One of the most popular emerging workflows in today's post-production
world is the Offline-Online workflow with the Panasonic P2 camera. Watch this video to learn exactly how to take your HD media from the P2 card, edit at a SD resolution, and then relink back to its HD flavor. A transcription of my narration is posted below the video.
I’m Bob Russo, the media education evangelist for Avid
Technology. Today I’m going to talk about an offline – online workflow with
media from a Panasonic P2 camera and the Avid Media Composer.
One of the ways
to work with media from a P2 camera is to copy the contents of a P2 card to a
folder on a drive. This is what I’ve done here. The first step in working with P2 is to import the clip information into a bin. Select File, Import P2, Clips to Bin. A finder window opens. Navigate to the drive with the P2 media. The top-level folder must be selected. If this folder is not selected the Media Composer will not be able to import the clip information and you will receive this error.
Once I selected the correct folder the Media Composer indexes the media. The media isn’t being imported, instead, just the clip information is being loaded very quickly into a bin. You can see how the clips are actually linked to a virtual P2 card on the drive and can be played right away. I’ll make my selects and consolidate the media over to my local storage using the File, Import P2, Media. The clip media is now on my local drive. For storage and performance reasons, I like to edit the sequence in a standard definition resolution. To do this, change the Format tab to 30i. Select Clip, Consolidate/Transcode. The Consolidate/Transcode box opens. I now have the option to transcode the HD media to any SD resolution. I’ll select DV25. As you can see, three new clips are made, and I can start my edit.
Once the edit is done and the sequence is ready for the
online, it can be relinked to the HD media. Change the Format tab back to HD.
The SD media changes to yellow, warning that there is SD media in an HD sequence. With the sequence selected, select Clip, Relink. The Relink box opens and select the Highest Quality in the Video Relink Parameters. These options can be turned off, and click OK. The sequence is quickly relinked to the original DVCPRO HD
media and ready for the online.
And that's an offline – online P2 workflow with
the Avid Media Composer.