So I was unloading my footage from today and have encountered a problem that is driving me nuts. I started off as always by going directly from p2 to a hard drive moving the hard drive over to my mac and then transferring the footage. Well one of my clips (the 45 minute chunk of a 1 hr interview) would finish transferring before telling me it had an unknown error. So I started by clearing disk space, making sure there was enough on the macs internal drive which now there is (35gb, I know I need to clear off more for decent performance but i wont have time till the weekend to really shuffle all of my things around). I tried again, same problem. I then tried going straight from the camera, thinking that maybe the P2 data was corrupted when copied over to the HD, same issue. So then I tried doing a capture straight from the camera, about two minutes in it tells me that its out of HD space, despite having both 35 gb on the internal HD and 700 on the external drive that it should have been writing to. I'm in a real bad position here especially since I have 3 more interviews tomorrow and will need to clear off my cards by then. Your help is much appreciated.
"Unknown Error"- Driving me insane
- Thread starter ObiMcD
- Start date
Slight update: I finally managed to get it imported, but there's no sound, the other clips, no modified settings or anything, have sound, and I know we were registering a signal during recording.
Even if there's no way to salvage the footage, does anybody know how I can avoid these issues in the future?
Even if there's no way to salvage the footage, does anybody know how I can avoid these issues in the future?
The only way I could fix a similar problem was to use a product called Raylight. You need to convert using Raylight. In the future ONLY use the P2CMS software to transfer our clips to another drive from the P2 card. It's a free download from Panasonic. It appears there is a finder conflict with the P2 cards and the Mac operating system. The P2CMS software prevents file corruption. Read Barry Green's suggested workflow for P2. It works! Raylight can save your clips (most of the time).
dregenthal
Veteran
I may be way off on this "but" I'd recommend you run a check -- see if you have sound when you play the clip back "in camera." If you've already re-formatted your cards, then shoot a 30 second test shot (before going out there and recording something important). This should help identify if the problem is with the camera (unlikely) or with your transfer workflow.
I understand you're planning to edit on a MAC. I know little about the end of it--some folks do have problems off loading their clips, having them recognized, etc. (again I'm no expert).
If when you are satisfied your camera is doing its job you can always pick up a used laptop (eBay or elsewhere) on the cheap, install the P2 drivers and use one of the free/cheap software programs to off load your clips (while you're figuring out your MAC workflow). This way, at least, you'll not lose any important interview video.
Hang in there.