P2 Reader Macbook Pro Workaround?

D

Davidwillis2

New member
I have been following some of the threads on here and understand the Duel Adapter will never work on my snow leopard. I have a Macbook Pro with the express slot. What I am wondering, is if I can partition my drive and install Tiger or Leopard on the new partition for the sole purpose of using the Duel Adapter to transfer footage to an external drive? I would hate to have to buy an old powerbook and lug that around on shoots when I do all my editing on my Macbook Pro. Thanks in advance for your advice.
 
I was in the same boat, and just got an HP 2140 netbook brand new ($355) from Richards Computer in Miami. Now I run the Duel off this miniscule little Windows XP machine networked to my Snow Leopard MBP with a 6' gigabyte ethernet cable.

Now I can use the Duel like I used to before I switched to Snow Leopard, BUT I have my expresscard slot free on the MBP which I use to dump directly to E-Sata drives.

Getting Snow Leopard to network/share with XP was a minor PITA, but now I have a really compact superfast download solution.
 
You can purchase an external USB or Firewire drive and hook your camera direct to that to dump P2 cards onto. You'll need to supply power to those drives as the camera will not power them. That's what I do in the field, shoot and fill the P2 card, dump to the drive, erase the P2 and shoot some more. If it's critical footage (which most is) you can offload a second copy to another external drive before you erase the P2 card.
 
Thank you for replying. Yes I have considered using a PC laptop or netbook as part of my workaround. I was leaning toward a Panasonic Toughbook because they are rugged and I figure that if any PC laptop is going to run efficiently with a P2 card it should be a Panasonic right? Some are also equipped with two card slots.

The thing is I just want to keep everything Mac if I can. If I am going to have to own a separate machine I would rather buy a used Powerbook G4 and share an external hard drive. I do think your solution is clever though and probably as compact as you can go without buying a Firestore. Do you think a partition would work? My filmmaking is my priority so even if I have to scale my OS back to leopard completely I will do it, I just need to make this happen on my machine. Thank you for your input.
 
Thanks DGW, the problem is that time is so critical on set, especially when I am renting dollies and such. The reason I desperately need the workaround is because I cannot afford to waste the hours it would take throughout the shooting day to transfer the footage with the camera. I need the camera to be shooting on a new card while someone dumps the footage from the full card.

This may be a crazy question, but has anyone figured out a way to shoot straight to an external drive? Other than a Firestore I mean. It would be a PITA to have it tethered to the cam but you could shoot a hell of a lot of footage.
 
You can stream video with timecode out the firewire port, but not in any of the 720p NATIVE modes.
 
Interesting. I shoot 720 often because 1080 is overkill for most of my projects which are destined for the web, but I still want them to look good on DVD so its right where I want to be. Thank you for the info.
 
from what ive seen, snow leopard doesnt really do anything to make your world that much better.
i say screw snow leopard altogether. just reformat the machine with leopard and you'll be fine.
 
DGW said:
You can stream video with timecode out the firewire port, but not in any of the 720p NATIVE modes.
Click to expand...

While this is true technically, when recording 720p 24 or 30, you can set Final Cut Pro to delete redundant frames on capture, with the result that the frames that are recorded to hard drive are only the frames recorded in native mode. This is equivalent to recording in native mode, since you get the identical frames. The default in FCP is to delete redundant frames when recording 720p24 or 30.

Hope that helps,
Kevin
 
I like the PC/Mac connection for shoots where we have tons of long takes being recorded, and we NEED to dump in the field.

But honestly, since P2 card capacities are at 32g and 64g as the average nowadays, we rarely dump in the field anymore. We just do it back at the office at the end of the day or the next day, where we can transfer directly from the camera to the Mac over USB2.0.

Have you considered simply purchasing a few more E-series cards as a means to eliminate dumping during the shoot day altogether? It makes life on location much smoother. We have 4- 32s, and 2- 16s and have never run out of space shooting 720/30pN.
 
kwoff said:
While this is true technically, when recording 720p 24 or 30, you can set Final Cut Pro to delete redundant frames on capture, with the result that the frames that are recorded to hard drive are only the frames recorded in native mode. This is equivalent to recording in native mode, since you get the identical frames. The default in FCP is to delete redundant frames when recording 720p24 or 30.

Hope that helps,
Kevin
Click to expand...

Yes, I'm with you on that, but if he sets his camera to say, 720/24pN then there will be no stream coming from his firewire port. I believe you are suggesting he can set the camera to 720/24p to enable the stream and then set capture to eliminate redundant frames. Are we saying the same thing? :)
 
Yes, I think we are saying the same thing. You can't record direct to disk in 24pN, as you said, because there is no firewire signal out in 24pN. I was just pointing out that you can get the same result by having FCP delete the redundant frames on capture. I've found that this is a nice workflow to use when facing the need to record for an hour or more without a break (I have only the smaller P2 cards), and it does not require any more storage space than recording in 24pN.

Kevin
 
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