I just went on a trip with 2 HVX200 cameras. I must say I was a little confused by the clip naming structure that Panasonic came up with and why I couldn't add my own info on clips in the camera. Someone on this forum mentioned that the amount of footage you would have to shoot to get a repeat clip name is amazingly large.

Over the course of three weeks we shot around 800 GB of footage at 720P 30PN and I have encountered at least four clips that have identical names.

Why Panasonic won't allow users to add a prefix (IN CAMERA) or something to make the clips particularly unique to the user and situation is beyond me. If I could just pin LND 0406 to clips to indicate that I was shooting in London on May 2006 it would be REALLY helpful. Panasonic could add its cryptic little names after the info. Anyway. At the moment it's not a huge problem because I've been creating subfolders in my capture bin and moving all clips from the same P2 card into their own sub folder. If I had allowed them all to just pile into a single folder I would have run into big trouble with duplicate file names.

I know that I can do all sorts of clever renaming schemes in FCP or once I download the media but there are very clear problems with that so no offense but please don't recommend that.

Anyway, in theory the naming structure may make sense but it my practical implication I am already bumping into problems.

My 2 cents.

Paul,

Your complaint is a valid one and a point that I've been struggling with also. I incorrectly assumed that file naming would follow the same conventions that DSLR's have been using for years, whereby you can add or create your own precursors to file names for just the reasons you brought up.

I've scoured the manual about this and only found references to adding meta-data or user data (post work) but not file/clip naming conventions prior to shooting.

This is something I was going to ask Barry-wan Kenobi about but just haven't had time - yet. Maybe he can chime in and offer some suggestions - if there are any.

If not, then we've all got the same issue: It requires naming file folders once transferred to the working or archive drive.

Probably most of us have been up against this problem. Page 57 of the user manual mentions using the SD memory card to "upload" metadata to the camera. It wasn't clear to me exactly how that works and if metadata items such as "take number" will automatically increment with each shot. It also says that you have to use the PC only "P2 Viewer" to create this metadata for uploading. I have not seen any threads where people have tried this.

It should be quite rare to encounter a duplicate name, but I guess it's possible.

The clips are named with an ascending numerical prefix, and a seemingly-random two-character suffix. So the first clip you shoot on a card will be named something like "0001XZ", where the "0001" stands for "1" and the other two letters are a unique identifier. Then the next clip you shoot would be something like "0002VF", where "0002" is the identifier for clip #2.

Why is there no unique name prefix/suffix capability? I have no idea. I was able to sit down with the Panasonic engineers at NAB and present a whole bunch of ideas to them about things users would love to see updated/changed, and that was one I put on the list.

You can somewhat get around this by assigning a user clip name, so you could assign "London April 2006" in the metadata and that metadata would be attached to every clip that's created, but right now that doesn't really show up anywhere but in the P2 Viewer. Some enterprising software engineer could probably write a program in about 10 minutes that would rename all the files in a P2 card to extract the custom clip name out of the metadata file and rename the clips to include that name, so 0001QZ could become "London April 2006 0001QZ"; it'd just have to track into the other folders and rename all those files accordingly.

Loading metadata is very simple, just tell the P2 Viewer program to save a metadata file on the SD card, then load that card in the camera and load the metadata into internal memory. Then turn metadata "on" in the thumbnail menu, and it'll automatically attach the contents of the loaded file to every clip you shoot. There's no provision for auto-incrementing yet, but that's another thing I asked them for.

I have no idea if the wishlist I asked for is possible, but it got asked for, I can tell you that! :)