P2 store VS. laptop

B

Boomerang

Well-known member
Hey guys I have just been put in front of working on a documentry which will include interviews and run and gun on location shoots.

I own the HVX and 1 4gigP2 card. we will be renting cards as needed.

My main question is do I

a. Buy a P2 store for dumping footage on

or

b. buy a powerbook Mac 17 for direct card access.

Also for the interviews if needed I could stream direct to a laptop. i think.


I would prefer to buy the new MacBook Pro but feel the PCMIA slot is a needed feature and the project starts before a solution is avaiable.

Up unti now I have used the camera and my 12 inch to store work, but feel I will need the camera to be in use while storing footage.


Any advice is greatly appreciated.
 
Boomerang, I am about to kick off a documentary project as well. We will have a two camera interview set up with 8gig cards--here we will offload the cards from with a powerbook and the other onto the P2 Store. Between interviews, we will offload the Store. I wasn't going to get the Store at first, but the value it adds to the on the street run and gun stuff justifies it I think--and keeps me from having to lug a laptop around the streets.
I'm interested in knowing what workflow you decide on and how it works out for you.
 
Boomerang,

I'm a month into a feature doc right now. The crew is myself, the producer and host. We've shot 1.8 teribytes of interview and b-roll footage and I now wouldn't be caught dead without my P2 store. Anders' new P2 Genie app looks promissing as a way to make the laptop a more viable solution but the P2 store gives me much more confidence. With verify mode on it takes about 6 minutes to offload a 4 gig card and I feel very comforably knowing the footage is correctly copied. Offloading to laptop requires much more attention to ensure that everything is correctly copied and verified before clearing the card.

While shooting in 720 24PN (10minutes record time on a 4g card) I can get by with 2 cards and run continuously (one interview lasted 9 hours with a break for lunch!) without stopping the camera. The third card is nice as an added buffer in case you find yourself unable to make the switch when you want.

At the end of the day, we copy to two firewire drives using a 12" Powerbook. The producer travels with one drive, I travel with the other. It has worked very well for us so far.

I think the more people use the system for real projects, the more in demand the P2 store will be. Yes it's pricey, but worth every penny when you footage is at stake.

If you go with the P2 store, you will not regret it.

-filmstox
 
Filmstox,
This is good to hear. I've haven't come across much talk yet of the day-long interview sessions, and am glad to hear the p2 works well for this setup.
 
Thanks David and Boomerang, lets just say that after injesting all of that P2 data I am cringing at having to capture an additional 20 hours of DVX-100 footage. I am officially P2 spoiled!

Happy shooting!

-filmstox
 
Quick question, what is the total minutes the P2 store holds at 720 24pn.
I would guess, 2-2.5 hours.

My concern is exceeding the need for a possible 4-5 hours of storage before being able to dump down to a laptop/HD external.
 
The store will hold a maximum of 15 4g cards or 7 8g cards. This translates to:

2:30 for 4g
2:20 for 8g.


You will loose the space for any unused portion of a card. If you only record 1 minute onto a card and pop it in the store, it will take up one of your partitions thus wasting the other 9 (or 19) minutes of capacity.

Plus you have the capacity of the cards themselves to let you make the day. I pretty much figure when I leave the hotel in the morning, I'm carrying 3 hours on storage. Ironically, I would usually walk out of the hotel with a case of Beta tapes equaling exactly the same amount.

I have found that under continuous shooting circumstances, on rare occasion, I needed to dump the P2 store at lunch. This takes about 2 hours on the 12" G4 going to 2 external FW400 drives. In Memphis last week, we shot 18 interviews in 4 days. During that time the data was only an issue once. Our schedule was VERY aggressive and the workflow was up to the task.

So long as you keep your wits about you and think ahead to what you've scheduled you should be able to keep ahead of the data pretty easily.

What's your doc about?

-filmstox
 
That makes sense..... my only concern is if interviews pass the 3 hour mark which I highly doubt but may happen. I will need to take the time into consideration during pre prod.

The doc is about artist work spaces and rent control laws in NYC.

Thanks for your input, if it does pass the P2 store limit do you feel the laptop to External HD is a viable option?
 
Since the 12" powerbook doesn't have a PCMCIA slot, we used the P2 store as a pass through slot on a couple of occasions. The slot with a card inserted mounts as a 16th NONAME partition on the desktop.

This is a 4 (or 8) minute transfer from the card but does not perform any verification beyond the OS's standard alerts. It will certainly work, and with Anders' Genie app should be about as convenient as the P2 store. Even so, I would recommend having an assitant handle the laptop transfer so that you are not distracted with operating the camera and transfering at the same time. This way they can compare file sizes and inspect the directory tree before clearing the card.

-filmstox
 
As a side note, to stay organized, I've adopted the a naming convention using the Modified Date and Time of the Lastclip.txt file as the time stamp for the card. So each directory containing a card would be:

ProjectName_04-05-06_2234

Where 2234 is military time. This way the next card in sequence would be _2244 and so on. The lastclip is writen when the card is full or when the last clip is saved so it is an accurate indicator of when that footage was shot. The CONTENTS directory is created when the card is formatted and could show an innaccurate date and time.

It works really well and makes sorting and organizing your drives really easy. I found just going with a serialized number was a little too risky. All of my years as an editor taught me to date and time stamp everything and it seems equally valid here.

The DVD-r backups get labeled with this same time stamp.

-filmstox
 
Filmstox thanks for the naming convention.

Filmstox thanks for the naming convention.

I have been searching for a naming convention and yours makes great sense. Thanks for sharing. HVX is on my next camera list. :-)
 
Here is a teaser of P2 Genie Beta4:
Beta4Teaser.jpg


Two new features:
Filmstox Naming and 2'nd destination...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top