Panasonic's P2 Card and the Format Error!

Hopefully you'll never see this:

The error message blinks which is why it looks faded here.

It's a FORMAT ERROR! (I think it actually reads "FORMAT ERR!") which can occur very rarely on P2 cards for seemingly no reason. Recently we had one while on location.

What happened was someone forgot a standard USB cable to load in footage from an HVX200 camera to a Hard Drive - I've had extremely bad luck with going directly from the camera to a hard drive in the past so I avoid it at almost all costs now - and since we were on location with pretty much nothing around us in the way of stores and rummaging around through everyone's bags and equipment cases looking for a USB cable I decided to load in the footage via Firewire.

Now this camera and another we've been using have had Firewire issues in the past. Namely extremely slow and getting slower over time Firewire transfers. Resetting the cameras and restoring the Firmware seems to have no effect. USB xfers are multiple times faster than Firewire at this point so I've been going with USB regularly, often and without issue when there's no card reader available.

So, finding a Firewire cable and setting the camera to be a Firewire device and hooking everything up I began the copy from camera to laptop. While slow -as expected- it was going and I told everyone to take a coffee break while it copied over.

About 400MBs into the copy there was a Finder Read/Write error, I didn't have permission for something or other and it konked out. I suspect it was something to do with the "LASTCLIP.TXT" file which is locked by default.

So I tried to unmount the camera with no response and ended up just power cycling it since it was completely unresponsive and the Finder on the laptop couldn't unmount it even after waiting 5+ mins.

Powering it back on I saw the dreaded "FORMAT ERROR!" in red on the screen.

Now this is a very rare error and unfortunately there's not much you can do about it on location. Some people have had luck with a few power cycles and mounts and unmounts, others have had luck with Disk Utility repairing it but I wasn't one of them. I'm reluctant to have the Mac do anything to the cards but we were desperate and the director said go ahead so I tried a few repairs with the Terminal and Disk Repair but nothing seemed to help.

We ended up calling and overnighting the card to Panasonic who was able to recover the footage in their labs. They copied the footage back to the same card of ours and shipped it back to us. Panasonic was amazing, fast and helpful.

So the bottom line solution for us, upon seeing FORMAT ERROR! was to just ship the card to Panasonic and have them recover the footage.

My new rules for loading footage from a P2 card when you have to use the camera as a reader is to:

1. Lock the card with the write protect switch before mounting it on the Mac.
2. NEVER use Firewire. USB only from now on.

MacBook Pro 2011 Not Recognizing SanDisk Class 10 SD Cards

A few people are reporting that a Class 10 SanDisk SD Card won't be reliably recognized in a 2011 MacBook Pro.

What does seem to work as a temporary workaround is restarting the Mac with the card already inserted. But even then it's not recognized if you remove the card and then reinsert it or another similar card.

"I use a Sandisk SDHC Extreme Class 10 SD Card and have problems getting it to read through the inbuild SD card reader.

I tried the following:

Reformatting on Disk Utility
Reformatting on my Canon 450D
Restarting Laptop
Resetting PRAM
Resetting SMC
Repairing Disk Permissions
Repairing Disk

All of these did not solve my problem. I have a card reader which when plugged into the MBP, works fine and detects the card.

The Weird Part

I plugged the card into a friend's iMac and it detects it every time. And then right after I do that, I plug it into my MBP, and it detects the card, but the problem is once I eject it, and slot it back in, it fails to detect again! However if I try this method again (Slot to iMac, remove, slot back to MBP), it will fail the second time. "


Someone tried a card in MacBooks at an Apple store and:

"They had me EFFA back the machine, and provided me with a new one. I tested the new one right out of the box and it worked fine, but after Migration, it no longer worked. Restoring using the included disk back to factory specs DID NOT restore the ability to read the card.

In checking random machines at the apple store, only 1 on the entire floor recognized that a card was inserted, when I tried the Sandisk SDHC Extreme Pro 8GB 45MB/S card."


Apparently Apple and SanDisk are aware of the problem but if you use SD Cards for production or have them sent to you for editing it's a good idea to be aware of this issue. I've not seen it as I've been using an external USB card reader. Hopefully it'll be addressed soon with a software update.

FCPX Apparently "Not Ready for Professional Use"...yet.

"Whenever you've got something which is that big a re-write, stuff gets changed, stuff gets left out, stuff gets added later because they can't get it all re-written and I guarantee you that on day one when the dot zero release ships it will not be ready for professional use. 

Apple has a very poor track record of perfect dot zero releases. So for those of you saying: "this is without a question the second coming, I'm going to bet the ranch, I'm buying this the day it's released and God help me I'm plunging forward whether it's ready or not" -- I want your clients. 

I think there is only one company on the planet that could rethink non-linear editing like this. I think it's Apple. It's not ready for prime time. First it's not ready because it isn't shipping, then when it is shipping it's time for us to experiment."

Larry Jordan said recently.

Later on he expanded upon his remarks but said some interesting things:

"Based on what I learned during my conversations with Apple, I believe this release provides us with an opportunity for a large step forward."

