Panasonic P2 in FCP

Hi guys,

I'm loaning out one of my local universities Panasonic HVX200E P2 cams next week and it's a pretty big jump so i just want to make sure things aren't going to go pear shaped in the edit suite.

I had my induction on this camera and based on the output media (SD DVD/Web) and in the interest of not burning the P2 cards too quickly i was advised to use DVPRO50 576/50i. There seemed to be an issue with stuttered panning when using the progressive option.

I'm going to be editing in FCP5 which actually supports P2.

Are there any pitfalls or schoolboy errors i need to watch out for when transferring the data over to my Macbook Pro FW drive. I've read some articles advise write protecting the media to stop spotlight indexing the card and causing potential problems. Others advise to use the P2 Manager to transfer footage instead of FCP.

Does FCP ingest the footage natively? Can you edit straight away or is there loads of rendering? How do i setup my sequence?

Sorry for the long post.

Thanks in advance

Hi Mike:
I've had the HVX200's since they first came out and started shooting with a 4gb P2 card which was the highest card available at the time. Many things have changed since then but FCP rocks with P2. I have FCP6. I use the Panasonic AJ-PCD2 to ingest my data. Once I put Snow Leopard into the equation, I could no longer use my Dual Adapter. You can also use your camera to bring in the files.

All you have to do is open up your project in FCP. Open a new bin and call it whatever works for you. I usually just call it Video. Now choose "Set logging bin" for that bin. Now go to File and choose Log and Transfer. If it doesn't automatically bring in your clips, then hit the + arrow at the top and direct it to your P2 Files.

Now all your clips will come into the program. You can now choose the clips you want, or just select all of them and drop them. They will now show up in your video bin in FCP. When you drop the first clip on the timeline, it will ask do you want to conform and say yes. That 's all you have to do Mike. It's real simple. Let me know if this helps.

eric

Thank you everyone.

Much appreciated.

Thanks Rista. Shane's tutorial rocks. Even though I've been using P2 for a very long time, I learned some very valuable lessons from Shane's tutorial.

Thanks again for posting,

eric

Eric Cosh
Phoenix, AZ
InternetVideoProductions.org
www.ericsfilms.com
www.paradigmvideoproductions.com