Twice last night I tried to do 2fps of the night clouds. both times after about an hour or so I got a record warning error. I tried too different p2 cards. The file was unable to play back as they have a little cross on them.

Phil.

I failed maths from Grade 5 onwards so I am not much help. I calculate you are recording 120 frames per minute for a total of 7200 frames for one hour's worth. This to me seems worth about 208 seconds worth of motion running time.

Are your P2 cards running out of memory and the system being unable to close off the .MXF file correctly due to lack of memory left to write the headers or footers or whatever .MXF files get done to them to rule them off?

You may need to shut off before the P2 card memory is fully committed.

The only other thing I can think of is that if the images are packed as a series of individual still-image files, they might have to be imported off the P2 as still-images and animated.

Are you able to examine the P2 as if it is a separate drive and get a file index list off it with the file extentions named like in Windows Explorer when you pull up "properties" of the file.

There may be menu settings to look for. Otherwise there is the possibility the system has a bug which might have to be engineered out.

the p2 card says I have 480 minutes worth...could it be the file is to big for fat32?

Phil.

This is where my ignorance shows. I thought a P2 was only good for about two minutes of HD. At MiniDV SD data rates, the old FAT32 file size limit was good for about 18 minutes. At DVPro50 of whatever it is, the high definition time limit on the cards might be a lot smaller.

when recording in native mode at 2 fps you get a much much longer record time. Normally frame rate HD you get 8 minutes per 8 gig card

Seems like something is haywire somewhere. You might have to try and workaround by keeping sequences shorter than the hour it takes to crash the system.

Something gnawing at my brain keeps me to thinking there might be a different playback regime than for normal motion images but since I don't know the camera, it is just distraction on my part.

I think there was something in the PD150 manual about still images with the Sony memory card so maybe that is it. It is the term "Native Mode" which prompts me to think this along with the longer runing time.

I still wonder if the system does not record to a different file type, maybe even eliminating the steadyshot safe zone and using more pixels off the CCD or both which might make the timelapse images non compatable unless processed or converted.

(Regarding gnawing at the brain, there is a phenonema known semi-humorously as EMS. Not to be taken as PMS. EMS = Evaporative Memory Syndrome. At my age, it is part of the background of life. Others describe it as the need to know principle at work as in "Do I need to know that? No." when the reality check says "Yes".)

Please don't head down dead ends on my suggestions. I am really out of my depth here.

i am curious to know what is the longest other people have done 2fps in 25pn mode. If I am alone in this problem

Were you recording with two P2 cards in the camera?

I know I can't preview clips (with P2 viewer) that are continued from one card to the next in the camera... I didn't check to see if it's the same in the camera. But everything worked fine after I imported the MXF files into FCP.

Phil,

I'm wondering if as Sam suggests that it might have something to do with the clip being split between 2 cards. So far I have not noticed if any of my timelapse cllps have actually been split between the cards or not; the longest single clip I've shot so far was about 1 1/2 hours in actual time both in 1fps and 2fps settings using 2 8gb cards.

I still have the original MXF clips - I'll see if I can reimport them into the cards and look to see if they got split up. Maybe there's a connection, maybe not but it's worth the time to investigate.

i was recording on two cards, i think it is because it was split onto two cards. I am going to do a test to see if that is the case

Do you think that it may have something to do with the hack? I know that if you try to shoot in 23fps it will let you for a while and then you have the same problem. A little cross through the clip.