card anymore! Just the message "Format Err!" and blank scene files!!

I think I just lost a day's shooting (afternoon, but still...) with actors:(:(! 3 questions:

  1. Is there any way to recover the footage on the P2??
  2. What's the best way to prevent this in the future, aside from checking the hard drive space availability prior to offload? Best practices for securing footage and all.
  3. Is there a way to copy footage to a hard drive without losing it from the card at the same time?
This experience is indicating to me that P2 offloading is a dangerous process tantamount to performing heart surgery -- one slip of the scalpel and your patient (footage) is done for. There's no going back and trying again if there was a glitch in the process. Is this correct or am I missing something?
 
how are you downloading your footage from the card? are you using a Mac or a PC?

Download P2CMS its a free download from panasonic and can verify your data after copying as well as performing backups of your clips.

I'm going to guess you are using a PC and where dragging the footage to the new folder and where cutting/pasting instead of copying? I just can't see the reason why your footage disappeared from your P2 card.

Dick's suggestion is something that should always be followed: always write protect your cards the moment the leave the camera.
 
Thanks for the replies so far.

Yes, I do believe I've been dragging the "contents" folder from the P2 card to the new location on the hard drive with a 'left click' (PC by the way, not Mac) instead of copying them to the new location with a right click and drag and selecting "copy here". (I've been plugging the camera directly into the computer via USB 2.0 cable.)

Any other suggestions out there particularly regarding recovering the footage off the P2 card?? Is it a total loss? I also had about half the footage on the hard drive, by the way, before it quit which I deleted thinking I could start over with the offload. Recoverable??
 
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Thanks for the posts. They helped a lot. Great news. The footage was indeed still on the P2 card. It just didn't show up on the scene files for some reason. After reading these posts and talking to some folks (esp. the last post here. Thanks Daniel.) I decided to plug the camera back in and try offloading again anyway....And it worked!!!!!! The footage was all there and intact! Woo hoo!
 
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