Edalgo_Alvarez
Well-known member
Hey guys I know that with P2 cards you can unload to a laptop during production but Im not sure if you'll have to buy a P2 ready laptop or if the P2 cards just fit into an existing slot.
-Edalgo
-Edalgo
Are laptops already P2 ready?
- Thread starter Edalgo_Alvarez
- Start date
Barry_Green
Moderator
Any laptop with a PCMCIA/Cardbus slot will work. You plug the card in and it mounts as an "external hard disk." From there you can copy the files off, or play them through the free P2 Viewer software, organize 'em, annotate 'em, etc.
So no, no new hardware necessary.
So no, no new hardware necessary.
PanasonicNZ
Well-known member
ANY current model laptop will take your P2 card and run with it. That's the beauty of the format, anyone with a laptop already has a P2 player/backup solution, no need for bulky and expensive devices.
Barry_Green
Moderator
Xray, that's a silly statement. Modern laptops are including 60gb hard disks, which would hold an hour of footage at 1080 res, and two and a half hours of source footage in 720/24p. Some laptops have 1920x1200 screens. A laptop could be a quite viable editing solution.
And, Edalgo didn't ask about editing anyway, he was asking about using it to offload footage. A laptop can be used to offload footage either onto its own internal hard drive, or to any external drive -- so you could easily attach a 300gb external drive and offload hours and hours of footage onto a laptop.
And, Edalgo didn't ask about editing anyway, he was asking about using it to offload footage. A laptop can be used to offload footage either onto its own internal hard drive, or to any external drive -- so you could easily attach a 300gb external drive and offload hours and hours of footage onto a laptop.
hopalongmedia
Member
The Apple guy at the Panasonic booth at NAB told me that Macs and P2 aren't working together yet. He was hopeful that it wouldn't be long. I don't know what that means exactly.
When I asked him if I could edit DVCPROHD on my 1.6 ghz Laptop he shrugged and smiled. I then asked him if there was a new powerbook model pending. He said "always."
When I asked him if I could edit DVCPROHD on my 1.6 ghz Laptop he shrugged and smiled. I then asked him if there was a new powerbook model pending. He said "always."
Zack Birlew
Veteran
Yeah, a new model's always pending, but it sure as poop ain't gonna be a G5 mobile!:thumbdown
Anyway, back on topic. I wouldn't say that a laptop can hold all that much data as Barry has said. A 60gb hard drive can be shrunken to a 40gb one just with the installation of the O/S, editing software, and updates alone. The best solution as Barry has already stated, will be external HDD's. Unfortuantely, to my knowledge there are no 3.5" USB/Firewire drives that are fully portable (you still need to plug them into the wall). Currently the external notebook drives look to be the best solution as they are powered solely by the USB 2.0 or Firewire connection, which is fine now because you've got sizes from 20gb-120gb of varying speeds and caches.
But, if you're in a situated location with electricity, then you sure as heck can store as much as you want/can afford with all the HDD's you want going even into RAID-ed Terabyte ranges, now THAT'S a lot of video!:thumbsup:
Anyway, back on topic. I wouldn't say that a laptop can hold all that much data as Barry has said. A 60gb hard drive can be shrunken to a 40gb one just with the installation of the O/S, editing software, and updates alone. The best solution as Barry has already stated, will be external HDD's. Unfortuantely, to my knowledge there are no 3.5" USB/Firewire drives that are fully portable (you still need to plug them into the wall). Currently the external notebook drives look to be the best solution as they are powered solely by the USB 2.0 or Firewire connection, which is fine now because you've got sizes from 20gb-120gb of varying speeds and caches.
