HPX250: P2 Media drops timecode moved or transcoded

B

brynsank

Active member
Ok some front-end info: I'm working in Windows 7 on Premiere Pro CS5.5. Shooting on HPX250 (although media shot on the HVX200 and I'm sure all other P2 cameras did the same thing).

I'm relatively new to P2, coming over from (most recently) XDCAM EX and Final Cut. I've dabbled with P2 before, but not a whole lot. The whole P2 workflow seems pretty inefficient to me, although Premiere's native support of the AVC-I codecs is a nice feature. I know others must have raised this question before, but I've been searching all day for a solution in vain.

Here's my issue: When I am shooting, it's normally not just for one project but a number of different projects at the same time. For example we'll shoot a scene for project A, quickly make some set adjustments and then shoot a scene for project B (since we have all the gear set up), and so on and so forth. It's not practical (nor should it be necessary) to dump my P2 cards after each scene, so projects A, B, C etc. all end up back-to-back on my card(s).

Since the media is for different projects, I want to store the different segments in project-specific directories on my media drive, however it seems that the P2 folder structure has to be maintained in order to keep the timecode intact (in other words, if I move the individual MXF files to different folders, the timecodes all revert to 0:00:00;00 when imported to Premiere). The same happens when I transcode to Cineform - timecode stays true IF the files stay within the P2 folder structure, but as soon as they are moved, timecode is lost. It's apparent that the timecode is not embedded in the MXF file itself but in some metadata file within the same directory structure (the lastclip.txt file?).

One of the things I most enjoyed about XDCAM EX was that, despite the fact that it had to be re-wrapped to .mov before editing, once that was done I could rename files and move them wherever I liked without fear of losing timecode/metadata.

Any way around this? Since I'm on Windows 7 it seems that P2CMS is not an option.
 
P2 Viewer will do what you want. When you copy your cards to the computer, don't just drag & drop, use P2 Viewer instead. It will let you specify specific directories ("setting virtual P2 card") and then you drag the clips you want for project A over to that "virtual card". Then set up another "virtual card" for project B, and drag the clips from your P2 card over to that virtual card, etc.

Then you will have a set directory with all the P2 subdirectories and everything organized exactly as it should be.
 
Good to know, thanks for your quick reply Barry. I didn't realize P2 viewer was more powerful than a simple viewing application, as its name implies :)

Now I wonder if I can put the media back on the cards with directory structure intact and attempt the process from the beginning...
 
If the footage is in a directory already, you don't need to move it back to a card, you can just point to that directory as a "virtual p2 card"...
 
You're right: the starting timecode is in the clipname.XML file found in the CLIP subdirectory. It's part of the MXF data structure. It's easy to mess everything up if you don't use the right tools to move the data around. The nice thing is that XML is human-readable so you can usually figure out the structure (if you're so inclined).
 
Good to know, thank you both for your replies! I think I have it all sorted now. Loaded each card (stored on the drive) as a virtual card and then set up a bunch of new virtuals to redistribute the footage into. Actually worked out really well this way as I was able to load about 15 cards at once and just get it all knocked out systematically. Since all the original cards are already backed up, I could then just delete the originals from my media drive and work from the new project-specific directories I set up. Wonderful!
 
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