How to dump P2 to HDD.

Jimmy Moss

Jimmy Moss

Well-known member
I did a search and did not turn up what I was looking for.

What the step by step procedure for dumping P2 to and Firewire Hdd on the go.

I know the drive has to be powered, must be firewire, and I have to put it in PC.Dub mode. Other than that.......

Does the drive have to be formatted NTFS, FAT 32? or can you do the format from the cam. I know it creates a partition for every card downloaded and you run out of space once you use up the alphabet.

What buttons do you hit when you get into the menu?

Thanks a bunch.
 
There is a setting that is in "other functions" in the menu that gives you three option for digital export: USB Device, Firewire Device, and Firewire Host. You want to be in Firewire host mode. connect the drive to the cam and put the cam in PC mode and the cam should recognize the drive. The drive has to be empty and formatted in order for this to work, and you get up to 14 partitions/ card downloads per formatted drive. I believe that you can use the camera to format the drive but I have never done it myself.
 
Right on the money -- the details are in the manual in the section labeled "Copyring from P2 cards to the hard disk drive (1394 host mode)" on or around page 85.
 
Right on the money -- the details are in the manual in the section labeled "Copyring from P2 cards to the hard disk drive (1394 host mode)" on or around page 85.
Click to expand...
Wow you have mede great serch work here, but I personally think that it would be great to have that info in the mind and if you quoted that that will help OP greately - IMO
 
Ok, now I got the cards on the HDD. Do I use P2CMS to offload just like a card from the cam, or do I just drag and drop since its already on an HDD.

The camera copies an exact copy of the P2 card to the HDD in host mode. Am I right?
 
HostV said:
Wow you have mede great serch work here, but I personally think that it would be great to have that info in the mind and if you quoted that that will help OP greately - IMO
Click to expand...
Filmbuff already explained the procedure and I just wanted to add where it was covered in detail in the manual. I'm not going to type out everything that any HVX owner (or those who download the PDF manual) can look up for themselves...
 
Jimmy Moss said:
Ok, now I got the cards on the HDD. Do I use P2CMS to offload just like a card from the cam, or do I just drag and drop since its already on an HDD.

The camera copies an exact copy of the P2 card to the HDD in host mode. Am I right?
Click to expand...
No need to offload a second time with P2CMS, just specify the partitions on the hard drive as your source when importing into your NLE. And yes, it's an exact copy of what was on the cards at the time.
 
I used "ingest" when taking files from the P2 cards onto my laptop (i know that my way of doing it was not suggested but I can't go back now) and now I'm having trouble getting FCP to see the files during Log and Transfer. Do you guys have any suggestions on how to go from using P2CMS to getting the files into FCP??
 
Ingest turns every clip into its own CONTENTS folder. You'd have to go into the database directory and then into each clip's contents folder, IINM.

If you use P2CMS's EXPORT feature instead of INGEST, it creates a copy of the card rather than putting each clip in its own CONTENTS folder.
 
I think I figured it out! I did a test run with about 30 clips (I have about 415 in all, so hope the test works out). But I re-imported the files from my HDD back into P2CMS and then "exported" them into a specific directory. It actually then re-organized them into the structure that is similar to the P2 card. Now its one folder for the Log and Transfer to see and it saw it. I've found though, that Log and Transfer sometimes is silly and needs to be reopened numerous times for it to see the files. Thanks for your help Barry.
 
If you've already got those files ingested, you can export them as "hard links" for the purposes of importing them to FCP. When you export a "hard link" it takes no time and no hard disk space, so that should be the easiest/quickest way to go.

Well, of course, the quickest way to go would be to ditch "log & transfer" entirely and use one of the MXF import programs (raylight, mx4qt, etc) because that way you wouldn't even be importing/converting at all.
 
Barry, I just tried testing the workflow with a MacBook Pro 2.4 ghz.

I transfered 1.72 GB of data from the P2 card, connected to the MacBook Pro through the Duel Adapter, directly to a LaCie Big Disk 1TB Triple Interface.

I tested transfering times, using finder's drag and drop were:

USB 2: 70 sec.
FW 400: 56 sec.
FW 800: 56 sec.

Since the macBook as 160 GB hard drive with 100 GB free, which could be the right workflow when having to edit the material acquired on the external hard drive?

Example: if for a project you have 400/500 GB of video, you should import on the MacBook Pro only the needed video and do a log and transfer to Quicktime? Or it's better to use Raylight or other programs?

P.S.: noticed that FW 400 and 800 have the same transfer time...what about it?
 
I would never use log and transfer to quicktime, but many people do and seem content with the workflow. I think it's an unnecessary expenditure of time, and it results in throwing away the metadata and results in a platform-proprietary file that can't be used on the other platforms (Windows, etc). So I would avoid log and transfer and instead use Raylight, or HD Log, or MXF4QT, or some other solution that allows you to skip that log & transfer step.

As for transfer speed, it's entirely likely that the drive you're using isn't capable of any faster than 50 megabytes per second -- or, somehow you've daisy-chained a FW400 device onto a FW800 bus. But I'd suspect that the drive just isn't capable of faster-than-FW400 speeds.
 
Not sure I know what you mean by "do they exclude P2CMS"... any of them will work with or without P2CMS.

As for external hard drives, if you want to increase your transfer speeds you want the fastest hard drives you can get, probably something like a G-RAID.
 
Barry, sorry for my bad explanation.
I meant, should P2CMS be used anyway when archiving the P2 card on external hard drive, even if you want to use any of those software to handle MXF?
Can they do the archving job too ?

Let me show you an example.
This is a typical day of work I would have:
shooting 4/5 hours with two 32 GB P2 card and having to archive fast to format the P2 card for the next day.

No need need to start editing soon, but a good archiving and organizing of clips for the end of shooting at home.

What about it?
 
Yes, I'd use P2CMS or HD Log for that situation. P2CMS can export the card contents and verify that the copy was completed successfully. P2CMS doesn't change the nature of the files, so it's perfectly appropriate for using when you plan on editing the native MXF files.
 
Thanks Barry.
I think HD log could work best since it also allow to open MXF files directly.
So only one program to use.
 
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