An opportunity (to me at least) is not the same as the actual "large step forward."

Wait till it drops and I think your jaw will drop for one of two reasons at the dot zero release of FCPX.

Of course, a few months from now, after some FCPX updates all of this will be moot, but fun to look back on.

Locking (Protecting) P2 Cards Before Ingesting

We've been having a problem with one of our P2 cards here on location which may warrant it's own post in the near future but one suggestion I've been reading about (and talking to friends, thanks, you know who you are) is that it's generally good practice to Lock your P2 cards before you mount them on your Mac.

Why?

I've been told that the Mac will write files to the P2 card upon mounting in the Finder so I decided to find out. Here's what I did to test:

1. With the camera not connected to the Mac format a P2 card.
2. Shoot a test clip.
3. Turn off the camera.
4. Switch the Lock switch on the P2 card to PROTECT.
5. Turn on the camera and mount the P2 card on the Mac.
6. Fire up the Terminal and type in (with out quotes) "cd" hit space bar then drag the icon of the NO NAME P2 card to the Terminal and hit Return to Change Directory to the P2 card.

Your Terminal should read something like this: cd /Volumes/NO\ NAME

7. Type "ls -a" which lists all, including hidden files.
8. You should something like this:

.
..
CONTENTS
LASTCLIP.TXT

Ok, cool, so with the Write Protect tab ON that's what's on the card from the camera untouched by the Mac.

Let's try it with the Write Protect tab set to OFF.

Just mount the card like you normally would but leave Write Protect off. Now, with the unlocked card mounted run the Terminal steps again. After "ls -a" you'll see:

.
..
.Spotlight-V100
._.Trashes
.Trashes
.fseventsd
CONTENTS
LASTCLIP.TXT

So there you have it. The Finder WILL write to a mounted P2 card without you having to do anything. Has that caused a problem for me in the past for the thousands of cards I've loaded in in my life? No, but the possibility is there that the Panasonic camera may not like the files that are on the card after mounting.

My new rule of thumb is to lock the cards before mounting them in the Finder…just in case.

Even More FCPX Screenshots

No telling how long they'll be up. Take a look here.

Streamago for Video Streaming and Serving

A friend showed my Streamago the other day and while I haven't really played with it too much, it looks like it could be a handy (largely FREE) resource to stream video and post videos of limited size.

Ya know, for when Youtube isn't "classy" enough for a client or for when Wistia isn't cooperating with some browser.

Macrumors Posts FCPX and Motion X Alleged Screenshots

Have a look here, before they get pulled. They were already pulled from the original source apparently.

Uploading Videos to File Sharing Sites

Here's a quick tip: When a client wants you to upload some selects or some rough edits to some video sharing site, many support multiple simultaneous uploads.

Try highlighting (using Shift or Command) more than one video in the upload window and then hit send or upload or whatever the button is and see if you can upload more than one at a time.

It saves time but I was a bit surprised that more people don't try it.

Loader organizing software

Loader from Digital Heaven…


"…works alongside Final Cut Pro (launching and quitting automatically) and appears as a small tab on the left side of the screen. When tracks from iTunes or files/folders from the Finder are dragged onto the tab, it slides out to reveal a list of projects currently open in Final Cut Pro. After dropping the items onto the desired project, Loader copies them in the background to the assigned media folder linked to that project. In addition, those audio file formats that don't play nicely in Final Cut Pro (.caf, .m4a and mp3) are automatically converted to an AIFF file before import. When the copy is complete then the copied files are sent to a new bin in Final Cut Pro. 

Loader also offers the ability to sort copied media into subfolders according to the file extension. By default, subfolders are automatically created for audio, graphics and movie file types and settings can be changed at any time to suit specific requirements."

also

"Some types of audio formats don't play very well with Final Cut Pro so if you drop an mp3, AAC or Core Audio Format (.caf) file onto Loader then it will automatically convert it to an AIF file."

It's $79.00 but if you find yourself in FCP and doing lots media ingesting and organizing this could be a fairly handy timesaver. I haven't tried it yet and it seems a tad pricey and word on the street is that it copies all your media which could be an issue if you have large assets and limited space but it could eliminate some hassles which is always a good thing.

Check it out here.

Making 1920 x 1080 smaller and keeping the aspect ratio

Just a quick note, when you want to make 1920 x 1080 smaller but keep the same aspect ratio here are the most common sizes:

1080/1920 = 0.5625

For 1920 they're:

1920 x 1080
1440 x 810
  960 x 540 (this is half-size)
  480 x 270
  240 x 135

720/1280 = 0.5625

For 720 they're:

1280 x 720
  960 x 540
  640 x 360 (this is half-size)
  320 x 180
  160 x 90

424/640 = 0.6625

For 640 they're:

640 x 424
480 x 318
320 x 212 (this is half-size)
160 x 106
  80 x 53

If you like math I posted something about how to calculate your own aspect ratio sizes years ago here.