P2 viewer problem on PC

Mathew Knight

Mathew Knight

Active member
Hi there everybody. I am slowly plodding through the workflow using a PC laptop & external drive to offload HVX P2 cards. everything is looking good. Apart from one thing. That is my P2 viewer window monitor.

I shot 1080/50i (in PAL/50hhz land). Transfer to eternal drive good, P2 genie works great. Virtual P2 cards perfect! (after much difficulty).

But still my DVCPRO-HD 1080/50i footage is still stuttering through having difficulty playing. It looks fantastic on the monitor. Full screen and all. But can't seem to show the motion properly.

Any thoughts on why ?

Could it be that the monitor has a 60i refresh rate ?

Static footage looks perfect.

And it the problem is the same if I shoot 50i or 25p.

And the problem is the same if I view off the P2 card or off the external drive (as a virtual card)

And strangely it doesn't make any difference if I go tool/customize/Hd playback and select 'half frame rate' and/or 'half resolution at full screen'

What is the problem ? Laptop not whizzy enough ?

PS. Turns out that 720 footage plays almost fine. So I think 1080 is just too much data for the laptop to handle.
 
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I would say unless you have a dual-core processor on that PC it will not be able to display all of the frames properly. Doesn't mean that they are not there, just means your laptop isn't fast enough.

Best,

Jan
 
Jan_Crittenden said:
I would say unless you have a dual-core processor on that PC it will not be able to display all of the frames properly. Doesn't mean that they are not there, just means your laptop isn't fast enough.

Best,

Jan
Click to expand...
Thanks very much for that info Jan. That does seem to be my problem. Guess I need to find another laptop.
 
Evrything actually works fine. Its just the reasurrance of viewing the material on the laptop. And beleive me a PC laptop is the last place I want to be. But we had a PC laptop available and thought I'd give it a try (it sounded easy when Barry Green was explaining it).
The real pain is that we have a nice new Mac laptop, but no PCMCIA slots ! Damned if you do and damned if you don't.
if only I could view the clips properly on the laptop i have I would be 99.9% sorted.
 
Hey Matthew,

How do you view the footage?
What editing software are you using?
We're also working with PC, laptop, hardrives and stuff....but we're having a problems with p2 viewer, importing the clips from hardrives...it shows the clip but it doesn't play it. There is no problem viewing the clips directly from p2 card....native setings. We went to Avid system hoping we'll be able to view the clips through the Avid, but again there is a problem, it keeps showing the error "wrong bin" ? If you have any information how to be able to look at our footage daily from the hard drives not from P2 cards, I'd realy apprciate it.
Thanks!
 
Pedja said:
Hey Matthew,

How do you view the footage?
What editing software are you using?
We're also working with PC, laptop, hardrives and stuff....but we're having a problems with p2 viewer, importing the clips from hardrives...it shows the clip but it doesn't play it. There is no problem viewing the clips directly from p2 card....native setings. We went to Avid system hoping we'll be able to view the clips through the Avid, but again there is a problem, it keeps showing the error "wrong bin" ? If you have any information how to be able to look at our footage daily from the hard drives not from P2 cards, I'd realy apprciate it.
Thanks!
Click to expand...
My P2 viewer is functioning perfectly at the moment (besides difficulty with motion on full screen High def stuff, but that is because the CPU is too slow).

Have you sorted out making the hardrive folders into virtual P2 cards ? You can't look at them untill they have been made virtual P2 cards and that took me quite a long time to sort out.

If you haven't done that let me know and I will pass on the intructions.

In terms of viewing and editing we are using this;
On the PC laptop which will be with us on set we only view items using P2 viewer (apart from camera playback).

Once the external hardrive is back in the edit suite we are opening the external hardrive in final cut pro HD (on a mac) and final cut is saving the files to its capture scratch (on the edit suite big fast raid drive).
 
Thanks Matthew for your reply!
1) I haven't made virtual P2 cards, and to be honest and don't even know what is virtual P2 cards. So the instructions would be greatly appreciate it

Also don't know if you faced this problem with p2 viewer is when I have the clips with variable frame rates, overcranked and undercranked, the viewer doesn't read them at all, no clip appears, just red x like it doesn't recognize it or no file. Is this something that you discovered before, or is it me hallucinating :) ?

Anyways, I'm looking forward to your instruction how to make this p2 viewer works with this virtual p2 card thing?
 
Pedja said:
Thanks Matthew for your reply!
1) I haven't made virtual P2 cards, and to be honest and don't even know what is virtual P2 cards. So the instructions would be greatly appreciate it

Also don't know if you faced this problem with p2 viewer is when I have the clips with variable frame rates, overcranked and undercranked, the viewer doesn't read them at all, no clip appears, just red x like it doesn't recognize it or no file. Is this something that you discovered before, or is it me hallucinating :) ?

Anyways, I'm looking forward to your instruction how to make this p2 viewer works with this virtual p2 card thing?
Click to expand...
O.K Pedja heres what to do with Virtual P2 cards to use in P2 viewer (For PC).

I don't have the viewer infront of me so all the details may not be accurate. here goes;

When you use P2 viewer it will only show things that it knows are P2 cards. When you put a card in the PCMCIA slot it will come up automatically in P2 viewer (as long as you have installed the P2 driver free download).

