Avid P2 Workflow
Better Media Management for P2

Written by: George Cohn

Requirements:

• Avid Xpress Pro or Media Composer
• Panasonic P2 Viewer application

Overview:

Tapeless workflow has finally become a reality. It frees us from tedious captures and allows us to easily review and cull our footage even as we shoot.

The easy come, easy go nature of video as data means that it is up to us to save our assets. This can be scary for people who are used to having a set of tapes that they can heft in their hand after a long shoot. Anyone who has ever lost a media drive can tell you what a relief it is to be able to recapture or batch capture the assets of a project.

Even with tape, life is a lot easier if you develop simple ways of keeping track of your stuff. When I started producing video professionally, I was working with mini DV. I figured it would be a good idea to keep the tape names down to boring, simple numbers and then use a spreadsheet to keep track of what's really on which tape.

When I got the HVX200 I looked all over the Internet to see how others were doing Avid ingest and media archival. There was not a lot out there. Most people just strip-mine the MXF files out of the subdirectories from the P2 cards and drop them into the Avid MediaFiles\MXF\1 directory. Avid can also recognize a P2 card as a "media drive." I have seen some workflows where you use Avid's Consolidate feature to integrate the media from a P2 card into the normal media directories. This did not look realistic to me, for many reasons.

I needed something that was as safe and mindless as possible during a shoot and as safe and useful as possible afterwards. The first thing that came to mind was to treat the P2 cards like tapes. I could copy them onto a hard drive and give them each a number. Then I could keep a spreadsheet that tells me what's what. That would work great except for the clips that cross P2 card boundaries. I would have to deal with them as segmented clips in Avid.

On Panasonic's website you can download a free application called the P2 Viewer. The helpfile tells you how to use it but not what to use it for. I noticed that, among other things, it allows you to view P2 card images on your hard drive as "Virtual P2 Cards." It also allows you to create brand-new virtual P2 cards on your hard drive and copy clips from other P2 cards—virtual or otherwise—to the new virtual P2 card. This means you don't have to be locked in to whatever you can cram into a physical P2 card. You can organize your raw footage any way you want. It also takes care of the segmented clip problem.

For a naming convention, I still wanted to keep it simple but at the same time load some light semantic information into the name. I figured that on any given day we might shoot one or more projects with one or more cameras. My virtual P2 cards would be named using the shoot date followed by a sequential number to differentiate projects, cameras, or whatever else might crop up in the future. The names would take the form yyyy.mm.dd-nn, so that these virtual P2 cards could be sorted by date easily. They could be large or small, it doesn't matter.

I would set up an archiving system and a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet would keep track of what's on which virtual P2 card, what media drive it's on, and what drive or drives it's archived on.

There are a couple of ways to get Avid to see a virtual P2 card as a media drive. One way is to share it on the network and then map it as a network drive. A much simpler way is to use the Windows subst command. This causes the system to see the virtual P2 directory as a virtual drive, which is exactly what you want. When Avid sees a volume that has the structure of a P2 card, it recognizes the media. You can then use Avid's Media Tool to locate your assets, and then select and drag them into a bin in your project.

Below is the workflow as I use it today, as a list of steps and screen shots. You can use it as is, or modify, adapt, or accessorize it as needed.

Before Shooting

Create several working directories in a place where you can get to them easily during the shoot.  You will be dumping your P2 cards into them.  Keep it as simple as possible because later during the shoot is not a place where you want to screw up.  I usually make a directory called P2 at the root of the drive I am planning to copy to, and populate it with subdirectories named 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. There are a number of ways to do this, including using the Command Prompt if you want to be really old school:

In the end, your directory structure will look something like this:

During the Shoot

Whenever a P2 card gets full, offload it into the next available empty directory.
To do this, navigate to the P2 card and do a select all (ctrl-a),

and a cut (ctrl-x).

Then navigate to the directory you are moving the data into, and do a paste (ctrl-v).  When it asks you if you want to move a read-only file, you can enter A or click Yes to All.

Then wait 8-10 minutes for the copy to complete.

The assets from your P2 card are now on your hard drive, and the P2 card is empty and ready to go back into the camera.

After the Shoot

Consolidate the material from the shoot into a single virtual P2 card, using the Panasonic P2 Viewer application. One of the benefits of doing it this way is that clips that go across more than one P2 card are seen as single clips.

First, bring up the P2 viewer and identify each directory that has a P2 image as a virtual P2 card. The P2 viewer has a menu item for this under the Tool menu:

You will receive a dialog for setting and deleting virtual P2 cards. Click the first item in the toolbar to set up a virtual P2 card:

You will receive a directory picker dialog. Use it to navigate to the place that you copied your first P2 card to.

Your Setting Virtual P2 Cards dialog will now look like this:

Continue identifying the rest of your P2 card directories.

Finally, Create a target folder. Navigate to the place you want to use as a parent directory and click the Make New Folder button.

Give the new directory a name. You can use any name you like. My own naming convention has the date of the shoot followed by a sequence number. I use a date format of yyyy.mm.dd so that they can sort by date.

If you shot five P2 cards worth of footage, your Setting Virtual P2 Cards dialog will end up looking like this:

Now go to the View menu and set up the P2 Viewer to show All Virtual P2 Cards in the Primary Bin.

Then have it show the target Virtual P2 Card in the Secondary Bin:

Select all of the thumbnails in the Primary Bin and drag them to the Secondary Bin. The copy can take quite some time, especially if you have done a lot of shooting.

After the copy completes, your secondary bin will show a thumbnail for each clip. The Primary Bin will show two thumbnails for each clip, because it is set to show all virtual P2 cards and you can see both the source and destination copies of each clip.

It is easy to check that you got them all. If you navigate to the root directory and float your cursor over the P2 directory, you will receive a summary window that shows the size of all of the data within the directory, including the subdirectories.

If you then float the cursor over the destination virtual P2 card directory, you should see the same data size.

You now have two copies of your P2 data on your hard drive. I don't like to delete the original files until I have made at least one copy of the new virtual P2 card. Today I archive onto hard drives that are dedicated to that purpose. This is the fastest, cheapest way I can think of to do it. If some faster, cheaper way comes along I will totally jump on board.

When You Are Ready to Edit

Use the system subst command to make your virtual P2 card look like an independent drive.

It should then be visible.

When you bring up Avid you will see it scan your virtual P2 cards.

If you forget to run the subst command before bringing up Avid, have no worries. You leave Avid up, run the subst command, and then run the Mount All command under Avid's file menu.

To get the assets into your project, use the Media Tool to locate them, select them, and drag them into a bin in your project.

About the Author

George Cohn is a founding partner of Creation Ground Media LLC (creationgroundmedia.com), a corporate video production company in Mountain View, CA.

After receiving a Masters in Computer Science at Indiana University, George began a career at high-tech firms in Silicon Valley, managing software development teams at UB Networks and Divicom Inc. George’s artistic appreciation for visual composition and music, combined with his technical and computer skills, led him to a second career in filmmaking and video production. He has not looked back since.

When not behind the camera or in the editing suite, George enjoys bicycling, hiking, bee-keeping, music, and cooking.