P2 Card Freezes up Powerbook G4 1.5 GHZ & 1.5 Ram - FCP 6

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dcfilms

Member
I'm having a horrible time trying to capture P2 card footage. I have searched this only to find an old unfinished thread.

I was on set last week with an HVX. We used a DELL with a p2 slot - copied "contents & last clip text" to a external drive - brought the drive to our mac - opened with FCP 6 - all was good.

I just bought a Powerbook g4 17 inch so that we could playback the footage on set and start to organize our bins. However I just got it tonight - went out and bought 1 gig of ram to go along with the 512 that was in there already. (I'm pretty sure they are different brands but are both apple certified - does this matter?)

I just shot about 2 GBs worth of test footage with various frame rates and aspect ratios. When I put the card in the slot - my computer reads both my 8GB & 16GB. I can transfer using the log & transfer for a short while until I get my happy little beach ball. Doing one clip at a time kind of works until I get near the end of the clips. Also I would prefer to do this quick by mass import.

I also thought I would try to do it the same way we did on the DELL - Just copy the contents & last clip text file to a folder on the desktop. I read in a previous thread to copy the last clip text file first so the transfer goes quicker. I tried this - was getting excited because it looked like it was moving much faster - then I hit the beach ball again.... sigh.

I'm guessing this isn't a common problem because I can't find squat on it... I have updated to the newest drivers - any other suggestions? BTW I'm on set all day tomorrow and was looking forward to using the powerbook method... I will be up for a while, any help would be greatly! appreciated.

Thanks for looking

dc
 
You can download the demo version of HD Log which will transfer your P2 cards over for free.
I've also used P2 Genie as well.

Since Raylight for Mac has come out, I don't use log and transfer anymore and enjoy not having twice as much space used up on my hard drive since I no longer need to have both the original MXF file and the QuickTime copy.

I don;t have any problems with my 17" G4 PowerBook stopping or hesitating once the copy process begins. I'm running 10.4.10.
 
Are you using the latest P2 drivers, or the ones that came on the CD with the camera? Does the problem happen with both the 8GB and 16GB card, or just the latter?
 
Another thought

Another thought

Are you really using FCP 6.0 on your G4 powerbook? I thought you needed at LEAST a G5 to decently fun fcp6. How well does FCP 6.0 run normally on your powerbook? I don't mean to get off topic.

markus
 
My G$ powerbook went through the same problem that is until i ran the most recent OS update. Now everyone works just peachy. I believe I read somewhere that apple did address the problem in the OS update.
 
I was always under the impression that RAM had to be added in pairs in the G4 PB. So if that's the case having a 512 chip and a 1gb chip together could be causing problems.
 
Thanks for all of your answers. Sorry that I have been MIA - I was on very long sets and didn't have that great access to the internet.

When I bought this powerbook from my friend - he shipped it via UPS (btw always get anything insured duh). It was damaged during transit thus destroying the Hard Drive. I just installed a new one (Seagate 160) and everything is running smooth...

Not a bad head ache for only spending 400 bucks on everything....

Thanks again.

dc
 
What I do is dump all my p2 cards to two external 2.5" hard drives through my powerbook g4 using P2 Genie, then format and eject the cards.

When I want to review the footage, I use Raylight for Mac. Works well and when your done shooting, you can begin editing instantly since Raylight makes link quicktime files for FCP, so you never have to import the footage within FCP.

This has worked well for me. It is also nice since I dont need to open FCP if I want to show people the footage on my macpro or powerbook, I just go to my folder where I keep the footage and start opening files in full screen.
 
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