Weird P2 problem/issue

[puredrifting]

Hi all:

Did a shoot yesterday, used my 170 and then asked producer to rent a second 170 for a different camera angle. We shot about two hours worth of footage and I dumped all of the shot cards to two hard drives for backup. Used a Panasonic single card USB reader and yes, of course I locked the record tab before inserting the card into the reader.

I am going over the footage today and one of the cards from the rental camera didn't seem to work right. I have been shooting P2 since it first came out and I have never ran into this issue.

1. The card shows 6.29GB of material on it. When you click on the contents folder, only two sub-folders show up, Audio and Video. No Clip, no Icon, Proxy or Voice folders show up? Within the Video folder are two .MXF clips, one is 4.25GB, the second is 1.87 GB. In the Audio folder are eight .MXF files, as you would expect, four for each video clips. So there is material on the card, it did record, but somehow the card structure is incomplete. P2CMS and FCP 7.03 Log and Transfer do not show anything, obviously because the file structure is incomplete.

2. Also, the LASTCLIP.TXT is there, but it is greyed out and is not locked like all of the other cards LASTCLIP.TXT icons are on the other card. Also, all of the other LASTCLIP.TXT show that they are a 4KB file, this LASTCLIP.TXT shows 0KB.

Has anyone seen or experienced anything like this? Is it fixable? I may load the material from the drive back to a card and try to "repair clips" using the camera? Any other options or advice? I am flummoxed because P2 always just works, I have never had to do forensic reconstruction to get a card to work. If it matters, I am on a Mac, OS 10.6.6 and all of the other cards from the shoot from both cameras worked fine, just this one didn't.

Advice?

Thanks,

Dan

 

[David Jimerson]

Do you have access to any other NLE, like Premiere Pro?

 

[Michael Schrengohst]

Did you format the cards in camera?
I have had some weirdness when I would format the cards in one camera
and then use them in another.
Try doing the repair clip in the camera that caused the problem and then re-transfer.
But keep the stuff you already copied.

Try this to convert your .mxf file
http://dvfilm.com/raylight/mac/index.htm

 

[puredrifting]

Cards were formatted in the rental camera.

When I try to transfer the Contents file and the LASTCLIP.TXT file from the drive back to the P2 card to try the camera to repair the clip, the LASTCLIP.TXT file will not transfer, it gives an error message (this file in use on this Mac). Cannot open the LASTCLIP.TXT file either. When I transfer just the Contents file to the P2 card and insert into camera, the "repair clip" option is grayed out, only the format option is live.

I will try the Raylight option, do not hav Premier or AVID, I know that they can work with the .MXF files directly.

Thanks for the suggestions, anything else I should try? Weird problem.

 

[puredrifting]

Could not get th files successfully to read back on the camera because of the faulty file structure. Ended up downloading Raylight and it seems to convert .MXF to QT fine. Thanks for the suggestions.