But, if you're in a situated location with electricity, then you sure as heck can store as much as you want/can afford with all the HDD's you want going even into RAID-ed Terabyte ranges, now THAT'S a lot of video!:thumbsup:
Edalgo_Alvarez
Well-known member
Thanks guys, I decided that instead of complaining about how little the P2 cards can store I'm just gonna back up my bro's laptop and clear everything off it so I can just unload all my footage onto it as I shoot my movie. Sure a few minutes of footage is inconvenient but how much time do you need for each shot anyways? Just shoot until the card is full, put it into the laptop, roll up a... cigar 
, and then when the crew is all freshened up we go at it some more. Hell maybe I could even rent 2 P2 cards and then we'd cut down a little on the downtime.
-Edalgo
, and then when the crew is all freshened up we go at it some more. Hell maybe I could even rent 2 P2 cards and then we'd cut down a little on the downtime.-Edalgo
filmstox
Well-known member
When we shot with the SPX800 last month, the mac support wasn't in place for P2, the system would only recognize the cards if it was being accessed through the External USB P2 reader and even then, it would only show you the file structure but wouldn't allow for reading or writing files. FCP5 is supposed to handle the P2 file structure but I don't think they have written the drivers to get Mac's to recognize the cards directly through cardbus. I can't imagine it will be long before the drivers are ready though.
We did a live capture via firewire out of the camera to my 17" G4 Powerbook and we backed up all of the P2 cards using a PC laptop and external Firewire drive (and an I-Pod just for fun) and it worked perfectly. There is even a viewer available from Panasonic that lets you view the clips and edit the meta-data if you aren't using the laptop as an editor. It's a free download from Panasonic but you have to provide te serial number of the P2 camera you are using.
If anyone is in the LA area using Final Cut 5, I'd be interested in bringing my footage by and seeing if we can get it to open.
-David C. Smith
LA / OC D.P.
We did a live capture via firewire out of the camera to my 17" G4 Powerbook and we backed up all of the P2 cards using a PC laptop and external Firewire drive (and an I-Pod just for fun) and it worked perfectly. There is even a viewer available from Panasonic that lets you view the clips and edit the meta-data if you aren't using the laptop as an editor. It's a free download from Panasonic but you have to provide te serial number of the P2 camera you are using.
If anyone is in the LA area using Final Cut 5, I'd be interested in bringing my footage by and seeing if we can get it to open.
-David C. Smith
LA / OC D.P.
..lets not forget that you dont need a laptop to offload to.. you can use any off the shelf usb 2.0 external drive and the HVX will write directly to the usb2.0 drive. so why buy, borrow , or bring a laptop just to hang usb2.0 drives off it?? you can do that right off the camera. the nice thing about having a laptop is the use of a large screen p2 viewer or NLE and iother stuff you can use a laptop for right there on the set or location. but just for storage concerns.. simply toting a little usb2.0 drive would be alot easier and more cost effective.
xray
Well-known member
Barry_Green said:
I wish you luck Barry, during the editing on a laptop with a G4 or PetiumM processor and 40 gig of space and raw 1080 res material. You want to bring a fuelgenerator to fire it up? No, in the field the system will not work. But sure, you can drop the P2 data on a laptop. Or on an portable drive, the thing is, you need to do so, the P2 card capacity is low.
Barry_Green
Moderator
Xray, I use a laptop in the field on every shoot I do. I always have a laptop there running DV Rack (now with HDV Rack for when I get the JVC). They have this really cool invention called an "AC Power Supply" which lets you power it for hours and hours and hours and hours. And you don't even need AC, you can plug it into an inverter and power it out of the van or car. Or totally unplug and run for a couple of hours on its internal battery. What, exactly, is the problem?
I don't mean to be too sarcastic, but I really don't understand why you're so consistently negative towards the HVX/P2 solution. It may not work for your desired shooting circumstances, but to say it doesn't work at all is just not accurate.
I've used the laptop cabled via the firewire to the camera standing in the middle of the desert outside a broken-down bus while we shot a scene for an upcoming movie. I've used it on a mobile cart inside hotel rooms, offices, conference rooms... I have a battery in the laptop that powers it for hours, I have a booster pac that can fit on the cart and power it for probably 12 hours, and we're usually never far from an AC outlet anyway. I've got about 400' of cheapo orange extension cords from the hardware store -- probably cost $10 total, I don't remember -- which means I can shoot almost any exterior you could imagine, still powered from AC.
