How to transfer P2 footage to a portable hard drive on location without a laptop?

Assuming it is a 170, go to page 83 in the manual

Step by step instructions there. FW drive must be powered, and the cam won't power it.

Step 5 details how to format the drive using the cam.
 
i have a lacie 500gb firewire, offloading the p2card to a Harddrive only works with firewire 400.
Also Note: offloading 16gb p2 card is fuc%ing LONG, like 30-45mins long. SLOW AS ALL HELL!!

get a netbook! its the fastest way to offload.
 
It's not going to be fast. It's gonna take between 1 and 2 minutes per gigabyte.

If you want fast, you want a laptop copying to a SATA RAID. You can get up to 8 gigabytes per minute with a configuration like that.
 
2 minutes per gig is hugely out of proportion. I get two gigs per minute on my laptop.

And yes you can go straight from the camera to a drive, but it's not incredibly fast. It takes about one minute per gig, and if you turn on verification it takes two minutes per gig.
 
I don't really use that workflow, so I don't have specific recommendations, other than to say that you don't need a huge drive (you can only offload 15 cards maximum, so if you have a 16gb card, the maximum drive size you can take advantage of would be 240gb).

I've heard reports that the big western digital terabyte drives don't work, they bring up an error message that says "too many targets", but I don't know what specific models do that.
 
Barry_Green said:
If you want fast, you want a laptop copying to a SATA RAID. You can get up to 8 gigabytes per minute with a configuration like that.
Click to expand...

I Don't want to hack the thread but i just wondering how this works....i don't know nothing about this method...How it works ?
 
The speed of copying the cards is always going to be limited by whatever the slowest element in the chain is. Speed up that slowest element, and you'll speed up your transfer.

A single hard disk usually has a sustained write speed of about 30 megabytes per second, maybe 40. Firewire has a transfer speed maximum of 50 megabytes, USB has a maximum of 60 megabytes, and a P2 card has a transfer speed of between 80 and 150 megabytes per second. The PCMCIA interface is 150 megabytes per second, and SATA is 300 megabytes per second.

So when copying on a laptop, the slowest element is almost always the hard disk. Doesn't matter how fast the interface is; a SATA hard disk might be able to receive data at 300 megabytes per second, but if it can only sustain writing of 30 megabytes per second, then your whole transfer is going to happen at no faster than 30 megabytes per second.

If you were to put the fastest elements together -- an "E" series P2 card, interfacing through PCI-Express or PCMCIA to a RAID of SATA drives that can sustain 150 megabytes per second of transfer speed, then you would be able to offload at a rate of about 8 gigabytes per minute. But if any element in the chain is slower, it will slow down the whole process accordingly.
 
You have to have a firewire drive that is self-powered. There are a few battery-powered drives, Nexto makes enclosures that are battery-powered.

But you cannot use a bus-powered drive, as David said it simply won't work.
 
I can tell you this, do not fall for Panasonic's P2 Store - the little on-site P2-reader/hard-drive. The one where you have to say a bunch of magic words and dance on your head and wait for the green lights to turn orange while you hold down three separate buttons and paper-clip a hole in the side in order to make it copy the data so that your Mac can read it (only half of that conversion process is made up - I'll let you guess which half). If you talk to PAnasonic, they'll tell you that everyone loves them - i have yet to meet one person who didn't send it back very upset about their lost footage that they could have sworn successfully transferred.

We repurposed a Mac that cost $300 off of craigslist and has the PCMIA slot in the side of the machine and we use the bus-powered LaCie "Rugged" drive to store the data, sometimes with a suplicate on the machine's on-board hard drive. It's a great investment as an exclusive "Card-dumping" machine.
 
You can offload straight to the camera, but you will tie up the camera whenever you offload. also the hard drive can not be bus powered, it must be wall powered.. the other issue with that method is, if say you have a 64 gig p2 card and you record only 3 mins, for example, you will still "eat up" a 64 gig partition, no matter how much you record. this particularly annoys me, plus the fact that your drive becomes a "fat 32" drive. (we won't get into that). Do yourself a favor and "lug" your laptop or just get some extra cards.
 
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