digital artifacts in p2 footage

[drdimento]

I'm listening to all this rattle on about the "inferiorness" of P2 and after going through over 100 boxes (50 or more tapes in a box) of miniDV tape I can tell you this . .

- zillions of dropped frames
- dozens of broken tapes
- boxes of tapes destroyed during rewind
- months of man hours wrapped up in duplicating tapes that are being shipped and have to have a back up in case of a resulting lost shipment

BUT with P2 . . WOW!

- off the P2 to a external HDD
- copy the HDD in the field
- zero "0" dropped frames
- quick easy to use
- external P2 drives

Want more tapes, get ready we'll have 1,000's for sale once we get our last 200 in service . . just stand by then all you who are knocking P2 can buy the tapes

As for us and our TV broadcast, weddings, commercials, infomercials, and recently movie production . . we're going P2 all the way. Tape is for fixing things broken not production.

 

[drdimento]

Here are a few screen grabs of some terrible artifacting we encountered on a recent shoot. Does this look similar to yours?

From the start, our work flow was impaired by a bunk P2 store unit. We ended up having to connect the camera directly to a new Apple laptop and dumping the data from our spent cards at various intervals throughout the day.

This is my first shoot using P2 cards, and though it seems pretty obvious that the files are corrupted somehow, I'm hoping the issue might be occurring during the transcoding process (re-wrapping) to Quicktime - I'm importing the clips with FCP 5.0.4 - File>Import>Panasonic P2.

Any advice/expertise would be greatly appreciated, and have a happy Thanksgiving!!!

WoW! That looks like what we saw with miniDV tape. Sure you weren't using tape and thought it was P2? )

 

[drdimento]

P2 & Mac's

I recently went to a P2 seminar in Pittsburgh and everyone using Mac's said the same thing . . here's the procedure:

- remove the card from the camera
- move the write protect tab to WRITE PROTECT
- copy/import the P2 using the proper drivers/procedure
- unselect the WRITE PROTECT
- delete files or format the card at the camera (not the mac)

They all said that if the WRITE PROTECT wasn't selected that the Mac writes some unusable files onto the card to prepare the card for copying, the former of which FCP doesn't recognize and corrupts the transfer. Moreover, the mac can't format and erase the card properly because Apple hasn't taken the time to work on it (as one guy put it, Apple wants everyone to use Sony's and HDV because Mac's handle smaller data files better and struggle with and have to down convert larger data files). His words not mine and he's using P2 and Mac.