HPX250: Panasonic P2 Viewer 3.60 & P2 Viewer Plus puzzling issue on ingestion

[lonewolf2koc@hotmail.com]

Had the chance to try out the new P2 Viewer Plus fr. Panasonic on both Mac & PC OSes.

The mysterious aspect of the P2 Viewer Plus is its inability to copy LASTCLIP.TXT file.

This is a premium feature. It has MD5 verification but will not copy the important LASTCLIP.TXT file.
Most NLE apps will not work properly when there's no LASTCLIP.TXT on the root of the folder.

The P2 Viewer 3.60 for Windows has the exact same "P2 Ingest" function and it does copy everything. It even
open 2 windows. The only thing it can't do is MD5 file verification.

Panasonic P2 Viewer Plus seems to lost its identity on the ingest. I assume that when selecting the root of the P2 drive,
it would copy everything. But no. Only the CONTENT folder.

I contacted Panasonic and they acknowledge the issue but seem not to worry about much on the LASTCLIP.TXT file.
This is a bit troubling. It makes me wonder if Panasonic has different reason why not to include LASTCLIP.TXT file.

 

[THoff]

LASTCLIP.TXT should only be needed for recording, it doesn't contain any information about the clips on the card and a NLE shouldn't require it -- I know Edius for instance does not. Which NLE(s) have you come across which require this file?

 

[lonewolf2koc@hotmail.com]

The good old Final Cut Pro 6.0.. Without that LASTCLIP.TXT, Log & Xfer will not allow P2 import. In the broadcast world, there're still quite a few people that still use v6. Because the annoying proprietary Apple XSan & expensive fibre channel switches & NICs for file sharing, few are willing to invest the hardware infrastructure to jump to 10. It's great for single user. Collaborative editing is still far behind in FCP X.

So far Premiere CS5, CS6, FCP 7.0.3, FCP 10.0.5, 10.0.6 all can take the CONTENT folder only. No need for LASTCLIP.TXT file.

Personally, I'm reluctant to skip this file for the sake of 100% compatibility on all NLE apps.