bit ot: p2 and fcp x

having a obviously good internet connection made me a bit "skittishly".

quite a time ago there was a post and discussion about panasonic p2 (or another mxf based system) and fcp x regarding the reel name.
can't recall the details. just a simple summary from my memories.

importing a p2 directly into x creates a reel name which is the card's name. let's say "p18". in that case (the post) there had been a change of the reel name to something like "060A2B340101010501010D431300000028EA0DEB604505C50080458238C7C022". this is not very user friendly.

i hopefully answered that the change was a correct change - though as said not user friendly.

the fcp x way to take the card's name is definitively the wrong approach. first there can be a lot of cards named "p18". second and more important: it won't allow to handle spanned clips. for many people that's obviously not a problem. for me it is. for a lot of "professionals" as well.

these times of file based stuff require unique handling of each file which can be given by a uuid. any serious company for recording devices takes care of that. consumer companies mostly don't.

an easy old and still actual example is audio. especially broadcast wave files (bwav - sometimes unfortunately named bwf) any of those have a "legacy header". modern ones include a so called ixml. pro companies like aaton, sound devices, zaxcom take care of these xmls. consumer products like the zoom or apps for the iphone don't.
this doesn't mean that the recording quality of those consumer devices are bad. for the 2 mentioned ones it's excellent.

a pro xml like the ones from sound devices use a family uuid and a file uuid where the file uuid has a kind of channel id added.
having thousands of files you could drop all of them in 1 folder. running a little script or app will give you a perfect, sorted overview within seconds (or a short time).

taking v, av or a files with pro metadata do work the same way.

so thinking or talking about the "it's all metadata" should include these little things mentioned above.

just my 2 cents.

- andreas

ps sorry for the all lower case, it will turn back to normal hopefully soon.