P2, Mac Book Pro, Leopard

[Gus Sacks]

Hey all.

 

I consider myself to be a fairy seasoned P2 tech. Normally I use other people or production's laptop setups, but recently I assembled my own. It's running Leopard OS 10.5.5, Final Cut Studio 2, with the 6.0.4 update... all the P2 and RED and EX program one could ever want.

 

Well, I've got problems. I borrowed a Duel Adapter and P2 card from a friend, and basically it doesn't work. It seems like the newest P2 drivers don't really gel with 10.5.5 so well, and the only time it reads a card is when I restart with it in there. But I can't hot swap cards, and often itll have my system crash.

 

So I'm considering partitioning the drive and make a partition with Tiger on there running just 6.0 and to do the P2 injesting on thaaaat one and do the RED and EX on the other one. But that sucks.

 

Anyone else having these issues, or a solution?

[Satsuki Murashige]

Hi Gus,

 

I've been doing P2 data management with my Macbook Pro and Duel Adapter running OS 10.4.11 on a partition. The system works okay as long as I only use the Duel Adapter as a card reader and don't try to use P2 Content Management Software to ingest footage directly off of the card (which invariably crashes the system). I can hot swap cards without crashing as long as the Duel Adapter itself doesn't pop out of the Expresscard slot while copying footage, which it is prone to do (!!). For what it's worth, I've found that the P2CMS ingest function works fine on my system with a Panasonic FW800 P2 Drive. My other OS is 10.5.4 which seems to have the same functionality with the Duel Adapter and P2CMS as 10.4.11.

 

So what I now do is use the Duel Adapter just as a card reader and do a drag and drop onto the external drive, then check the footage off the drive with P2CMS. I've been doing Red data management on 10.5.4 with no problems. Hope this helps, let us know what you find out.

[Gus Sacks]

Hey,

 

Well. I don't even use the P2CMS Program. I just do the data transfer and ingest in FCP. The only reason I have Leopard, and FCP6, etc is so I can work and download and edit in ProRes.

 

I got an email from the engineers at Panasonic, and they basically told me what I already knew. I got in touch with Duel Systems, and the guy told me the newest drivers (Card Bus 1.33) don't actually support the P2 cards through the adapter for Leopard, which is lame.

 

SO, now I'm looking for (and asked Panasonic for) an older version of the P2 Mac drivers (like 1.2 or 1.0) that I think should work...

 

Otherwise, how did you partition and install, etc to run Tiger on one partition? I have tiger and I have a partition, but I don't know the next steps.

 

 

Hi Gus,

 

I've been doing P2 data management with my Macbook Pro and Duel Adapter running OS 10.4.11 on a partition. The system works okay as long as I only use the Duel Adapter as a card reader and don't try to use P2 Content Management Software to ingest footage directly off of the card (which invariably crashes the system). I can hot swap cards without crashing as long as the Duel Adapter itself doesn't pop out of the Expresscard slot while copying footage, which it is prone to do (!!). For what it's worth, I've found that the P2CMS ingest function works fine on my system with a Panasonic FW800 P2 Drive. My other OS is 10.5.4 which seems to have the same functionality with the Duel Adapter and P2CMS as 10.4.11.

 

So what I now do is use the Duel Adapter just as a card reader and do a drag and drop onto the external drive, then check the footage off the drive with P2CMS. I've been doing Red data management on 10.5.4 with no problems. Hope this helps, let us know what you find out.

[Satsuki Murashige]

Otherwise, how did you partition and install, etc to run Tiger on one partition? I have tiger and I have a partition, but I don't know the next steps.

Well, if I remember correctly, after you've created the partition and named the new volume with Disk Utility, you reboot your laptop with the Tiger install disc loaded. You'll be prompted to select which volume you want to install the OS on. Select the partitioned volume and install. After that's done, go to Startup Disk in System Preferences and select which OS you want to use after restarting. I'd recommend backing up all your data before you do this though, never know what could happen.