Hi friends,

Long day of shooting and we got back to the studio late to d/l everything and Final Cut does nothing when selecting P2 Import... No errors, no spinning wheel.. natta. All partitions mount on the Mac desktop and browsing folders is no problem. There were no problems with the device all day and we've used a rental unit several times. We’re no experts but not simply green either!

Does anyone have any ideas we can try in the morning? After getting over the feeling like I wanted to puke, I used the demo version of Imagine Products P2 Log and several of the .mfx files opened fine. But the demo is limited to one file at a time and before I buy it I wanted to ask you experts here. Their program also has a Repair Wizard that might be worth a shot? For what it’s worth it was all B-Roll and we don’t need any of the audio.

The P2 Store is due back to the rental house Monday a.m. so tomorrow looks to be busy.

Thanks in advance…
Billy

You could try Raylight for Mac and not even have to worry about P2 Import.

They have a demo that you can try to see if it will work.

It's the only way I edit now. No need to convert the MXF over to QuickTime. No taking up twice the space by converting them to Qt. Plus, the files are ready to go so there's not lag time while I'm waiting for them to be converted.

Worst case scenario:

Open up the P2 Cards in Finder, individually (yeah, this sucks if you have a lot on there), and copy the contents to your hard drive. DO NOT rename any folders on the card, just put each card's content into it's own folder. When FCP is fixed or you get Raylight, you can just import/transfer directly from each folder.

Thank you both.. great ideas, except the P2 Store has (14x) 8gig cards worth of data downloaded to over the couse of the entire day, so it's not just one P2 card.

On the Raylight wesite it states "Edit MXF files straight off the P2 Card in Final Cut Pro.".. does anyone know if that will work for an entire P2 Store worth of data?

I'll grab the demo, and also try to copy the 14 disk images that mounted from the P2 store.

Billy

I use P2 Genie to dump the entire P2 Store to a hard drive then open them all up in one shot with Raylight

On the Raylight wesite it states "Edit MXF files straight off the P2 Card in Final Cut Pro.".. does anyone know if that will work for an entire P2 Store worth of data?
Yes it would.

There is something I don't understand here. Billy states he has 14 8GB cards worth of data inside one P2 Store. There is no "P2 Stores" - so I am assuming he has only ONE P2 Store. Can somebody kindly explain how 14 8GB cards worth of data can be squeezed into one P2 Store? 14 * 8 = 112 GB, and one P2Store has only a 60GB harddisk.

There is something I don't understand here. Billy states he has 14 8GB cards worth of data inside one P2 Store. There is no "P2 Stores" - so I am assuming he has only ONE P2 Store. Can somebody kindly explain how 14 8GB cards worth of data can be squeezed into one P2 Store? 14 * 8 = 112 GB, and one P2Store has only a 60GB harddisk.
The only way 14 8GB cards could be copied to the P2Store is if most of the cards weren't even close to full. The P2Store holds ~55GB.

It could be my understanding that is wrong. What I know about the P2Store is the 60GB hard-disk is divided into 15 4GB partitions. If I insert a 4GB P2 card to copy, it will occupy 1 4GB partition, regardless of whether the data is just 1 byte or 3.999GB. Similarly, a 8GB P2 card will occupy 2 4GB partitions. That's why I am puzzled how 14 8GB P2 cards can be copied into one P2store ...

What TingSern is saying is correct. The P2 Store's capacity is governed by the size of the drive (60 GB) and the partitioning (15 partitions). A 4 GB card uses one partition and an 8GB card two partitions, regardless of how much information is on the card and transferred.

Best thing for Billy to do is to transfer all the contents of the P2 Store onto RAID1 storage and take it from there.

It could be my understanding that is wrong. What I know about the P2Store is the 60GB hard-disk is divided into 15 4GB partitions. If I insert a 4GB P2 card to copy, it will occupy 1 4GB partition, regardless of whether the data is just 1 byte or 3.999GB. Similarly, a 8GB P2 card will occupy 2 4GB partitions. That's why I am puzzled how 14 8GB P2 cards can be copied into one P2store ...
Forgot about the partitioning... but if you're only using 1GB on an 8GB card, then would it still reserve two 4GB partitions?

That's the part that is left undocumented ... I don't really know whether the P2Store copies data at the 4GB partition boundary or it uses the P2 Card size capacity to determine how many partitions to reserve.

I found it very hard to test it out - because of the 15 partitions - most of the time, I run out of drive letters to assign.

If you're using the newest P2 Store Manager, you don't have to assign partitions by drive letter; you can instead tell it to mount all the drives in an NTFS folder. Much more convenient than hassling with drive letters, for the type of experimenting you're trying to do.

Okay - thanks Barry. I will give it a shot and let everybody know then.

Hi everybody,

I confirm the P2Store uses the P2 card capacity to reserve the number of partitions on the Hard-disk. In other words, if you use 8GB P2 card, even if the P2 card is just 10 bytes, it will occupy 8GB (or 2 * 4GB partitions) on the hard-disk.

So - this implies you have to fill the P2 Card to the brim or nearly the brim in order to maximise the space available on the P2 Store's Hard-disk.

How I test? Create some video (1 - 2 minutes) on my 2 16GB P2 cards. Copy both P2 cards to P2store. Create again some video - copy it to P2store. 3rd P2 card - can copy. (3 * 16GB = 48GB). Copy the 4th one - error .... 48GB + 16GB = 64GB which is > than 60GB available on the hard-disk.

I also viewed the P2Store contents using P2 Manager ... it does allocate partitions based on P2 Card capacity.

****

Which brings me back to my original question - there seems to be no way to squeeze 14 8GB P2 cards into one P2Store. I have not got any clues how Billy manages to do that in the first place ... unless there is some faulty hard-ware to begin with.