Avid and Mac and P2 workflow question
 

Hi guys, quick question.
I have been called last minute on to a shoot for tomorrow. They want to use my HVX for some handheld, run and gun and green screen stuff, which I am looking forward to and know the camera will do great with.
However, they are using an Avid Adernaline to edit and I am a strictly Mac FCP kind o guy.
My usual workflow is this:

Shoot on HVX record on to P2 cards.
Hot swap P2 cards and load into P2 store on the fly.
Whenever there is a break copy files from P2 Store through Powerbook G4 and on to Firewire drive
At the end of the day unwrap Files on Firewire drive on to Through Powermac G5 and onto Raid as MOV files

All very easy.

Now, does anybody know if the following would work

Shoot on HVX record on to P2 cards.
Hot swap P2 cards and load into P2 store on the fly.
Whenever there is a break copy files from P2 Store through Powerbook G4 onto Firewire drive that is formatted FAT32.
At the end of the day take FAT32 firewire to AVID Adenaline and load onto RAID as whatever files AVID takes.

I know this is a bit complicated, but it is the only way I can see to make it work as:
1) P2 Store is not large enough to hold all the footage that we will shoot in one day (or so says the DP)
2) No one I can find can lend me a PC laptop to load my footage into.

If the worst comes to the worst, can I burn the Files on the P2 Store on to data DVD's from my MAC that can then be loaded into the AVID.

I know this is a pain in the arse kind of question to answer, but I don't want to find myself tomorrow up a certain creek without a certain instrument. (a Canoe)
Thanks in advance
John

John,

I cut on Avid but not Mac... and never worked with P2. Your best bet for workflow solutions would be to post on the Avid forum

www.avid.com

Note that there are different forums for different products.

Thanks Richard, I've done as you suggested.
In the meanwhile, could you tell me if you've had any experience taking files off of a Mac formatted FAT32 drive and copying it into a PC based system? If this can be done I'm pretty sure that everything else will work.
Thanks again for your help.
John

JOhn,

A quick search of the Avid Forum yielded this response from Todd Sanderson, teh moderator.


RE:Panasonic P2 workflow with Nitris
Take the ALEX tour on Avids website... it's a good place to start with regards to the P2 workflow... helped me alot with my first time. I'm running MCA not Nitris, so I won't presume to know the specific steps for your system, but I'm sure they are quite similar.

My workflow...

Create a Folder called Avid MediaFiles on the root of your storage drive (not in the OMFI ƒ!)
Inside that folder create a folder called MXF
Inside that folder create a folder called 1
Drop all the P2 "contents" from the video folder and audio folder 'only' into the folder called 1
Open Avid
Open the Media Tool
Search the storage drive you chose with Media Tool
There they are!
Drag and drop them into a bin directly from the Media Tool
Edit...

Adrenaline, at least as of version 2.1.6, still has significant bugginess with mxf files.... which--no surprise--Avid remains completely silent on.

Basically, any clip that spans across two P2 cards is going to be a HUGE problem for you. The latter portion of the clip (it's actually two files on the P2 cards) will appear with a bunch of unplayable black at the head of the Avid clip, followed by the valid media. The unplayable black needs to be removed (by subclipping the valid media) or you'll be unable to play the clip at all. The timecode will be incorrect, too. Also, the clip will show up incorrectly in the Media Tool as being 1:1, not DVCProHD.

The front half of the clip generally won't load at all. It'll be on the media drives, but when you try to drag it into a bin, it won't show up.

If you convert everything in FCP to a Quicktime, then import into Avid, it'll all work fine, but the import process is WAYYYY slower than copying the mxf files to the media drive.

I've taken to converting just the clips that span two P2 cards, and bringing the other clips into Adrenaline as native mxf. To the best of my knowledge, there's no other workaround.

If you archive the mxf footage to tape (I have a client who wants DBeta backups on tape), you'll find that you can't build very long timelines of mxf P2 media in the Avid... you'll get an odd error message (in 10+years of daily editing, I've never seen it before). You end up having to build a large number of smallish sequences to archive off to tape.

Thanks Scott, That's worked a dream.
John

Good; glad it helped. Now we need to kick Avid about not fully implementing the mxf format. :-( You'll also find that 720/30pN is not supported by Media Composer, which really really sucks.

Ahahha, and I see that ye olde 720/25pn is not supported either. Guess I'll have to find a work around for that too.
Thanks for your help scott.
John

According to reliable sources, Adrenaline v 2.5 and higher (they just released 2.6.1) correctly handles the mxf files that span two cards. Now I need to convince my chintzy post house to buy the upgrade...argh...