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P2 WORKFLOW
The P2 workflow consists of four parts: Shoot, Back-Up, Ingest and Archive.
SHOOTING
Shooting with a tapeless camera is no different from shooting with a tape camera… except, of course, there’s no tape. The Panasonic HPX-500 records onto a special flash drive called a P2 card.
A P2 card is basically four arrayed SD cards and is very rugged because it has no moving parts. P2 cards are made in different sizes from to 2GB (gigabites) to 32 GB sizes. The P2 cards are pricey, but can be used over and over.
The Panasonic HPX-500 can record 32 different frame rates.* The most popular is 720/24pn. The “n” stands for native.
Shooting 720/24pn you get over 40 minutes on a 16GB card. The Panasonic 500 holds 4 cards, so that means you can record 170 minutes without changing cards.
If you only want to shoot Standard Definition (SD) DV quality, you can get over an hour on each 16GB card. That’s like 8 tapes pre-loaded in the camera.
BACK-UP
Backing-up is a simple drop and drag function. You’ll need something to “read” the P2 cards such as the camera, a Panasonic P2 reader or just a standard sized PCMIA slot in the side of your computer. If you have the express size slot you need a $129 adapter.
Instead of tape stock, you need hard drives to copy the data from the P2 cards. Because you won’t be using the Back-Up hard drive for editing (you hope), it doesn’t need to be super fast, just super reliable.
The data on P2 cards is stored as .MXF files. MXF files are made up of two parts, a folder named “CONTENTS” and the “Lastclip.txt”. Just remember one thing: NEVER CHANGE THE NAME OF THESE TWO ITEMS!
Just like a tape, the first thing you do with a card out of the camera is push the tab which “Write Protects” the card.
On your Back-Up hard drive make a folder for each card. I suggest you label the folder with the name of the project and the card number, such as “Workflow Basics1”. Then, simply drag and drop the “CONTENTS” folder and the “Lastclip.txt” into the folder. It’s that simple.
Drag and drop to another separate hard drive and now you’re backed up.
You can check your files by downloading a free P2 Viewer and Contents Manager at https://eww.pavc.panasonic.co.jp/pro-av/sales_o/p2/cms/index.html . There are other P2 file management systems located on the donleyfilms.com links page.
You may be wondering how long the transfers take. That depends on whether you’re using the PCMIA slot, your buss speed and if the hard drives are firewire 400 or 800. Figure a 16 GB card takes about 18 minutes to transfer, so downloading 40 minutes of 720/24PN media takes less than 20 minutes.
One note: When you get your drives for editing I’m assume you’re using FCP and getting a drive that is formatted for the Mac. Drives formatted for PC may have FAT 32, a program that partitions the drive into 4GB partitions. This means you can’t write a file bigger than 4GB to that drive. That’s a problem for long video clips, so watch out during sit-down interviews. If you’re shooting 720/24pn that means no clip can be over 10 minutes.
INGEST
Instead of making two Back-Up’s, some producers prefer to make one Back-Up and then Ingest the footage straight into Final Cut Pro (FCP). By doing this, you can check your shots right on set, set up your project and can walk right into post ready to go. You can even start editing right on set!
This is a little more complicated than just dragging and dropping a file because you are setting up your project. For Ingest, you’ll want a hard drive fast enough for editing.
FCP can’t edit MXF files, so the MXF have to be converted into Quicktimes. You want to keep your Back-Up MXF files in case you or your client ever decide to cut on an Avid.**
Click on “Final Cut Pro” and then “System Settings” and set-up your capture scratch on the fast editing hard drive. There isn’t a 720/24PN codec, so set your “EZ set-up” to DVCPRO HD 24p at the same time.
Open a new project and save it with the title of the project, such as “Workflow Basics”
If you have FCP 5.1, under “File”, go to “Import Files” and you will see “Panasonic P2…”. Click on that and the “Log and Transfer Window” opens. If you have FCP 6, under “File” you will find the “Log and Transfer” right under “Log and Capture”.
The “File and Transfer” window is similar to the Log and Capture window, yet it is completely different. Here’s how it’s different: At the top-left all the clips will appear. You simply highlight all the clips, push the “Add to Queue” button and the conversion process begins. As the clips are changed to Quicktimes, a little blue button lights up confirming Ingest.
Here’s how it’s the same: On the top, right hand side is a window like in the Log and Capture window. Instead of ingesting the clip in it’s entirety, you can view it, use the J,K,L keys and mark in’s and out’s of the part of the clip you want transferred. You can sub-clip. Then, you send the clip to the Transfer Queue and only that part of the clip is transferred to FCP.
At this point, you may be tempted to rename the clip. The clips have names like still pictures from digital cameras: A long string of nonsensical numbers. Do not rename the clips as your back-up will become useless. Instead, use the description column to write a new name and put that window first in your browser.
If all this is too technical for you, I suggest hiring a Assistant Camera/IT Person/ Assistant Editor. This seems like an extra expense until you realize ingest takes the place of digitizing.
In a normal single camera day, the cards can be downloaded at lunch and again at the end of the day. We don’t want to spend two hours at the end of the day downloading. If we have an Assistant Editor on set, they can be ingesting as we shoot.
If I’m not using the P2 cards the following day, you could make a single back-up and you or your editor can use the back-up drive to make the Quicktimes before I reformatted (erased) the P2 cards.
Once the card is re-formatted there is no getting the data back. We want to make sure you have two complete copies before erasing the card.
Organization is the key to managing your media during production, but it becomes critical when you are going to re-format (erase) a P2 card during the shoot.
Again, it is advisable to hire a Camera Asst/IT Person/Asst Editor to handle the downloading of cards and creating log sheets during the shoot.
ARCHIVE
What about the long term? It seems so many productions are “throw-aways” how much footage do we really keep? There are options.
The first option is to wrap-up the Back-Up drive and put it on the shelf. This is what most people do. But don’t just leave them there. Some experts suggest you run your drives once a month to keep them lubricated.
A second option is to transfer important footage to tape. But quality is lost in the transfer and tape shot just ten years ago is shedding, so tape is not the best way to archive.
The best option seems to be DVD’s. This includes the double density DVD’s, Bluray’s and HDDVD recorders that are coming on the market. Long term archiving is still a problem for film, video, sound recording and still pictures. Still photographers have almost completely moved digital and are using DVD’s for storage.
*All Panasonic cameras use a 720/60p HD frame rate. For example, you can set a Panasonic camera to record1080/60i, but what is actually being recorded is 720/60p with a “flag” on each frame so it’s played back at 1080/60i.
The 720/60p is a 100mb (per second) data stream or about 1 minute of video per GB (gigabyte). That means a 16GB card will only hold about 16 minutes of DVCPRO HD.
Why 720/60p? It comes from the Varicam. The 60 progressive frames are how Panasonic gets “slow motion” from their cameras.
Panasonic’s HD is1280x720 pixels or just over 1K resolution compared to the 1920x1080, which is just under a 2K resolution. That’s almost twice the resolution. Which is why the Sony F900/3 rents for almost twice the money.
** In the CONTENTS folder is six other folders that contain the audio, video and metadata, which literally means data about data. When you take a still picture and all that stuff is recorded like the day and time, what lens, ASA, that kind of stuff. You can add meta data with the P2 Contents Manager.
Why back-up MXF files and not the Quicktime? Some systems don’t use Quicktimes, most notably Avid. Also, while you don’t lose quality going to Quicktime, you lose the metadata.
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