RED X and Exclamation point warning on P2 card clips?

Luis Caffesse

Luis Caffesse

Admin
Just got a phone call from a friend who in the midst of a shoot - he's been shooting for a few days with no problems.

He just copied over a 16GB card and everything seemed fine.
When he popped the card back into the HVX he was going to reformat it when he noticed that the clips all had a red X in the corner followed by an exclamation point.

Now unfortunately he doesn't have FCP or any other way of importing the MXF files in the field - he has just been backing up the data from the cards.

My advice to him was to keep that card intact for now if he can spare it - until he could figure out if the footage was okay.

Anyone have any ideas on what the red X warning means - and what the ramifications might be? I've never gotten a warning like that myself.
Thanks.
 
A red X means the clip is damaged, unplayable, and unrecoverable. But if *every* clip is showing up with that, then I'd suspect some foul play somewhere... did he write-protect the card before offloading it? Did any other program write data to the card? Can he try the card in a different camera? Definitely don't erase it until he verifies that the footage is successfully offloaded.
 
I am having this same problem right now.

The footage was fine, I downloaded it onto a hard drive, I then logged the footage into FCP and it couldn't read anything,as if there was no footage on the card.

I pop the card back into the HVX and every single file has a red X on it and won't play, it gives me the repair clip option, but that does nothing.

I still have the card with the files, it is a full card.

Every other card from the shoot works fine, everything logged fine, we did nothing different with this card.

Anyone have any help??
 
Okay, well I think I know what caused the problem now.

They were just dropping and dragging the p2 contents onto a mac, not write protected or anything, so most likely that corrupted the footage.

Any way to fix the footage?
 
The only card we've ever had corrupt was after dumping the footage without write protecting the card. I think something the computer does to recognize the card will on "very rare" ocassion mess up the card data.
Panasonic does have a guy that can help with some card data. I think his name is Yakav. There was just a post about this the other day. Maybe a search for P2 recovery will get you there or I'll link it if I find it.
Best of luck!
 
Hey Thanks Ted,

Well I now know exactly what is wrong, the cards XML files are wrong, not only are they named wrong but they are also corrupted...

Does anyone know how to reconstruct XML files from hand?
 
Or if there is anyway to import the MXF files by hand, instead of log and transfering them...

It's funny, if I open a MXF file on my windows system, windows media player can watch the cips, or play the sound - not together.

I can alos open the clips sans sound in windows movie maker though as DV instead of HD.

but FCP is just confused and can't do anything with them.
 
Don't use Log & Transfer. You can import the footage in many other ways, all of them more reliable than log & transfer.

Do you have P2CMS installed on your system? If so, you can just drag the MXF files directly to the FCP timeline. You'll have to import the audio files separately.
 
really, I didn't know I could do that with p2cms, I will try that in a bit.

Thanks Barry, and everyone else. I'm about 99% we got this thing fixed now, so thanks so much!
 
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