Hey guys,

I am about to embark on a multi-day shoot that will be generating a lot of P2 material (on the order of 300GB/day) that will need to be offloaded to external HDD's every night with relatively short turnaround -- sometimes perhaps as quickly as 4 hours.

I'm planning on bringing a MacBook Pro, two 2TB G-Drive HDD's, and a 5-slot P2 card reader. My first question is: what's the best program out there right now for automated offloading with verification of the P2 data? I used ShotPut Pro on a shoot a couple years ago and it seemed to work well. Does P2CMS do automated offloading (meaning more than one card at a time)?

My second question: is this the best setup to use for this job? I'm open to investing in different gear if it is going to make my life easier, is very reliable, and is relatively small and light.

Thanks!

Peter

Hi again,

After a bit of research and some testing it looks like my best option is either P2 CMS or ShotPut Pro. The main advantage of ShotPut seems to be that it is a bit faster on copies (with byte verification) than P2 CMS based on a test I ran and, more importantly, it allows the user to select more than one destination folder for each card.

So I think I will go with that software and my MBPro setup, unless anyway advises otherwise.

Thanks!

Peter

Have you looked at the P2 Wrangler 1 Beyond, Inc. - The 1 Beyond Tapeless Workflow Solutions (http://www.1beyond.com/products/p2wrangler.asp?search=p2workflow)
It's a really nice bit of kit, you just stick the card in and it dumps it with verification to 1 or more drives, you don't even have to press a button.
Otherwise I find P2 CMS works OK, not bad for free. As Panny say, it is good to have a verification process in the procedure rather than just dragging and dropping.
Steve

Thanks Steve. Have an email in to them to get a quote. Any idea rough cost on one?

Peter