This P2 horror story was ported from Tommy D over at DV.com during a great on-going discussion started by Walter Graff titled
P2 reality starting to hit folks (requires log in).

(edit)
…In the off chance this may save somebody from the friggin’ purescreaminghell I’ve been in for the last week, well, it’ll be worth the post.

First off, a fine ‘lil camera [the HVX]. For what you get for what you pay, as far as image goes, super nice. Don’t own one, rented one for a shoot recently. (own a 100A)
I take my lumps for this one… I made some really stupid assumptions. I, as a card carrying Luddite (new member) will never, never ride the bleeding edge of technology on a serious shoot. Got it done, but heck fire and tarnation…

Here’s what happened. Doc shoot. Client is on a budget, yet wants to match the Varicam that the rest of the show was shot on. For various reasons, this camera package was cost effective locally. HVX200, 2 8GB cards and a P2 store. I do a bit of research (I mean, god—how *hard* can it be??! Right? Right? Right.) and find out that if I shoot 720/30PN I have 16 min. a card, and it takes, oh, half that time to dump a card into the P2 Store. Makes sense, right? I can put approx. 2 hrs into the P2 Store, and when that fills up I still have 32 min. on the cards as well. And I can dump the P2 Store onto my G5’s hard drive at lunch, and start anew. Wow. Five hours of footage… Oh, then I need to give him something to get on the plane with…what was it…Oh! The tape-er, I mean footage. Guess I’ll get a 250GB FW drive. Ok. Done. Should work out. Right?

Here’s the reality of getting my ass kicked, P2 style:

1. Renting, even with a great rental house, allows only so much time pre-shoot with the camera. The klunkiness of a new workflow is not trivial- even if it is a great workflow. Regarding the world of tape- the ease at which we set TC, pop cherries, lay bars and label tapes- not to mention check playback- is not to be glossed over. It is only second nature because of sheer repetition.

2. Ya’ll know that in any shoot, especially when interviews are sensitive, breaking rhythm is bad ju ju. So when you want to take the swap cards (don’t forget to delete the old media, or you go back to jail and don’t collect $200) Swapping cards shooting the data rate I did was a no-brainer.

3. But what do you do when the director wants to look at something, oh, four cards ago… Oh, you just hook up the P2 Store to your Mac and view them, right? Not with the P2 Viewer, as it’s only a PC product (?) now. Guess you’ll have to import them into FCP on your Mac.

4. Better have FCP 5.0.4. because 4.5 doesn’t give you a P2 import option. Ok, so say you have FCP 5.0.4, transferring this footage (ie, translating it into a QT takes time. By this time it’s pushing into lunch. Director’s focus has changed from wanting to see something from 4 cards ago, to wanting to *know* that the footage resides somewhere in that little black box of a P2 Store. Can you blame him?

5. This process takes time- specifically the time it should have been taking to transfer and delete the P2 store for another batch of shooting, as that process takes about an hour. Ah, well- at least there’s always enough time to hyperventilate… which is what happens when you see the P2 Store mount as an array of 7 volumes, all named “No Name.” Can’t drag drop them, have to drag their contents and fabricate folders. (NOTE: FCP 5.0.4 imports these hand transferred files as nicely as the P2 store itself, although FCP 4.5 taunts you with it’s stoic silence)

Oh, next interview shows up. P2 Store is full, my stomach’s empty. Hmm.

6. Well, FCP 4.5 will allow streaming at 720/60P@30fps directly to my Mac (with no backup, as the P2 cards are full. ha.) Test a couple clips. Great. The emotional crux of the interview just happens to be now…and ending the clip by hitting escape results in…the spinning pizza (as if to taunt my empty stomach) of death. Reboot. Clip is the right size, but not viewable. (Resource fork? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone? I’d appreciate any advice on this one…) So now the director’s freaked out because he doesn’t trust the unfamiliar, (meaning both the technology and the DP who said, “Hell, how hard can it be?” But I digress) and he’s not *about* to let anyone delete the P2 Store without visual inspection of the clips (again, which you can’t do if you’re on a Mac w/ FCP 4.5) He has a PC laptop on set, but you need the software (which the rental house didn’t pack) to view the files, and that probably wouldn’t do you any good on set anyway, because…

7. The software and the technical writing are so obfuscated as to be useless. Everything from the loading of the software to it’s use…Major assumptions are made about the user’s knowledge of proprietary terms. Nuts. To be fair, when it is understood, it works fine.

Ok, at this point, we are in the swamp. The rental house hooks us up with a SDX-900 to bail us out. Hope the uprezz looks good.

Just a little more comedy: HD makes for big files. If, perchance you have to cross platforms with them, whew. I had a Mac formatted 250GB FW disk. Client has an PC based Avid. I want to put all his files on this drive that is formatted for PC’s, so he can use them effectively.
Options:
1. Leave it as a Mac disk. Buy MacDrive 6, software that allows PCs to read and write to Mac formatted disks. (Great software. $50) Simple file transfer, fine. But I don’t think you could work off it.
2. Format the disk for PC and copy the files to it. Except that Windows XP, NT, etc. are NTFS formats- which are *read only* in Mac world. Can’t copy to it.
Format the disk in MS-DOS (FAT 32) which is read/write for Macs. Beautiful. Except for…
…the fact that the largest single file size for a FAT 32 format can be no more than 4 GB. Well, maxed out P2 clips seem to be 4.19 GB, so that’s out. But wait, I’ll just copy those bigger files to DVD’s and the rest can go on the hard drive. Alas, the hard drive is too friggin’ big to be recognized by FAT 32 format at all (my guess).
* You could always rent a deck and squirt it out to tape. (at a couple hundred plus for a half day, it may be worth it)

What I did and could work for you:
* Format the destination drive as NTFS on a PC. A PC obviously can read/write to it.
* Install MacDrive 6 on the PC- this will allow the PC to read/write to a Mac drive.
* Transfer footage from the Mac to the shuttle drive, then
* Plug it into the PC and using MacDrive 6, copy to the destination disk.
** It may work, and it would be a very cool trick to put the Mac in Target Mode (which causes it to become a FW slave disk) and use MacDrive to access it for direct Mac to PC interfacing- sorta. Sort of an unholy marriage, but what the hell. Haven’t tried it yet.

Anyway, that’s the saga. I loved the camera. And as it goes with any camera, it’s super suited for some things and not others. Just make damn sure you have thought out and TESTED your workflow exhaustively. Make no assumptions about anything. Your confidence and poise on set is way too valuable a commodity to have dissolve under the waters of uncharted, untested, new technology.

Ok, flame me. Got the nomex suit on!

Cheers,
Tommy

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A Response from Walter Graff

Flame on Tommy! These threads we’ve been having here lately are educational and ask the questions no one wants to face. And it’s always great to hear real stories from guys trying to use this stuff. Don’t worry, the world is watching.

Some of the other less professional boards are even making threads about our threads here now under the titles as “strange goings on at DV.com” and “These guys don’t know what they are talking about”. But it’s nice to see real stories from pros trying to find solutions (albeit not always the best).

It’s situations like you got into that are a do or die. I think P2’s niche is going to be consumer for the most part right now. They already have a bunch of wannabe filmmakers convinced that solid state is going to make them Spielberg. What happened to you was very much my concern just testing the P2 stuff out the last two weeks. It’s a scary proposition and unless the workflow can be easy and guaranteed, I just don’t see it being viable. The future will tell.

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Moral of the story: test, test, test, test BEFORE your money and your ass are on the line. Thank’s for the great story, Tommy!