If you want to shoot a 30-minute steadicam shot in the middle of the Sahara desert, then maybe it's not the best choice (although, of course, it *could* be done). But for ANY production with any sort of a budget, it is absolutely a practical and reasonable choice. I know because I've done it a hundred times.
A reasonably powerful laptop is a plenty-powerful-enough workstation to handle moderate editing. Certainly more than enough for what needs to get done in the field. With a 17" screen an an external hard disk (I've got a 60gb that draws its power from the laptop, it's so tiny it could be velcro'd to the laptop and you'd never even notice) you could easily handle an hour's footage - per drive. I've got 300-gb drives that run off AC (again, no problem, I just plug into the Booster Pac or inverter when it's mounted on the cart). And if you need to go totally mobile, you use the internal laptop drive, which gives you easily a half-hour or more of storage space.
And yes, P2 card capacity doesn't allow for an hour-long shoot. So? I mean, really -- so? With two cards you get 40 minutes of 720/24p or 16 minutes of 1080. If you've shot television commercials, you know that 16 minutes is probably more than enough to shoot an entire day's footage. It's a 30:1 ratio! If you've shot dramatic narratives, you know that 16 minutes is enough for almost any dramatic narrative shoot to get you to at least the lunch break; offload during lunch, then start up again. Only on the cheapest, crappiest, no-budget, director-doesn't-know-what-he's-doing, roll-the-camera-at-all-times shoots have I exceeded an hour's worth of footage during an entire day. And on those, usually at least half the footage is complete garbage, and could (and should) be deleted in the field, which would extend your P2 runtime again.
For longform events like weddings -- no, P2 isn't yet the right format (although it will be when capacity increases). So big deal -- get the FireStore. Get three hours of footage at a time. Or more -- we don't even know what the capacity will be.
I mean, seriously -- if we were to take your comment seriously, we could also say "oh, look at your roll of film, you can't do any work with that because the capacity is so low, you only get 11 minutes per roll!" Yet people manage to shoot $200 million movies on those 11-minute rolls of film. A single P2 card gives you more capacity, and it's reusable, whereas those rolls of film cost $500 to buy, and $200 to process, and $200 to transfer to video, and they're not reusable.
The system works as-is, and it's only going to get better and better. Capacities will increase, prices will come down, computers will get faster, batteries will last longer.
I don't mean to be too sarcastic, but I really don't understand why you're so consistently negative towards the HVX/P2 solution. It may not work for your desired shooting circumstances, but to say it doesn't work at all is just not accurate.
I've used the laptop cabled via the firewire to the camera standing in the middle of the desert outside a broken-down bus while we shot a scene for an upcoming movie. I've used it on a mobile cart inside hotel rooms, offices, conference rooms... I have a battery in the laptop that powers it for hours, I have a booster pac that can fit on the cart and power it for probably 12 hours, and we're usually never far from an AC outlet anyway. I've got about 400' of cheapo orange extension cords from the hardware store -- probably cost $10 total, I don't remember -- which means I can shoot almost any exterior you could imagine, still powered from AC.
If you want to shoot a 30-minute steadicam shot in the middle of the Sahara desert, then maybe it's not the best choice (although, of course, it *could* be done). But for ANY production with any sort of a budget, it is absolutely a practical and reasonable choice. I know because I've done it a hundred times.
A reasonably powerful laptop is a plenty-powerful-enough workstation to handle moderate editing. Certainly more than enough for what needs to get done in the field. With a 17" screen an an external hard disk (I've got a 60gb that draws its power from the laptop, it's so tiny it could be velcro'd to the laptop and you'd never even notice) you could easily handle an hour's footage - per drive. I've got 300-gb drives that run off AC (again, no problem, I just plug into the Booster Pac or inverter when it's mounted on the cart). And if you need to go totally mobile, you use the internal laptop drive, which gives you easily a half-hour or more of storage space.
