Switching to P2 issues.

MatttEaly

Member
Twas a glorious day last Friday when finally our much anticipated and much needed new Cameras arrived, along with the new P2 readers needed in order to upload the footage.

Aside from a few minor details I love the camera's.

At my station, being in a small market, it is also my responsibility to install the readers to our PowerMac G5's.

The reader's we have are the AJ-PCD20P

I followed all directions in the manual for the installation process, but for some reason the Mac is still not Reading the drive. I tried numerous ways, even putting in a card with footage and formatting a new card, and the Reader still will not show up.

I called Panasonic support, they told me to do everything I had already did. So I uninstalled and re installed and still nothing.

If ANYONE, has:eek: gone through this process and happens to know what I might be doing wrong, it would be AWESOME, if you could help me out.
 

BNVN

Active member
How did you format them? Fat32 or NTFS? Mac has some issues with NTFS depending on the operating system.
 

editor_dude

Well-known member
see if you can use one of your cameras as a card reader. Macs are funny about settings. We also have a focus fs-100 hard drive that can record P2 native quick time. Once the drive is told to conect to computer its shows up on the desktop. It likes the hard drive better than the cards. To bring the clips from the cards we have to log and transfer.

It took our engineers a little tweeking to get the cards talking to the mac.
 

MatttEaly

Member
The problem, is It won't let me format them at all because it won't read them in the drive. The only other option is to format them in The camera. I'm gonna look into trying to import using the cameras and see how that works however, we did just spend 8 grand on P2 readers, so it sucks that we can't get them to work properly.
 

editor_dude

Well-known member
If the camera works as a card reader there is no reason the card readers shouldn't.

With formating the cards we do that in camera, my expieriance with still cameras it is better to format in camera.
 

quicklad

Well-known member
Make sure you have the latest Panasonic drivers installed on your Macs. Since it sounds like you did this already you might try downloading the drivers from Panny's site instead of using the ones on the disc that came with the unit - they may be corrupt.

Make sure your OS is up to date and that you have enough RAM

When I bought a P2 Store I had to tell it to talk to a Mac, it came from the factory preset for PC's.

Panasonic and Apple don't seem to really be a happy marriage - company wise.

Look here for support, drivers manuals etc:

http://catalog2.panasonic.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ModelDetail?displayTab=R&storeId=11201&catalogId=13051&itemId=278232&catGroupId=34402&surfModel=AJ-PCD20P
 
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Deft Depth

Active member
IMO, those card readers are completely obsolete given the fact that P2 cameras can function as a USB drive when connected directly to a computer source. My station made the mistake of buying 7 or 8 of those damn things and now they simply serve as TV stands.
 

MatttEaly

Member
SO does that mean I was not totally crazy to recommend to my news director that we should consider sending a couple back to free up some funds in our budget???:rolleyes:
 
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