filmstox
Well-known member
I just finished my first day shooting with the P2 store, here's how it went...
The shoot was a full day of talking head interviews where I was running solo; handling lighting, camera and sound. We shot 4 interviews in 4 separate areas of the Hollywood Entertainment Museum over the course of a 5 hour day.
This is my second production on the HVX, the first involved a full crew including dedicated Downloader. In this scenario copying via laptop worked fine, but needing to transfer while shooting would render the laptop useless, just too much to do while still trying to shoot. Rush at EVS hooked me up with a P2 store and it saved the day.
The build quality of the unit is exceptional, it is compact and light but feels as rugged as I've come to expect from professional gear. I kept it on my magliner shelf within reach of the camera position as much as possible, I would not think wearing it on your belt as has been suggested in other threads would be a good idea.
The P2 store worked perfectly. We had 2 8 gig cards that I limited to 4 gigs for DVD backup compatibility. I would have preferred a third card but 2 worked fine. Shooting >10 minutes of 720@24PN would copy to the p2 Store (a one button process) in about 6 minutes with the verify data option enabled. I had plenty of time to reformat (a 2 button process) and could easily swap cards while the interviewer asked a question. I assigned the [User3] button to switch active cards so I could swap in a matter of seconds (stop recording, hit User3, start recording, eject spent card). This would not have been necessary if we would have allowed the cards to fill to capacity and automatically roll over.
We shot continuously through the day and the interviewer/producer never knew I'd made a card change. Usually about 30 minutes into the interview he would turn to me and ask if I needed to make a card change, and was surprised each time to find out I already had, twice, without missing any of the interview.
I would only recommend trying this approach with any of the Native modes, shooting any other format would require three cards to shoot continually. Using the battery that came with the camera, the P2 store still shows 50% battery level after being on for 5 hours, transfering 30 gigs of data, and subsequently dumping that data to my laptop twice.
The only trouble we ran into was that we filled the p2 store faster than we expected. The store seems to partition based on the type of card inserted (7 8 gig partitions in our case) which meant by only filling each card half full, we were leaving each partition half full as well. So we ended up filling up after only 30g of data were transfered.
This was only an issue because we were using 8 gig rental cards as my 4 gig cards have not yet arrived. Until larger capacity DVD's are available, I am a firm believer that the safest and smoothest workflow is 3 4Gig cards transfered to P2 store. Backed up to 2 hard drives, one for the client, and one kept by me for 60days. The client then can archive to the format of choice, either dvd or LTO/DLT. After the backup is complete and the footage is ingested into the edit system of choice, my loaner drive would get reformatted and used again.
So overall, my first impression of the P2 store is very possitive. The only negative I can think of is that as rugged as it is, I wouldn't see it being appropriate for transferring while on the move. Otherwise a great piece of kit and in my mind, a necessary addition to the HVX's workflow.
-filmstox
The shoot was a full day of talking head interviews where I was running solo; handling lighting, camera and sound. We shot 4 interviews in 4 separate areas of the Hollywood Entertainment Museum over the course of a 5 hour day.
This is my second production on the HVX, the first involved a full crew including dedicated Downloader. In this scenario copying via laptop worked fine, but needing to transfer while shooting would render the laptop useless, just too much to do while still trying to shoot. Rush at EVS hooked me up with a P2 store and it saved the day.
The build quality of the unit is exceptional, it is compact and light but feels as rugged as I've come to expect from professional gear. I kept it on my magliner shelf within reach of the camera position as much as possible, I would not think wearing it on your belt as has been suggested in other threads would be a good idea.
The P2 store worked perfectly. We had 2 8 gig cards that I limited to 4 gigs for DVD backup compatibility. I would have preferred a third card but 2 worked fine. Shooting >10 minutes of 720@24PN would copy to the p2 Store (a one button process) in about 6 minutes with the verify data option enabled. I had plenty of time to reformat (a 2 button process) and could easily swap cards while the interviewer asked a question. I assigned the [User3] button to switch active cards so I could swap in a matter of seconds (stop recording, hit User3, start recording, eject spent card). This would not have been necessary if we would have allowed the cards to fill to capacity and automatically roll over.
We shot continuously through the day and the interviewer/producer never knew I'd made a card change. Usually about 30 minutes into the interview he would turn to me and ask if I needed to make a card change, and was surprised each time to find out I already had, twice, without missing any of the interview.
I would only recommend trying this approach with any of the Native modes, shooting any other format would require three cards to shoot continually. Using the battery that came with the camera, the P2 store still shows 50% battery level after being on for 5 hours, transfering 30 gigs of data, and subsequently dumping that data to my laptop twice.
The only trouble we ran into was that we filled the p2 store faster than we expected. The store seems to partition based on the type of card inserted (7 8 gig partitions in our case) which meant by only filling each card half full, we were leaving each partition half full as well. So we ended up filling up after only 30g of data were transfered.
This was only an issue because we were using 8 gig rental cards as my 4 gig cards have not yet arrived. Until larger capacity DVD's are available, I am a firm believer that the safest and smoothest workflow is 3 4Gig cards transfered to P2 store. Backed up to 2 hard drives, one for the client, and one kept by me for 60days. The client then can archive to the format of choice, either dvd or LTO/DLT. After the backup is complete and the footage is ingested into the edit system of choice, my loaner drive would get reformatted and used again.
So overall, my first impression of the P2 store is very possitive. The only negative I can think of is that as rugged as it is, I wouldn't see it being appropriate for transferring while on the move. Otherwise a great piece of kit and in my mind, a necessary addition to the HVX's workflow.
-filmstox