And yes, P2 card capacity doesn't allow for an hour-long shoot. So? I mean, really -- so? With two cards you get 40 minutes of 720/24p or 16 minutes of 1080. If you've shot television commercials, you know that 16 minutes is probably more than enough to shoot an entire day's footage. It's a 30:1 ratio! If you've shot dramatic narratives, you know that 16 minutes is enough for almost any dramatic narrative shoot to get you to at least the lunch break; offload during lunch, then start up again. Only on the cheapest, crappiest, no-budget, director-doesn't-know-what-he's-doing, roll-the-camera-at-all-times shoots have I exceeded an hour's worth of footage during an entire day. And on those, usually at least half the footage is complete garbage, and could (and should) be deleted in the field, which would extend your P2 runtime again.
For longform events like weddings -- no, P2 isn't yet the right format (although it will be when capacity increases). So big deal -- get the FireStore. Get three hours of footage at a time. Or more -- we don't even know what the capacity will be.
I mean, seriously -- if we were to take your
comment seriously, we could also say "oh, look at your roll of film, you can't do any work with that because the capacity is so low, you only get 11 minutes per roll!" Yet people manage to shoot $200 million movies on those 11-minute rolls of film. A single P2 card gives you more capacity, and it's reusable, whereas those rolls of film cost $500 to buy, and $200 to process, and $200 to transfer to video, and they're not reusable.The system works as-is, and it's only going to get better and better. Capacities will increase, prices will come down, computers will get faster, batteries will last longer.
stephenvv
Well-known member
Barry 1, Xray 0 :laugh:
These drives: http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/en/menuitem.72e3cabd3a6a384ccf1824a0eac4f0a0/
will be perfect for laptop field use. Put in a quality enclosure, run off battery, 7200 RPM, 100 GB.
I've used the 60 GB versions as internals in both my notebooks and I can do not only NLE but After Effects, 3D (since I have a FireGL T2 notebook chip), Multitrack ASIO recording in my Thinkpad.
With dual-core notebooks shipping in 2006 (and the HVX will probalby not be widely available until then), notebooks will be a perfect field platform for offloading, editing and even posting.
These drives: http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/en/menuitem.72e3cabd3a6a384ccf1824a0eac4f0a0/
will be perfect for laptop field use. Put in a quality enclosure, run off battery, 7200 RPM, 100 GB.
I've used the 60 GB versions as internals in both my notebooks and I can do not only NLE but After Effects, 3D (since I have a FireGL T2 notebook chip), Multitrack ASIO recording in my Thinkpad.
With dual-core notebooks shipping in 2006 (and the HVX will probalby not be widely available until then), notebooks will be a perfect field platform for offloading, editing and even posting.
Prairieboy
Veteran
Are there external PCMCIA readers out there? Either to firewire or USB2? My current laptop is an ibook, and the one big drawback is no slot reader(dang it)
Barry_Green
Moderator
There are many internal and external PCMCIA adapters on the market already. Many are under $100.
Iamloser,
I didn't realize any usb 2.0 drive will hook up directly to HVX. Really?!
It has the drivers to recognize the drive and will automatically somehow write to a file on the drive? I'm stumped. What would the file name be? What directory. Is each take a different file?
I always thought a drive was possible, but only through a laptop... I'm sure you're right, but it takes a bunch of firmware to write to the drive directly...
-Jerry
I didn't realize any usb 2.0 drive will hook up directly to HVX. Really?!
It has the drivers to recognize the drive and will automatically somehow write to a file on the drive? I'm stumped. What would the file name be? What directory. Is each take a different file?
I always thought a drive was possible, but only through a laptop... I'm sure you're right, but it takes a bunch of firmware to write to the drive directly...
-Jerry