virtual p2 card missing all structure but Video and Audio

Jason Adams

Jason Adams

Section Moderator
I copied a card to my raid and was rushed so I did not fully check the card. I simply compared sizes. Virtual card was the same as real card so I assumed all was good.

I get back to edit. After I have wiped the P2 cards and find the only sub folders in contents is only Audio and Video. its over 13 gigs of data in those two files but I am missing everything else.

My NLE does not recognize the card and p2 viewer will not display contents of virtual card.

Is there a utility to rebuild the missing pieces of the card. I have all thye video and audio. I am missing the map that puts it all together. I do realize that is a pretty freakin important thing to lose but that is where I am at.
 
Uh, wow... that's really weird. Bizarre...

Well, what NLE are you using? Most every NLE out there can take just the direct video and audio, if not happily. Premiere's P2 Importer wants the full file structure, but you can drag the individual files in. If you're using an Apple NLE, you can install P2CMS and it'll let you directly drag the individual MXF files to the timeline (audio and video separately, but you can still do it). Or Raylight or Calibrated MXF Importer, either of those will let you do it too.

With Avid, the most modern versions of the software use the card structure, but when P2 support was first added to Avid Express, it didn't use anything other than the audio and video folders, so surely that method will still work? You had to actually manually go into the audio and video folders and copy out the MXF files into your mediafiles directory, all together lumped into one big MXF/1 directory.

On most P2 cards, there are four of the six folders that are used. Audio and Video, of course, but also Clip and Icon. Icon is easy to fake, just copy any other .bmp file from any other P2 card's icon directory, and rename it so it matches the filename of each file in the video directory (so, 0113RB.MXF gets an 0113RB.BMP, for example). The hard part is the CLIP directory, because that's an XML file and if you don't get it right, it won't work for that clip. But you can do it; look at an existing .XML file from another card's CLIP directory. If you can read XML you'll see that it's a pretty simple layout, and if you substitute in the right clip name and save the file with the same name (in our example, 0113RB.XML in the CLIP directory) then yeah, you could probably reconstitute that card. It would get tricky for any spanned clips, but if you keep it simple you should be able to soldier through.

But yeah, find out why your raid warped out two directories, because that's really troubling. Run some diagnostics on that raid or something.
 
Got it. I had forgot about the old Avid P2 card workflow. I made a new folder in AvidMedia Files directory copies all MXF files to it and did a drag and drop of the .MDB file right into the bin and like Magic All is well.

Thanks Barry.
 
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