P2 workflow - what am I missing?

jpsheets

jpsheets

Well-known member
Hi everyone,

I must be missing something. Let's say I shoot an indie film in 720p to P2 and I dump the data to the 60 gig AGPSOGOG portable drive on location, - that only gives me 150 minutes of storage or 2.5 hours. Firestore is a 100 gig solution so a little more time, but it seems to me awfully limited if you're going to be shooting 8+ hours.

What am I missing here?

thanks!
 
I've never heard any one shooting 8 hours a day when doing a narrative project. P2 is alot like film work flow. 2.5 hours a day should be fine, and you can always hook up any generic usb 300 gig drive to transfer footage.
 
I'm with Esperman on this.

When you take into account, lighting, blocking, all the different setups and pickups I can't fathom the 1 day shoot (even if you were going to shoot a 16 hour day) where you end up with 8+ hours of footage in the can. I think that's really optimistic. There aren't many live events that require that much shooting.

On the other hand if you were magically efficient and were constantly rolling camera you could always offload to several different hard drives of varying size instead. That gets rid of the 60GB or 100GB limitations. Granted you'd have to stop for a few minutes while you dump but at least you can shoot for more than 2.5+ hours.
 
In all fairness the original post didn't state 8+ hours a day. Maybe that is for the entire shoot.

Maybe what he is missing is that he needs to dump the data off of the portable hard drive and onto a larger hard disk or array on his PC/Mac. Then the portable Firestore/drive can be reused. Is that what he was "missing"?

In some ways the hard drive is taking the place of P2 cards. They hold a ton more data but ultimately you have to wipe em clean to record more onto it.
 
Yea i think he was "missing" the hard drive component of the P2 workflow.

However I still think his post insinuates he wants 8+ hours of footage. If i'm wrong however, my apologies for jumping on your stuff.
 
Yeah, sorry folks, I wasn't clear in my original post. What you guys said about offloading to another HD makes sense. Thanks for the info!
 
I agree, there is a flaw in the workflow theory. On many of our shoots we are shooting 2 or 3 cameras for up to 6 hours a day. A single project can be 3 of these shoot days, thats a total of 54 hours of video per project and our editors are working on 5 of these projects at any time, thats 270 hours of video that cannot be "offlined" easily. For DVCPRO HD, that 270 hours of footage / 16,200 GB/ 15.82 TB of data. That is alot of data to constantly shift from P2/ Firestore to portable Hard Drive to AVID/ FCP RAID to then archive. The storage costs to manage a workflow like this are very high and would make us think seriously about going back to tape. Am I wrong? please tell me I'm wrong.
 
dglasgal said:
The storage costs to manage a workflow like this are very high and would make us think seriously about going back to tape. Am I wrong? please tell me I'm wrong.
Click to expand...
Not wrong - but everybodys needs are different. P2 works fine for some workflows, but certainly not for everybodys, probably not most peoples at the moment. There is a cost involved with archiving with P2 which is only starting to be recognised, a man hour cost, rather than a $/GB one.

As time goes on memory costs will fall and solid state will become more viable. Then it will make increasing sense for an increasing number of people, as it becomes more of a consumable item, less of a capital one.
 
dglasgal said:
The storage costs to manage a workflow like this are very high and would make us think seriously about going back to tape. Am I wrong? please tell me I'm wrong.
Click to expand...

In my opinion you are wrong. If you don't need to record continiously the P2 to HD swap is no problem. And as far as the storage costs, that's the price you pay for working in this kind of resolution. Ok, with tape you can work offline and online the final edit. But then you still need a deck, and they cost big bucks. Now you need a lot of storage but it's much cheaper then a deck. You could offline with the proxy files; but you still need the storage for the originals.
But hey, HDs can be used for anything. If you have to rent a deck to capture 270 hours of footage offline and then to capture the online bits you need and then to play it out... You only pay the storage once, and then you own it.

If you add up everything (camera cost, tape deck, ...) pro level hd just got cheaper, it didn't get cheap. But going back to tape is going to cost you more eventually.
 
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