Now if you copy that P2 card to an external or internal hardrive (which I use p2 genie to do because its easier. $30) then P2 viewer can no longer tell it is a P2 card. It just thinks its a folder.

So you need to tell P2 viewer to treat this folder as a P2 card. So you make the folder a 'virtual P2 card).

Now first things first;

The way I have set P2 viewer is to show 2 different window areas on the left side of the screen. (When you begin there is just one) Its the box that has a blue (or green) title that says 'All P2 cards' something like that.

If you go up to the 'view' file menu there is an option to 'choose primary bin' something like that. Choose 'show all virtual P2 cards'.

Further down in the 'view' menu choose 'show secondary bin'. For this pick 'Show all P2 cards'.

Now hopefully on your screen you will have two boxes. The top one has a kind of green coloured box that says 'all virtual P2 cards'. And the bottom box has a blue box with 'all P2 cards'.

if the coloured boxes don't show this just right click on them to change what it shows.

now once you have that if you put a P2 card into the PCMCIA slot all its clip thumbnails should show up in the window labelled 'all P2 cards' because its a real P2 card.

Now you probably want to copy this card to an external or internal hard drive.

I use P2 Genie to do this, its a lot simpler. if you use P2 genie you do the copy first then go to P2 viewer.

If you are not using P2 Genie then you can also copy in P2 viewer. For copying in P2 viewer do this;

First go to the external or internal hardrive where you want to copy to. then make a new folder. if it was your first P2 card of the day on a yoga program you might call it 'Yoga-card001" or whatever you want.

next in your P2 Viewer go to the top Menu and Select Tool>Setting Virtual P2 Cards.
A new window comes up. Click the first little icon on the top of the window. (its like a box outline and looks greyed out for some stupid reason)
Now navigate to the folder that you made on your hard drive to copy the P2 card to. ('Yoga-card001')

So now this folder has been made a virtual P2 card.

Now hopefully you will have an empty window in the top left of the screen titled 'Al virtual p2 cards'
And on the bottom left a box with the title 'All P2 cards' which shows the thumbnails of the content on your P2 card.

Go to the title 'All Virtual P2 cards' and right click it. You have the option to selct 'show all P2 cards or shoe all virtual P2 cards and now there should also be you 'Yoga-card001' select this.

The top window will still be empty.

Now you can select all the thumbnails (select all) from the real P2 card in the bottom window and drag them to the top window. And they will start copying. Now depending on you computer these could be faster than realtime, about realtime, or way slower. I found it was faster to an external hardrive rather than the internal. And i found P2 genie faster.

So everytime you put in a new P2 card, you have to make a folder on the hard drive, make it a virtual card and copy it over.

I find doing it this way is not so good.

The way I do it is first I have P2 genie open.
On my external hardrive I have already made one folder where I will copy all the days shooting cards to. Call this whatever you want (Yoga TVC, my great movie etc).

Set P2 genie to copy cards to this folder. Also on P2 genie you can name each card. I usually would call this 'Yoga-card' because p2 genie also adds a card reel '1,2,3,4...) So when you copy a card it will end up being saved with the reel number at the end. eg 'Yoga-card_001' So you change the reel number for each card. but you can leave the name the same un less you want to change it (Forinstance if you shoot in astudio for the first half of the day you could leave all these cards as 'studio-card' and just change the rel number so you end up with virtual cards called "studio-card001, studio-card002 etc" then you go to the beach and change the cards to 'Beach-card003' etc.

Once that copy process is done I go to P2 viewer.

In P2 viewer follow the virtual P2 cards instructions above (Tools/ create virtual P2 card). Then navigate to the folder "Yoga-card_001'

And its very important that it is that folder. theres is stuff inside that folder but it won't recognize that. this point is very important for all P2 cards. you can't all the folder contents or it will screw the card directory up.

So once you have set this folder as a virtual card it will appear in the main window ('Show all Virtuasl P2 cards).

Now I use P2 viewer to check the contents just to see it has copied O.K

Once i have checked this i go back to P2 genie and click the 'Erase P2 cards'. Then the card is empty and ready to be used in camera again.

So the main point is P2 viewer can only see real P2 cards or virtual P2 cards (that have all their contents intact.

Hope that helps.

Now as for you problem showing undercrank & overcrank footage. i used the above process and viewed 12frames to 50frames in 720/25PN. With no problem. (of course in the US its 720/30PN)

Although i think if you want to see the effect in P2 viewer you can only use the 30PN mode to shoot, not the 30p mode.

Thye camera will do variable frames rates in 720/30p mode but you have to use the final cut frame rate converter to extract them (in final cut pro). If you shoot with 'PN' (720/30PN 'native' mode) then the effect will play back in camera and in P2 viewer.

That might be your problem.

Good luck. it took me a long time to sort it out and I almost gave up.
 
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You can also view the video files right off the card or folder with Windows Media Player directly. Just open up Windows Media Player and open the file in the video folder. I find that it works just slightly smoother than the P2 viewer on my system. But...no audio.
 
Hey Matthew,

Thanks a lot for your help. It's working and I'm sooooo happy about it. Once again thanks for such elaborate steps and instructions. Take care and all the best!
Pedja
 
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