P2 card disaster

um... so I work at a film company as an assistant editor. The company is called Kontent (with a "K" - yup they're cute like that) and it includes five different directors all with very different styles which makes for an eccentric collection. The founder Mark Decena (writer and director of Dopamine - 2003 - and Unflinching Triumph - soon to be on DVD) found 4 other local indie directors and they all agreed to join forces to make some non traditional original work as well as commercial spots; whether it be TV or web films or brand films and what not. My description sucks check the website by clicking on this: Kontent.

Anyway, based on Kontent's success they've invested in hiring ME, Drew Crocker, the companies first employee! yup yup. Excitement - then a extreme anxiety. Everyday. And for what? I don't know. The people are awesome here and they be so nice to me - it's just - I've never been a real computer dude, but now I spend over 8 hrs a day in front of one.

So, aside from learning a heap load of new programs I've never touched (photoshop, illustrator, DVD studio pro and aftereffects - which I actually have yet to touch) I also am the go to guy when it comes to PA'ing ong their shoots. "Sweet," I think. Instant access to being on set during production. And I did a couple of shoots with them as the PA - no prob. Get them water, be alert and then clean up when the shoot is over...

Then they wanted to up my role... and that is where this story starts. They named me the "P2 wrangler" for a PAM spray commercial shoot. The director of this shoot was Sam Green, who - if you don't know - was nominated for an academy award for The Weather Underground, an amazing documentary film about radical activists in the 70's, so needless to say, I was already nervous meeting the man, not to mention having a role with more responsibility than grabbing thirsty important people water.

I showed up early to the shoot (meaning 6am) to set up my station: Macbook pro, DuelAdapter PCMCIA PC card for P2 capture, two hard drives (one to copy P2 media over to, and the other to ingest as quicktimes through final cut pro) and one external DVD burner to make a hard copy of the footage as a third back up. Not only that, I've also had everything plugged into to a Back - UPS system that provides battery back up just in case the power should go out (if power cuts, batteries kick in and my precious digital information is safe). Once this is all set up there is no way to loose any of this footage... or so I thought.

I got my station ready for P2 wrangling, and that day we were shooting onto 8 gig cards at 720P with an HPX 500 meaning each card holds around 20minutes of footage, and I'm ready for the first P2.
It came to me at about 8:30am and i stuck the card into my DualAdapter PCMIA card reader and copied over the fist load of footage to the first hard drive. Check. Easy as pie. Then with all my FCP systems settings set over to the second hard drive I began ingesting the copied footage into Final Cut. But this is where the problem started. I didn't want Final Cut to read from the P2 card, I wanted it to read from the copied file I had recently made on the first drive. So, in the "log and transfer window" of Final Cut I deleted the P2 icon...

Some how ( and this is seriously still a mystery to me ) but somehow not only did pressing the "delete" button on my key board get rid of the icon in my dialogue window in Final Cut (which is what I wanted) but it also deleted the information in the folder I had made on the first hard drive...

"what..." I said ( and I still feel confused about it ) "the F?" I searched in the folder I recently made in the hard drive and nothing was in there. "NO. I just waited 8 or so minutes for that thing to copy over. where the heck did it go?" No matter how much I questioned it or how often I repeated clicking open that damn folder, the info wasn't there!

Ok... no prob. I'll just go back to the media from the card itself. went there. nothing. why?

I clicked it open again. nothing. why? and now at this point I was really panicking. Then a third time opening that figging folder and oh my me, there was no miraculous reappearance of the footage, nope - there is no god - I was sweating and breathing heavy and shaking my head with disbelief. the damn folder was empty.

I took the card out of the DualAdapter and put it back in hoping for a change - obviously nothing changed (except my heart rate ) and that is when i stood up and walked out of the room. I walked past the set where they had moved on from the scene I supposedly had safely saved and backed up and ingested and burned DVD's of, and I walked into a vacant conference room. I paced back and forth thinking that not only had I lost the first 2o minutes of the shoot, but that I had alos just lost my job.

I couldn't just stand there though. They were going to come at me with more P2 cards and I was going to be expected to copy more footage into my "failsafe" process of saving everything... so I had to call Mark. I had to let him know the embarrassing truth. He was also in a state of disbelief and he sent down not only the main editor of Kontent, Matt - a genius behind a mouse and keyboard - but he also sent Eric Escobar - a Kontent director, [he made One Weekend A Month that played at Sundance in 2004] check out his blog, he's a bad ass film wiz - to oversee my horrible execution of P2 wrangling.

Matt and Eric came and calmed me down a bit just by being there, but they also couldn't find a way to make that footage reappear. At this point everyone on the shoot was aware of my situation and they were giving me the "Everyone is allowed ONE" ('one' mess-up that is) speech, but I have a hard time giving any eye contact and found everyones shoe patterns much more comfortable for me to look at.

It turns out the "protect" switch on the P2 card itself (which makes it impossible to delete footage) was clicked off. And I also found out the hard way that it is possible to delete the actual source footage within Final Cut. I never knew that. I just figure that by deleting the P2 icon with in Final Cut I was only telling the program to not import from there, not to actually erase it!

Well... I never figured out why the P2 media I transfered over to the first drive was erased, but I still have my job. The people here at Kontent are very nice. Sam simply re-shot what I deleted and patted me saying, "no problem man, the second time we got a better performance from the PAM lady anyway." And I learned a few things about P2 wrangling, like never delete with in Final Cut, and always have the "protect" tab in the correct position.

Good times.