P2 offload problem

S

shelleyvideo

Member
During a short break in my full day shoot for a corporate client yesterday, I decided to take a minute to begin an offload of the P2 card I had filled with footage. I broke out the old Dell laptop with a Cardbus slot and proceeded to start the transfer. The portable drive was not detected by P2 Viewer nor Windows Explorer. The day before the shoot I had formatted the brand new 320 GB Lacie Rugged drive using the HPX300 and performed a test transfer to avoid surprises. Worked fine, then I re-formatted the drive with the 300 again. After the shoot I tried again to offload with no luck. I decided to format the Lacie using the Disk Management Utility in Windows XP on the Dell laptop and then the Lacie was detected by the P2 Viewer sotware as well as Windows Explorer. Offloading went well and actually a good bit faster than usual. Full 32 GB card transferred in 22 minutes compared to the usual 32 minutes. The client has the footage now. Does it matter that the portable drive was formatted by Windows and not the 300 as I've done in the past? I did a test bu importing a couple of clips from the portable drive into Premiere and all was fine.
 
If you are using a computer to offload video to an external hard drive you do not format that drive with the camera. You only format the drive with the camera if you are offloading directly from the camera to the hard drive with out a computer involved.
Jim
 
Thanks Jim,
This was the first time attempting to use the laptop to offload during a shoot so as to avoid camera down time. But it's kinda strange that it worked the day before after formatting with the camera.

Steve


Jim Carswell said:
If you are using a computer to offload video to an external hard drive you do not format that drive with the camera. You only format the drive with the camera if you are offloading directly from the camera to the hard drive with out a computer involved.
Jim
Click to expand...
 
The 300 reformats any hard drive connected directly to it (not magically -you have to tell it to format the hard drive) - and it's not native formatting that a PC or a MAc would record to - but computers can read the footage on the hard drive that was formatted by the 300. I did a thread a while back (with pictures) on how to record directly to a USB hard drive connected to the 300, and that's when I learned that the 300 makes it's own type of hard drive formatting.
 
Sorry to keep this going but I'm still a bit confused about the NTFS, exfat and Fat32 issue. When I formatted my Lacie 320 Gb prtable drive using the Disk Management utility in Windows Vista I had the option of formatting in exFat or NTFS mode. I want to be sure the client will be able to access the footage with either a Mac or PC. Which one should I use? NTFS or exFat?
Also, is anyone familiar with the Lacie formatting utility that allows you to format the drive so that material on it can be used by Windows as well as Macs and Linux systems?


Jim Carswell said:
If you are using a computer to offload video to an external hard drive you do not format that drive with the camera. You only format the drive with the camera if you are offloading directly from the camera to the hard drive with out a computer involved.
Jim
Click to expand...
 
This is a bit off topic, but I was planning on doing a similar offloading process in the field. Could you post the model of laptop (mine is an old Dell also) and and more details that could help me?

Thanks,
Lou
 
Hey Lou,

I used a Dell Inspiron 1100 running XP Pro service pack 3. It won't play HD footage, but it transfers the files just fine.

I formatted the Lacie Rugged portable drive using the formatting utility (mentioned above) that comes with the drive. I transferred 4 - 32Gig cards using the P2 Viewer Ingest tool over to the Lacie with no problem. Haven't heard from the client so I'm assuming all is good on their end. I'll probably continue doing it that way for now.
I may end up changing one thing though. I thought I read in a post in another thread that the P2 Viewer Ingest function does not offer file copy verification. If that is the case I may switch to P2CMS software which I believe does have Verification.
 
I've been doing multicam shoots with two HPX300s for 5 weeks now, and this is the method I use to get everything working. It may not be correct, but it works flawlessly.

Each HPX300 has its own Lacie 250GB USB drive (plenty of room for 2 x 64GB P2 cards), which were formatted to FAT32 in Windows 7 using SwissKnife (otherwise, it's a pain to format FAT32).

Then, each drive is reformatted inside the camera to its native S format. The camera will generate a 64GB partition for each card (as needed, so if you only shoot on one card, Windows only sees one 64GB drive). With two cards copied to the drive, Windows sees two separate drives.

If I don't use this method (not formatting to FAT32 first) Windows will not recognize the drive(s) at all. Weird, but I tried every method several times to see what did and didn't work. The camera must be leaving some FAT32 sector alone for Windows to mount the S partitions (the manual is very vague).

Also, the Lacie drives I got (not a fan of this brand - but these drives are cheap, tiny and disposable. The style (Rikki) matches the camera perfectly - I velcro them to the side of the camera that looks oddly void of detail.
 
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