P2 & Final Cut: Making a copy of my footage in the field.
by John Dehn
on
Sep 4, 2008 at 11:04:45 pm
Hi, there.
I'm using a Dual Adapter with my MacBook Pro to injest P2 footage in the field with Final Cut Pro. I've been using log and transfer to get the footage on a drive and then making a copy of the footage onto a second drive for safety. I've been told I can format my drives as a mirrored raid and that way I get the redundancy in one step. The problem is when I go into edit, I only want to use one drive so I can store the other one off-site. (Basically I don't touch that one until the project's finished.) Is there a way to get my P2 footage onto two separate drives in one step, where I don't have to always have both drives hooked up in a raid configuration?
Re: P2 & Final Cut: Making a copy of my footage in the field. by Shane Ross on Sep 4, 2008 at 11:10:26 pm
First thing first.
Are you saying that you IMPORT from the cards in the field? You don't copy over the card keeping the original file structure? If so, that is a bad idea. Now you have limited yourself to using FCP, and you have lost 90% of your metadata. This is not the recommended workflow. What you SHOULD be doing is offloading the cards by copying off the entire contents of the P2 card to external drives, the CONTENTS folder and lastclip.txt file. Here is a tutorial on the proper workflow:
Now, as for drives...avoid RAID 1 unless you want to archive both drives together, because as you note, you cannot access one without the other present. In the field I offload to two seperate drives. Since I use firewire bus powered drives, I can daisy chain two of them together. And if you use software like Shotput P2 (imagineproducts.com), it will offload to both drives, and verify the copy.
Then you import the footage from those drives to your Media Drives, and either archive those drives, or archive the footage to archive drives or tape backup, then re-use those drives on the next shoot.
