Reformating/Erasing P2 card with a Mac?
 

I've searched this one out but haven't found anything.

I have been told by a rental house that if you are dumping footage to a Mac that you can't erase the drive WITH the Mac. You have to use the camera (or something else?). I was planning a shoot where we would be doing continuous recording with a few cards. Dumping full cards as we go. But if we can't erase footage that is on the cards with the Mac, that sort of kills the continuous shooting thing.

Is this so and if so what should I do about it.

Hmm, I believe that the P2 card mounts as a removable drive on the Mac. So once you've imported/downloaded the files off the card, you can delete the files off the card as you would any other files...

At least that's how it works on a PC. I just finished a shoot on the HVX with a PC laptop doing the downloading. I'm pretty sure the Mac workflow is similar but can't be sure. The 12" powerbook on set didn't have a PC Card slot for the P2.

Best thing to do is just to thoroughly run through the workflow at camera checkout. My AC and I went through the entire workflow (shoot, download, backup, format, import) during camera checkout just to make sure there were no surprises. One thing I discovered is that the P2 Store doesn't format/download cards when it's hooked up to a computer via USB.

rental house is wrong
 

very easy to erase the p2 with your mac. I do it 2 ways, both effective (works on either FW mode--1394 device mode-- and with the laptop in the pcmcia slot:
1. use the terminal in superuser (aka 'root') mode and just copy and paste a single line of code each time you want to delete the contents. That line would be (sans the quotes) "rm -rf /Volumes/NO\ NAME/CONTENTS/ /Volumes/NO\ NAME/LASTCLIP.TXT"

done. eject. record. command-v that line above, rinse and repeat. (and if not in root/su mode, then prefix "sudo" (superuser do) to the line and enter your password (and if you don't know how to enable superuser mode, PM or google it)

2. you can just delete the contents, though the lastclip.txt is locked, so unlock it first (command-i, unlock).

I find the terminal fastest b/c it's one keystroke (paste)
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edit: Paul, after thinking about this, I set up an automator action to do this as a kind of autoloader. I posted the links and directions here: http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=52345