P2 Genie & card transfer?

M

Mark Smith

Veteran
Here is something I find but don't know the answer to: Lets say I shoot 12 4 gig cards and drop them into a P2 store in the sequence they were shot. When I use P2 genie to copy the contents of the P 2 store to another drive and I watch the transfer happen, it seems like the cards get copied in some order other than the one in which they were loaded into the P2 store. Is there some kind of explanation for this? I figured they would be copied in order but it seems like something else is going on..
 
Okay. I'm not 100% sure about this, but I think the Mac version enumerates the drives as they're mounted in the OS - which means that it's the OS that decides what order they appear in. It would've been clever if the P2 Store made sure to mount them in the correct order. I'll pass this on to Anders, who's the Mac-developer of the Genie and I'll see if he's able to do anything about this for the upcoming version-update.
 
Seems like a plausible explanation. At first when I imported my P2 store volumes into FCP I expected them to be in the order they were loaded onto the drive which would be in sequence they were shot most likely. I discovered that this was not the case and so the work around became to import all the volumes, and then having done that do a sort by ascending time code number in the browser. Its an extra step but really a minor one as the sort for 15 cards full of clips even if there are 20 to 30 short clips on a 4 G volume happens in the blink of an eye.
 
You could also have the P2 Genie offload them from the P2 Store and use the name & date feature which will make them appear on the harddrive in the correct order as they were shot. P2 Genie takes the date of the lastclip.txt file and appends that to the name of the destination directory.
 
Name and date sounds good. I've been back and forth between reel# and name & date conventions. I've got to dig into it a bit more in some spare time and see what the best option is.

I generally go with the single folder option as that makes the import into FCP less cumbersome. I'll run some tests and note the results.
 
- In my testing, the partitions mount in the order they were created on the P2 Store.

- Single folder is not that usefull anymore as you can just drag multiple folders from the finder into the P2 import window in FCP 5.1.2.
50-100 folders/cards doesnt seem to pose a problem.
I always use Name and date option, except when the Lastclip.txt file is messed up and P2 genie fails...
It's just so easy to administrer the folders when backing up and moving stuff...
 
Does P2 genie throw up a flag if last clip .txt is messed up? I've never had a problem using P2 genie to copy so I wouldn't know... But I suppose I could delete a last clip .txt file and see what happens. I just love staying awake at night experimenting with stuff....
 
Currently the Mac version throws up a generic error message when this happens.
If you haven't experienced it thats great, no need to worry. If you hit it at some point just switch to reelnumber until it behaves again.....

For the next point update we are working on using other info to get the timestamp needed for the Name and date function.
 
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