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Wrestling With Camera Drivers
Jun. 5th, 2016 05:56 pmWe spent several hours today working to get the Dell laptop we plan to use for uploading this year's WSFS Business Meeting videos after they come off of Lisa's Panasonic AG-HPX300P camera. I have unkind things to say about the driver software and documentation, and in fact, we didn't get everything we wanted.
( Getting the Dell to Read PC Cards )
Getting the P2 card driver installed turned out to be the easy part. The camera and my computer both have FireWire (1394) ports. It seems like we should be able to use that to either transfer files quickly, or even better, stream the recording straight from the camera to my computer.
( No Joy With the FireWire Connections )
Unfortunately, even after getting the driver installed, none of the software from Panasonic can see video on the camera. It's possible that some expert at using Panasonic P2 series cameras knows how to make this actually happen (in which case please contact me), but after about five hours of fuss, we gave up. Swapping P2 cards back and forth works, and is relatively easy to do. I'd love to be able to record what was coming off the camera directly onto my computer, but we can make this work. One bad part is that because we'll probably only have two usable P2 cards that we'll have to keep re-using, it's critical that I make multiple backups of the video files, not just on my computer, but on an outboard hard drive. After all, there's no way to go back and re-shoot anything.
( Getting the Dell to Read PC Cards )
Getting the P2 card driver installed turned out to be the easy part. The camera and my computer both have FireWire (1394) ports. It seems like we should be able to use that to either transfer files quickly, or even better, stream the recording straight from the camera to my computer.
( No Joy With the FireWire Connections )
Unfortunately, even after getting the driver installed, none of the software from Panasonic can see video on the camera. It's possible that some expert at using Panasonic P2 series cameras knows how to make this actually happen (in which case please contact me), but after about five hours of fuss, we gave up. Swapping P2 cards back and forth works, and is relatively easy to do. I'd love to be able to record what was coming off the camera directly onto my computer, but we can make this work. One bad part is that because we'll probably only have two usable P2 cards that we'll have to keep re-using, it's critical that I make multiple backups of the video files, not just on my computer, but on an outboard hard drive. After all, there's no way to go back and re-shoot anything.
