P2 - near disaster stories- an invitation to share

M

Mark Smith

Veteran
I'm curious about any p2 near disasters. After a year of HVX/P2 use I had the first really big one the other day.
I was finishing a shoot for a client on location, actually wrap had been called and I was transferring the last P2 cards to a drive to hand to the client. Client asks about the drive to which I reply that the cards are being transferred. Following that, client walks into room where I have my transfer station set up and and unplugs the drive mid transfer, without my knowledge!!!!.
Ack.
My computer is very unhappy, so is P2 genie.

I restart and try to retransfer last 2 cards--- suddenly everything is going bonkers , my hard drive is full and every process slows to a crawl.

I get something transferred , but I have no confidence. After a quick conference I tell the client that I'll send him the remaining files once I get it sorted.

Back at the office later that day I remount the last P2 cards in my PCD 20 and they transfer perfectly. I've lost some earlier card files in the process that were on a back up drive but I have them all on the primary drive so thats ok.

After some sweaty moments and a short session with P2 log, I realize that all the files from the last 2 cards are intact and play back fine. I burn these to 2 DVD's and fedex to client , meanwhile I am thinking to myself, WTF??
 
That's a good story. Like a character in a Jim Cameron movie, you should have told your client, "Remember a while ago when I said you should unplug that? No? Well, that's because I didn't. Don't do that ever again."

I've had a couple of occassions where I've returned a loaded card to the camera instead of clearing it in P2Genie or more often than not on the P2Store. Confusion and hilarity ensue as the crew waits around for me to figure out what the hell I've done.

Hilarity like a tumor. I've never erased the wrong one, but I still check the content like, thirty-six times before I format the card.

e
 
I have had two P2 mishaps out of 150 transfers to date.

On my first day of actually shooting with the HVX I experienced a P2 Genie bug that caused my Powerbook to crash after each transfer. Juggling filming, P2 transfers and nursing an ailing Powerbook - by myself and in a far away land - it was easy to get confused. That evening I discovered that a whole P2 folder was missing.

As it turned out P2 Genie was not actually crashing the computer, but simply causing a temporary freeze of 1 - 2 minutes. The problem resolved itself as I became more familiar and more patient with the P2 cards and more confident in the very capable abilities of P2 Genie.

The second failure was the result of the Powerbook drive becoming full of phantom "volumes" - approx 50GB of the 80GB drive. On one occassion a full P2 card was only partly transferred before hard disc space ran out. The discrepency in folder size was apparent, however not knowing how to resolve the situation, and needing to continue shooting, I reluctantly deleted the untransfered footage from the card. So far I have been unable to locate and erase the mystery volumes in the Powerbook despite their names and size being listed Finder. (Any clues greatly appreciated!) To work around the "full" internal drive I have been ingesting directly to an external firewire drive.

There are common sense solutions that may help safeguard P2 card transfers:

1. Perform comprehensive transfer trials prior to the shoot, testing the computer's response to every likely user error that you can think of.
2. Develop a fail-safe P2 card handling and transfer protocol and follow it each time.
3. Where possible have a technician/helper on-hand to manage the data.

Overall I am impressed by the P2 format, even for long form documentary that poses unique challenges for P2 acquisition.

Russell Hawkins
 
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mysterious volumes.... I just ran into this problem myself with the above described near disaster. The reason all processes slowed to a crawl was because my HD was suddenly full and I mean full, all 55 gigs worth.

I have a great little utility called "whatsize" which will tell you where all your files are , even the hidden ones, and what size they are.

THe app allows you to see everything on your drive and delete stuff if you want. Be careful because you can delete almost anything...

Whatsize found the phantom volumes, about 22GB worth and I deleted them. The machine is Back to normal now.
 
I was shooting my short film in a once in a lifetime moment. The place I was shooting was full, and I got excelent picture. I did some impressive steadicam shots that day, and was incredibly happy with what I got. My surprise came when I went back to the editing room, and found out I didn't transfer the steadicam files to the harddrive. I was thinking "you idiot! You blew it!" But then I checked again, and had mistakenly named that card as Excelent steadicam for movie folder vs Movie day 1 card 3, or whatever, which was what I used for all other cards. I thanked every god possible on that moment :)
 
I was being really intense and focusing with the Schnieder Optics 2.0x Tele-Converter on a boat in the swamp, and a huge ass horse fly bit me on the back of my shoulder. Man, it swelled up like a baseball and stung like the dickens! I cursed a little too loud and scared all the wild life away. So when I got home, my FS-100 was empty...

Ok, maybe not the same type of story...

:Drogar-Dum(DBG):
 
overlandfilms said:
Hilarity like a tumor. I've never erased the wrong one, but I still check the content like, thirty-six times before I format the card.

e
Click to expand...

I can second that, did cost me some time and brain-pain, but made me end up with no lost footage...i even had the opposite when we were using P2 rental cards for an important shoot in Paris: i had checked all cards in my laptop before if they have the latest firmware update(as this were 8GB cards and some reported about that problem..), everything was fine and i forgot to check if some stupid brad had left his footage on one of the 5 Cards...so i had a great surprise and trouble when the cameragirl changed the 2 new 8GB cards in the interview break(supposed to be a real short one, an interview with a famous filmmaker..sweat..) and found out that she ended up with 16 minutes of dvcpro50 instead of 33 minutes...so this made us erase those damn shots...!

Hope THEY had their footage..!:Drogar-Love(DBG):
 
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