I'm completely new in the whole p2 business, but I'm considering using it for an upcoming videoclip.

What I am wondering is, whether it's possible to transfer the files on set to a windows laptop through pcmcia and store them on that laptop or external harddrive hook up to the laptop. And afterwards in post transfer the files to my g5 for editing in fcp. (so we can use the 2 p2 cards available continuously on set)

Hope someone can help me out on this one.

Your external drive will need to be formatted either FAT32 or Mac OS Extended. FAT32 limits filesizes to 4GB. Mac OS Extended will work for your Mac, but you'll need a PC program called MacDrive (http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/) to get it to work with Windows.

and what about transferring the file over a network from a pc to my g5?

because with dv if you digitize your material with, for instance premiere you will get 'avi dv pal' files (here in Holland) and with fcp 'quicktime dv pal' which are different files (even though you can work with them I believe)

Do you got something like that with p2 dvcpro aswell? That the dvcpro files for a windows based system are different from mac osx based system?

(once again, I'm totally new to this system and workflow)

If your network is setup correctly, it should be no problem to transfer files from PC to Mac. I have a mixed network and everything transfers fine.

I don't know about file formats though... I edit exclusively with FCP.

You can also format the hard drive as UDF and it will work on both OSX and windows. However, you'll have to find UDF format software since both Mac and Windows don't allow you to directly format hard drives that way. ...But yet the support the use of UDF. Hmmm.

But you may as well format the external HDD as NTFS and save yourself the headaches. Then you can copy the P2 data over to the mac later by one of two ways... One is via network -- I recommend having a CAT5E or better based wired LAN with gigabit switch to make this as quick and painless as possible. 54Mbps WiFi takes a while. The other method is to simply plug the NTFS drive right into your MAC. OSX allows you to READ NTFS, you just can't write to it or make any modifcations.

FAT32 is a complete PITA at times... But it's not so bad with P2 cards since they're FAT32 based as well and already have files clipped to the proper 4GB length on 8GB cards.

By default Windows limits FAT32 formatting to 32GB per volume or disk partition. However, you can tell it to ignore that limit if you do the format from the command line.

File formats are a non issue at this point (since Sam brought it up). Just copy the Contents folder and txt file in the root directory of each P2 card over to its own folder on the Mac or PC. Then import from that folder location just as you would from a P2 card. Formats only become an issue after you have imported the MXF files and wish to output to something else... Then it becomes a concern of AVI vs. QT and which file type combined with which codec will work on different NLE software.

ok great, thanks alot