P2 Workflow from a News shooter
Posted By Nathan and Martin:
Nathan McCann is a shooter I use on projects, and I have always been pleased to work with him. He makes his living shooting news for local tv station. He website is currently under "reconstruction" to use his words. But he shoots for NBC 12, and they shoot on Panasonic's P2 technology and I wanted to see his opinion of what it is like to use this relatively new technology. 
Here is what he has to say:
My name’s Nathan McCann and I shoot the news with Richmond’s NBC station, WWBT. Martin wanted an inside view of Panasonic’s P2 technology from someone familiar with it. I’m not an engineer so I can’t give you all the mind-numbing technical low-down, but I’m shooting with it all day, every day as a news photog so I can give you that perspective.
P2 is fantastic. I started shooting on mini-DV, then shot on BetaSP tape at my first news job. I switched to P2 when I started at NBC12 and for what we do there’s no substitute. I’ve got no ties to the company, I’m just a happy user.
Here’s a brief run-down of the gear we use. We’re shooting with Panasonic’s
broadcast-style P2 camera, the AJ-SPC700. We each carry three 8 GB P2 cards which gives us 101 minutes at the
video format we shoot in (DVC 25). We’re editing non-linearly on desktop PC’s at the station and on laptops
in the live trucks and satellite truck.
Basic workflow is pretty simple. You shoot on the card just like shooting to tape. The camera breaks each shot into its own separate clip. If you want to watch your footage in the field, you just pop out the LCD screen on the camera’s side and each clip is shown as a thumbnail. Think of the thumbnail view in a non-linear editor. You can view each clip, copy clips to other cards, and delete clips all in the camera. When you get back to the station to edit there’s a special drive built into the computer with five P2 slots and you just click your cards in. You open a bin and all your clips are there, thumbnail style. You can select the clips to download and then you just drag them in to your project folder for transfer to the hard drive. Transfer is significantly faster that real-time. I’m not sure the exact speed, but it’s close to 5x real-time.
Those are the basics. Where P2 really shines is in the little techniques you can use to speed up your day. Here are a few examples:
1) There was a major incident at a local high school a while back. Three of our news teams showed up, all shooting footage at the same time. We quickly realized it was nothing that deserved six of us (a student had let off some mace) so two teams decided to leave. One team was staying to do a live shot, though and wanted the footage of the other two teams to cut into the story going out to air. One team had shot all their other footage for the day so they just left the live crew with the single P2 card of the school footage. I didn’t want to leave my card because I had other stories to shoot, so I used my camera to copy all my school footage onto one of the cards that was staying on scene. Then I wipe my original card. So the live crew gets all their footage and I get to save all my disk space for later.
2) I was going to do a live shot in front of where city council was meeting. The meeting started at 6 PM but the producers wanted stories in the 5 PM and 6 PM shows. I needed video for the 5 and 6 stories so I was going to grab file video and use it to cut the stories in the live truck. In the old days you’d grab a tape labeled “City Council B-roll.” Yawn. Instead, I used our archive system to pull into an edit bay copies of our most recent Council stories. Then I exported the stories as .avi’s directly onto a P2 card. The card can act, basically, like a big thumb drive. So when I got on scene I popped the P2 card into the computer and downloaded the clip, treating the P2 card like an external drive. Downside, you can’t view the file clips in the camera. Upside, you’re not carrying around a bunch of tapes and you’re transferring the file at faster-than-real-time.
3) I’m shooting football. I know nothing about football, I’ll be honest. I basically aim at the ball and hope someone runs near me with it. Because I’m totally clueless I have no idea when a big play is shaping up. Enter the Pre-Record function. Setting the camera to Pre-Record makes it dump everything it sees onto a buffer. The second I hit Record, it starts recording a clip BUT it also tacks all the footage in the buffer on to the start of that clip. So the play starts, but I don’t hit Record yet because I have no clue if this is a big play or not. I watch the play and five seconds in the quarterback gets tackled. I hit Record two seconds afterward then stop recording when the play’s over. The buffer holds sixteen seconds, so the footage of my final clip actually starts sixteen seconds before I hit Record. As long as I had the camera pointed at the play, I get the footage of the entire thing. Not only is it great for sports, it’s also good for shooting lightning. Just aim at the sky and hit the button after the strike, you don’t have to burn tape just waiting for it to happen.
4) Shooting on a tight deadline happens all the time in news. There are days I get back to the station five minutes before air time and have to bang out a quick piece for the start of the show. Times like this even the 5x real-time download with kill my chance to make air. With P2, though, I have the option to skip the download and edit straight from the card. Pop the cards in the computer, open up the bin, and all your clips are there. Instead of downloading them, you just treat them like they’re already downloaded. Drag them in to the NLE, trim them, then paste them to the timeline. So why bother to download at all? Simple: when you edit straight from the card, the NLE copies to the hard drive only the footage you put on the timeline (with handles). For a quick job that’s no problem. If you’re doing a longer piece, though, you’ll probably end up going back and moving your edit points around. If you move your points beyond the handles of the original clip you have to redo the entire edit.
A couple other observations about P2:
The cameras and cards are completely solid-state, no moving parts. This stuff is rock-solid. I’ve seldom seen it just up and fail. True, the cameras aren’t much more than a year old, but keep in mind how we use them. These aren’t wedding cameras. They’re at fires and out in the heat and bouncing around police cars. They see the world. And I haven’t seen more than three or four examples of things breaking.
Some stations have selected direct hard drive capture (ie Firestore) over P2 technology. The big advantage of P2 over things like Firestore, in my experience, is the ability to put different footage on different cards. If I shoot two interviews for two different reporters I can just put the footage on two separate cards. Back at the station I just give each reporter their specific card. Not exactly an option with a single drive.
P2 cards fit in the standard PCMCIA card slot. With the right software you can just pop a P2 card in a laptop and start editing. You only get a single card’s worth of footage at a time, but you don’t have to worry about a separate card reader.
The biggest downside for P2 is the cost of the cards. Shooting on tape, if you wanted to save some footage you just stuck the tape in your desk and left it there. Not so with P2. With P2 you develop a sort of psychic link with your cards. You know exactly where they are at all times and who has them, because if they get lost that’s lots and lots of money. Of course, with the dropping price of archiving systems saving file footage to the network isn’t that big a deal anymore so the downside will be less of an issue in the future.
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