A P2 card is a solid-state memory device that plugs into the PCMCIA slot of a Panasonic P2 video camera, such as the AG-HVX200. The digital video and audio data from the video camera is recorded onto the card in a structured, codec-independent format known as MXF (Media eXchange Format). Specifically, Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects support the Panasonic Op-Atom variant of MXF, with video in DV, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, and DVCPRO HD formats. A clip is said to be in the P2 format if its audio and video are contained in Panasonic Op-Atom MXF files, and these files are located in a specific folder structure.

The root of the P2 folder structure is a CONTENTS folder. Each essence item (an item of video or audio) is contained in a separate MXF wrapper file; the video MXF files are in the VIDEO subfolder, and the audio MXF files are in the AUDIO subfolder. The relationships between essence files and the metadata associated with them are tracked by XML files in the CLIP subfolder.

The video and audio on a P2 card are already in a digital form, as if the P2 card were a hard disk, so there is no capture step involved in importing media from a P2 card. The process of reading the data from the card and converting it to a format that can be used in a project is sometimes referred to as ingest.

For your computer to read P2 cards, you must install the appropriate driver, which you can download from the Panasonic website. Panasonic also provides the P2 Viewer application, with which you can browse and play media stored on a P2 card. See the Panasonic website for details: www.adobe.com/go/learn_pp_panasonicp2.

Because Panasonic P2 cards use the FAT32 file system, each file is limited to a size of 4 GB. When a shot is recorded that requires more than the 4 GB, a P2 camera creates another file and continues recording the shot to the new file without interruption. This is referred to as clip spanning, because the shot spans more than one file or clip. Similarly, a camera may span a shot across files on different P2 cards: if the camera has more than one P2 card loaded, it will record the shot until it runs out of room on the first P2 card, create a new file on the next P2 card with available space, and continue recording the shot to it. Although a single shot can be recorded to a group of multiple spanned clips, the multiple-file shot is designed to be treated as a single clip or footage item in a video editing application. For After Effects to automatically import a group of spanned clips simultaneously and assemble them into a single footage item, they must all have been recorded to the same P2 card and none of the files can be missing, including the associated XML metadata file.

The Date column in the Project panel shows when each source clip was acquired. After you import spanned clips, you can use the Date value to determine their correct chronological order within the shot.

For additional information on the Panasonic P2 format and workflows with Adobe digital video software, see the Adobe website:

• P2 workflow guide for Adobe digital video products: www.adobe.com/go/learn_dva_p2workflowguide

• Dave Helmly’s video introduction to the P2 workflow in After Effects: www.adobe.com/go/learn_dva_p2davehelmly