Spanning P2 cards Question? Workflow?

[borax]

Hi,

Lets say I have 2 16GB P2 cards loaded in the camera. When the first one gets full it jumps to the second card. I hand the full card off to an on site editor to import the footage and format the card. That card is then re-inserted into the HVX in slot one.

The confusion starts at this point....

I have been told that instead of continuing to record onto card 2 it automatically starts recording to card one.

Is that correct?

I hope it would instead continue to fill card 2 until it's full then jump back to card 1. Thus creating an efficient workflow.

 

[Ldom]

It doesn't do that on mine. It keeps filling card 2 until it's full and then it continues on the newly formatted card 1. In other words, rest assured it works like it should...

 

[Ram S.O.S]

to add to this question, how can you format the card you just dumped in the camera without stopping the shoot? Is that possible? Do you have to format the card on a laptop first then inset it into the HVX?

 

[Sam Davies]

to add to this question, how can you format the card you just dumped in the camera without stopping the shoot? Is that possible? Do you have to format the card on a laptop first then inset it into the HVX?

AFAIK you'll need to format the card using something other than the camera if you want to maintain continuous shooting.

 

[borax]

Thanks for the reassurance Ldom. It's good to hear that it works as it should.

As for the follow up question. I would also like to know what program will format a P2 on a MacBook Pro?

 

[ProfessorU]

Won't the p2 content manager for mac format it for you?
It's about halfway down the page

 

[Barry_Green]

P2CMS doesn't yet format cards on the Mac. Hopefully it'll be someday updated to support that.

I have been told that instead of continuing to record onto card 2 it automatically starts recording to card one.

Nope, it works just like you'd expect it to -- it fills up card 1 and rolls over to card 2, and stays on card 2 until card 2's full and then it rolls back to card 1 (assuming you've put a new blank card in slot 1).

I would also like to know what program will format a P2 on a MacBook Pro?

You'll need the Duel Adapter to connect a P2 card to an MBP.

The P2 Store can format cards, but other than that... well, you can't really format cards on a Mac as far as I know. You can delete the clips off them using P2CMS and that's basically just as good.

I've been told you can format a card using the disk utility, but I haven't tried that.

 

[Josh Wallace]

You can format a P2 Card on a Mac by moving the CONTENTS of the card to the trash and then emptying the trash. That actually does it although I also made a copy of an empty CONTENTS folder from a freshly formatted P2 Card to my desktop and usually copy that back on to the card before I eject from the Mac as an added precautionary step.

 

[Barry_Green]

That doesn't format the card, that just erases information from it. And while people have done that before, that workflow won't work with a 16GB card unless, as you say, you restore the CONTENTS directory structure.

 

[THoff]

I previouisly suggested saving the CONTENTS folder of an empty, camera-formatted P2 card, but was told by Tony Lorentzen that for some reason the camera doesn't like P2 card that had this done to them -- apparently you need to format the cards in the camera, though I haven't tried it myself.

So my next suggestion for Mac users would be to use Disk Tools to create an image of an empty P2 card, and dump that back onto the card at the end of the offloading process. The image should be small and write quickly back to the card.

 

[pkendall]

if you have a p2 store you can erase and format it in a milisecond..

 

[JonathanLB]

For us, it seems easier to avoid confusion and transfer more often, so we end up just switching out the first card at certain intervals well before it's full and then shooting on card 2, not even putting card 1 back in until we need it again. It's all about what you shoot I guess, since we just shoot music videos with it there is never a need for that much footage on one card, an entire shoot won't fill up two cards entirely most likely, at 720pn anyway, so we keep offloading regularly to secure our footage on the computer and check it out quickly. I'm really paranoid after a shoot we did with tape had bad results so I like to see the footage right away on the computer, and I also like having everything backed up sufficiently at all times almost. So the process for us is P2 card --> laptop --> external hard drive. That way it's always on two sources. At the end of the shoot, the external goes with one person and the laptop goes with another in a separate car, thus providing two physical locations of the footage and giving me peace of mind!