P2 Log and Import - Lost Sync

I decided to pull out the ol' HVX200 and shoot a simple promo spot for a charity and wow do I regret it.

I shot about 4 minutes at 720p 23.98 onto the P2 card and after my PCMICA interface on my PowerBook G4 (OSX 10.5) refused to mount the P2 card, I hooked the HVX up via firewire and imported the P2 Media via Log and Import. Now when I view the clips in the clip viewer the audio loses sync immediately. The pops of time compressed audio is easily recognized but i can find no setting in Log and Import to futz with. 48KHz / 16bit audio.

Anyone have this trouble and can clue me in to what I am obviously doing wrong?

FCS2 (FCP 6.0.2)

- Jackson

did you TRANSFER the p2 media to your computer BEFORE you did the log and import? if not, its no wonder its not working...

and as far as the card not mounting via pcmcia on your powerbook. do you have the most recent p2 driver software? the 8gig card friendly software needs to be updated if you are using 16 gig cards

dont go a blamin' the camera for operator error.

I never said it wasn't operator error. Nor did I blame the camera. In fact I'm quite sure it's probably much like 90% of all posts on these forums and IS operator error / ignorance.

That being said, I fail to see the difference of my HVX and P2 cards mounted as firewire devices and doing the Log and Transfer vs. copying them first to another drive and then using Log and Transfer, since they both show up as mounted devices. What is the difference? How would that make the audio out of sync? Even though I couldn't understand why, I gave your tip a shot and copied the media to a local folder then did the Log and Transfer. No fix. The audio is still out of sync. The length of the audio is almost a full minute under the run time of the video. Almost as if it was time compressed.

The P2 cards are 4 gig cards so I didn't think an update would be necessary to mount on a machine that they mounted on before. But I DID upgrade to OSX 10.5 since my last use of the P2 cards. I'll reinstall the P2 software on my computer to see if I can't get them to mount. But I think these are very separate issues.

- Jackson

in my experience, its NEVER wise to log/capture p2 content from the source media. always transfer it to a drive first.

are your video and audio playback sources the same? if not, that can cause sync issues. but thats generally immediate and constant rather than a drift.

wonder if its a leopard issue?

Yes, both audio and video were recorded concurrently and are coming off the P2 card.

It's beyond just a sync drift, it's as if the audio is playing back faster than the video but without a pitch shift.

Being that today is a holiday, I took my camera into the office and tried to do the Log and Transfer on one of the edit bay boxes. (We are running FCP 6.0.2 on OSX 10.4 systems there)

Same thing, audio is quite truncated and fast. So that eliminates the Leopard factor.

I playback the clip on the camera, plays just fine there. Audio sounds good and stays in sync.

It's something in the interpretation of the footage. I'll continue to explore, but I'm quite lost at this point.

I agree, I always make a back up and protect my media prior to ingesting into FCP. This is just a silly fooling around video that I thought I could toss off right quick. Had I known it would have turned into another multi-day struggle I would have shot on DV tape and done it the old fashioned way. I've worked with P2 media in the past. In fact I have shot a documentary film all on P@ media and it simplified the workflow tremendously. Not having to capture from tape was a huge time saver.