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P2 Hits Its Stride in 2009

Dec 21, 2009 12:00 PM, By Helmut Kobler

In case you're new to LTO-4 tape, it's a $50 tape cartridge that stores 800GB of data (more than 30 hours of 720p24 footage), lasts for 30 years, and reads/writes data up to 120MBps, which is faster than any hard drive you have. LTO-4 has been around since 2007, but 2009 saw tape prices and drive selection hit a sweet spot. For instance, in 2009, you can find an LTO-4 drive for all budgets and workflows. There's the HP Ultrium 1760, which is a no-frills drive that sells as low as $2,600 and attaches to a single computer (throw in some backup software such as TOLIS Group's BRU Producer's Edition). Or there's the $7,995 Cache-A Prime-Cache appliance, which serves multiple computers over Ethernet.

But whichever LTO-4 drive you use, the same benefits apply: You can quickly archive your footage directly from P2 your cards or editing drives. For instance, my own LTO-4 system can back up 10 hours of footage per hour, all in the background. Also, you no longer have to label, organize, and store vast amounts conventional tapes or disks—one LTO-4 cartridge stores data from more than 50 DVCPRO HD tapes. Finally, when you restore your archived P2 video, you can slip a single tape into an LTO-4 drive, click a few buttons, and automatically load an entire show's footage in a few hours. Consider that convenience to the hassle of restoring footage spread over dozens of tapes or disks.

There've been LTO-1, -2, and -3 iterations, with each one doubling tape capacity, boosting transfer speed, and maintaining backwards compatibility with the last two versions. In 2010, we'll start seeing LTO-5 tapes and drives, but LTO-4 still feels "just right" for video producers. Combine it with your P2 footage, and you can finally bring your archiving workflow into the modern era.

Metadata gets easier

One of the benefits of shooting P2 is that you can bake extensive metadata into your video clips, including custom clip names, program title, crew names, shooting location (with GPS coordinates), scene and take numbers, camera model used, and so on. Having all this data in your clips lets video editors skip a lot of time-consuming logging work and lets companies quickly build searchable databases of their footage.

The problem with P2 metadata is that a lot of shooters don't take the 5 minutes needed to set it up before a shoot, probably because many producers aren't in the habit of using it. There haven't been good tools to add metadata once the footage is shot, so it largely goes untapped.

But the summer of 2009 brought a fantastic Mac-based app called MXF4mac P2 Flow ($729), which lets you easily add metadata after you shoot but before editing and archiving. P2 Flow can open any footage from a card or hard drive. Then, it lets you manually edit the metadata fields of a single clip, but it can also make batch changes to multiple clips. For instance, it takes about 2 seconds to give all loaded clips the same Program Title. Likewise, it takes about 5 seconds to select a group of clips, assign them the same Location field (e.g. San Francisco), then select a different group and give them a different Location (e.g. Oakland). My favorite feature is in beta testing right now; it lets you give a group of clips a custom clip name (e.g. "Interview_TigerWoods") and automatically add an incremental value to each clip in the selection (1, 2, 3, etc.).

Once you've made your edits, P2 Flow saves them back to the P2 clips, so they're recognized by any application that reads P2 metadata. Avid and Premiere Pro both import metadata without a hitch, as does Apple's Final Cut Server. Strangely and frustratingly, Apple's Final Cut Pro doesn't read native P2 metadata yet, but P2 Flow can map much of the metadata to Final Cut's various logging fields.

In the end, P2 Flow makes it easy for anyone—cameraman, producer, editor—to quickly add useful metadata that should've been there in the first place. It's a great way to take advantage of metadata today or to future-proof your footage for down the road.

The whole package

Thanks to the inevitable march of technology, the P2 format now lets you:

• Make a one-time investment in P2 cards, and then shoot all day long (or longer), without interruption, year after year.
• Offload more than a dozen hours of footage in less than an hour, with no labor other than a button click or two.
• Natively edit a world-class, next-generation codec in the pro video editor of your choice.
• Quickly bake extensive metadata into your clips, saving your editors significant time in editorial and laying the foundation for companywide footage databases.
• Archive an entire show's raw footage on a $50 tape cartridge and restore segments in minutes or the whole thing in a few hours.

What other format—tape or otherwise—gives you this kind of convenience, speed and efficiency? I'll leave that answer to you (tell us what you think in the Crosstalk forums), but it's clear that P2 has hit its stride in 2009, and I'm looking forward to a strong 2010.

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Helmut Kobler is a Los Angeles-based cameraman and producer, and the author of several books in the Final Cut Pro for Dummies series. He also writes The P2 Blog.

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