Gear talk: P2 on Avid1 min read

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Avid has recently added support to Panasonic‘s P2 media on its range of editing suites, including the Media Composer and the increasingly popular Xpress Pro.

If you have done the necessary updates and/or purchased the new versions of the MC and Xpress Pro, you will now see that there’s an option to import P2 files in the File menu. There is also support for the accompanying MXF files as well, so you can now see them on a media folder on your hard drive. This also allows you to read media directly off the P2 cards, or even the cards that you have backed-up on your HDD (assuming you have backed it up with the proper file directory, of course).

Avid has uploaded a short video demonstration of the P2 workflow on their website, which you can also download as a MP4 file here.

One reviewer online has however, pointed out a small bug in this new support, which I will summarise here:

Basically under File menu, you have two options: Import Clips to Bin and Import to Media. If you import via either method, you’ll see the clips in your bin, as usual, but should you quit the application and restart it, all of the media would now become offline.

The way around this is to first Import Clips to Bin, select the master clips, then Import P2 to Media. By doing this, you will effectively copy the clips into the media drive in which you specified in the Media Creation settings.