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P2CMS troubles


Satsuki Murashige

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Hey all,

 

So I just got back from an HVX shoot today where we were using my laptop (Intel Macbook Pro 3.1, 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM w/ Duel Adapter) loaded with P2 Content Management Software to ingest and copy footage from the P2 card to two firewire drives in a daisy-chain configuration. Trouble was, when I ran a test download in the morning, the P2CMS software would consistently freeze halfway through an ingest and then display an error message that said the computer must be restarted. We tried restarting the laptop with the Duel Adapter already plugged in, swapping out firewire cables, no dice. Finally, we ended up simply copying the files manually by dragging and dropping the card's contents to the hard drives. The copied files would then play back fine in P2CMS. So the footage is fine, but now I'm trying to figure out what the problem was with my hardware/software and how I can fix it.

 

This was my first time using my laptop with P2CMS to do this, but I've done this many times before flawlessly with another DP's system, also an Intel MBP with P2CMS and my Duel Adapter. So, my question is: what is the checklist of things I should be looking at to start troubleshooting this? I'm checking that I have the most current P2 drivers, and my P2CMS is version 1.1.9, Quicktime is version 7.4.5. Should I try reinstalling P2CMS? Any other ideas? Unfortunately, I no longer have access to any P2 cards to do further tests. :(

 

Thanks in advance, guys.

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Hey all,

 

So I just got back from an HVX shoot today where we were using my laptop (Intel Macbook Pro 3.1, 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM w/ Duel Adapter) loaded with P2 Content Management Software to ingest and copy footage from the P2 card to two firewire drives in a daisy-chain configuration.

 

 

Did you try using a single drive ?

 

Was it mac or PC formatted ?

 

jb

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Was it mac or PC formatted ?

 

Hi, I was the 2nd AC/P2 wrangler for Satsuki on this shoot.

 

Both drives were formatted Mac Extended (Journaled). But in the morning when we were running the tests we only had one of the drives at the moment, so we started out only running on the single drive. Didn't have time to try it out using only the 2nd drive later on.

 

The P2 viewer in the P2CMS program worked fine when reading directly from the P2 cards and also from the drives once we had dragged & dropped the files over. But as Satsuki said, we had a problem with the "Ingest" function of the program. It would transfer about half the files then the screen would scroll to dark with the error message to simply restart the computer.

Edited by Jonathan Bowerbank
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So according to Panasonic's web page, P2CMS may not be compatible with OS X 10.5 Leopard. More specifically, read/write and format functions are disabled, but then copying data from the card to a hard drive should still work, right? I realize now the previous system I'd used the program with was running OS X 10.4 Tiger... P2CMS 1.1.9 is the most up to date version for Mac, and I've now downloaded the latest P2 drivers.

 

https://eww.pavc.panasonic.co.jp/pro-av/sup...pdate.htm#p2_pc

 

So I'll ask again, but has anyone had any luck using P2CMS to copy data from P2 card to a firewire drive on an Intel MBP running Leopard?

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So I'll ask again, but has anyone had any luck using P2CMS to copy data from P2 card to a firewire drive on an Intel MBP running Leopard?

 

Not with Lep. but with 10.4 it was no problems.

 

jb

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Since you bump.

 

I was so blisteringly unimpressed with the software side of P2 that I wrote P2 Sanity for doing exactly this sort of work and generally sorting out the Gigantic Problem That Is P2. Unfortunately, it's windows-only.

 

P

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The purpose of P2 Sanity was to avoid ending up with things being listed in the NLE by the per-card P2 ID. It allows you to put any and all of the metadata in the XML into the filename, so you don't end up with:

 

0001XF.MXF

0001GR.MXF

0001LK.MXF

0002PK.MXF

0005P9.MXF

 

...where the first three of those were shot weeks apart, as you do with normal P2 stuff. I haven't used P2CMS as it didn't exist when I wrote Sanity, but it gives you results like this:

 

scene_1_take_1.mxf

scene_1_take_2.mxf

 

p2sanity.jpg

 

...etc

 

P

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I see, that's rather nifty. I take it f:\ in the "input" dialogue box is the P2 card, so you can rename files as you ingest them? Ever think of writing the mac version and selling it Phil? You'd probably make a decent amount of money on it.

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Hi, Phil --

 

What did you use to write that? Years ago, I used to write Turbo Assembler code under DOS 3.3. With Windows, getting up to speed on programming was more work than I could justify.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

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Not very; it's a combination of website coding (for the interface) and generalised Javascript and WSH.

 

Hypertext appilcations

Windows Script Host

 

To be honest, though, the best way to do this, and the smartest place to start, would probably be JScript.Net, which is enough like Javascript not to completely throw you off, but it isn't very well supported.

 

P

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