P2 workflow - simply defined

esperman

esperman

Well-known member
Just spent the whole day with my pals at Zacuto shooting hvx footage, in all framerates and resolutions.

Don't fear P2 workflow...very, very simple.

We shot on 5 4gig p2 cards all day.
when the cards were full, we copied over firewire all data to my external drive.
Then I walked over to a G4 powerbook and copied the files again to the laptop hard drive. Then I opened FCP and imported all files from P2 into project media manager. Talk about batch capture! FCP then unwraps the mxf to a new mov. in the scratch capture disk (where ever you assigned that in FCP). I figure at least 4 times faster than real time to import into FCP.

When you transfer P2 footage over to external hard drive....the camera formats the drive into each P2 partition. So, if you transfer 5 P2 cards, the external drive registers as 5 seperate drives when conected to the laptop. These files can be accessed by both windows and OS10.

So, to sum up.....one copy of all mxf files on external usb/firewire drive. One copy of all mxf files on laptop HD , one copy on P2 until you delete, and one copy of all converted QT files in your FCP capture folder. Thats 4 layers of data. Talk about redundacy!!!

I'll discuss the footage and camera later on another thread.
 
Thanks for that. I'm not the most technically savy, but it just doesn't seem like it has to be that complicated and based on what you just stated, it's not.

when people starting talking about how much of a pain P2 is I just have to laugh to myself thinking about the troubles that I've had with shooting on film before I turned digital...don't get me wrong I still love film above all formats, but let's be fair, film can be a pain in the butt.

Thanks for the post.
 
I've been really happy with the reports of Mac users and P2.

Did you have any experience viewing/editing metadata on a Mac? I know this is possible with the P2 viewer, but that is PC-only. Not a very good solution if we have to enter data on a PC and edit on a Mac. :) Wasn't sure if FCP had this ability somehow as well, or what...
 
Esperman,
Thanks for the info. Good to see how easy it is to have redundancy on the drives.
How close to real time was the transfer from P2 to external disk thru the camera, and again how fast was it from the P2 into the G4 laptop?
You did mention that importing into FCP was fast but that's after the files were in the laptop and off the P2 as I read you.
You didn't get to look at the mini DV output compared to DVX did you?
 
Lenilenapi said:
How close to real time was the transfer from P2 to external disk thru the camera, and again how fast was it from the P2 into the G4 laptop?
Click to expand...

tranfers times are much faster than real time....MUCH faster....to both usb/firewire drive , and importing into FCP. You can import the P2 straight from P2 cards only, or the files that have been transfered to the computer laptop....FCP doesn't care.

We shot DV50, DV100 and DV25. I was not dissapointed.

The G4 played the footage just fine using the internal drive.
 
Thanks Esperman,
Do you think the transfer time is fastr enough that you could get by with only 2 P2 cards (4Gig) and trade them off to keep more or less shooting continuously?(Obviousy with an extra person to do the transfers.)
 
hi everybody,

I just was able to get a look at the camera here in Hamburg,Germany. They had a presentation and you could try out quite a lot of things. I read an article about "Going P2" in the "King Kong" issue of the American Cinematographer and they said, that with 5 P2 Cards containing 40 mins of footage the whole capturing process including data verification took round about 30 mins, which is not a too good ratio, I think.

So I asked the guy from Panasonic if they had worked on that problem and he said that they were able to make it 10 times faster by working over the P2 Cards. What is your experience Esperman? From what that guy told me, downloading 40 mins of footage would took some 3 minutes, which sounds a little unlikely to me.

so long
Christian
 
when i get to the office, I'll test the actual time. I'm sure my G5 will be faster than a G4 laptop.

But keep in mind, even if its only twice as fast as real time....thats half the time it would take to capture footage from tape in real time. It's a win win, any way you look at it. AND NO DROPPED FRAMES!!!!
 
Plus to capture from tape takes longer than real time.
A 30 min tape might have 60 shots on it.
Depending on tape format and the way your system
is capturing that 30 min tape might take over an hour
to really capture. Shooting P2 you could eliminate
bad takes with confidence...something I never do
shooting tape. I am looking forward to the "brave new
tapeless future".
 
okay...to transfer a 4gig copy of P2 data from my FW400 HD to my dual 2.7G5 desktop took 1.12 minutes.

To import the mxf files into QT .mov from same 4gig copy of P2 data STILL from FW 400 took 1.06 minutes. So roughly 6 minutes of 1080i and 720p footage only took 1 minute to import.

Not too bad eh?
 
When did you get a dual 2.7!!!??

If on a real shoot, would you do the same way, or would you take a P2 card out and import P2 into FCP using an external drive there? That would reduce the redundancy, but it would also reduce the redundancy, if you get my meaning.

I'm not sure which would be more to my liking, unplugging and plugging a firewire cable (or gaff taping one to a tripod) or unplugging and plugging the P2 cards. Which one would less likely to wear out?
 
hey T.
Got the dual last may ish?? I thought I told you. Really dig it too. lol
Well.....thats a good question. Prob would transfer P2 to a laptop, then copy that data to the external drive with the laptop. I still would copy mxf data to be really safe.
 
Not bad at all considering that same 6 min of footage would take
at a minimum about 10 min to log & capture with a tape deck that would probably cost more than $20K
 
well ok... so the guy from panasonic didn't really lie. :thumbsup: But usually on location you wouldn't carry your monster-machine-dual-core-mega-G5 with you, would you? I mean how fast is it, under shooting conditions? Thats the point I am really interestes in. What they tested in the AC is now some month old. Panasonic said that they improved their Cards. Do you have a G4 Mac at hand? Would be nice to know.

Thanks anyway for testing :grin::thumbsup:
 
Don't worry Christian....even on the G4 laptop everything transfers fast. Especially if your just using the laptop to store the mxf files.
 
If you are using the same 4 gig card all day over and over and dumping to firewire drive does the drive get partitioned every time you dump footage from that same card, and how does it work that you don't overwrite anything.

\v
 
Has anyone tried to delete the P2 files from a Mac? I downloaded several P2 cards to an iBook and then later moved the files over to my G5 Quad and imported into FCP. Workflow was seamless.

However, when I put the content folder and .text file (the two things that you have for every P2 card downloaded) in the trash and then tried to empty the trash niether Mac let the trash be emptied. The problem is the files are locked. Simple enough solution for the text files (one per P2 card). Just click on the file, hit command/i (get info) and unlock the file then it will empty in the trash. BUT, the content folder has 5 folders in it (named audio, video, etc). In each one of them are hundreds of LOCKED things that need to be individually unlocked. This of course would take hours/days for just one card.

Has anyone else encoutered this and if so do you by chance have a solution?
 
Nick, locked files and folders on a Mac can be easily deleted (trashed) by pressing the
option/alt key while dragging that locked file/folder to the trash. You have to confirm in a small dialog box, however, that you really want to trash it.
In addition there is a bunch of freeware/shareware apps that help to trash stubborn files and folders. Just go to www.versiontracker.com and do a search with "trash" as keyword.

Hope this helps. Pe.
 
I know nothing about the Mac yet, but Jan posted something about this on creative cow, there's some way to execute a "forced delete" -- maybe it was "control-I"? Don't remember, but I'm sure some mac expert will weigh in and explain.
 
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