ShotPut EXpress Automates SxS Media Offloading at FreshDV

Resources

ShotPut EXpress Automates SxS Media Offloading

Published by Matthew Jeppsen April 27th, 2008 in Formats, News, Production, Software, Storage

Panasonic solid-state shooters have had a fantastic tool called P2 Genie for quite some time now. The software simplifies and automates the process of dumping P2 cards to disk so they can be re-used in a shoot. I’ve used it, and it works beautifully. So I was delighted today to see a similar application for Sony SxS shooters, ShotPut EXpress. It’s cross-platform for PC and Intel-Mac users, and at just $49 it looks like a worthy investment. Here’s the scoop:

ShotPut EXpress features Single card (manual) and Multiple card (auto) modes. Simply insert the SxS card into a PowerBook or Notebook’s ExpressCard slot and ShotPut EXpress makes secure, verified copies of the SxS card’s video contents (the BPAV folder) in up to three (3) locations. ShotPut EXpress makes a printable activities report log of all the file transfer activities. This text file shows all the details including names of cards and files, the copy destination names, file sizes, duration of each transfer and aggregate transfer time, date, etc. A great way to document and organize your project and billable time.

Fast Copying: Perform copies at top speed without the overhead of Finder or Explorer.
Automatic or Manual Copies: Manually select one or more drives to copy. Or use the auto offload mode to sequentially copy SxS cards upon insertion.
Easy Folder Naming: Save time and improve consistency and organization by auto-naming the copy folders.
Improve Workflow: Make up to 3 simultaneous SxS card copies at the same time.
Reformat Cards: After offloading is finished, automatically Erase the BPAV folder contents and Rename the card so it’s ready to return to the camera.
Security: Verify byte-to-byte comparisons of your media copies to ensure integrity of the files.
Verification Report: Create a record of file transfer activity, how the copies were named, time, date, etc. Save complete details for project organization and billable time.
Print Offload Log: Offload results are presented in a text file, printable with the click of a button.
Session Error Checking: Prevents overwriting of existing folders and duplicate offloading of the same card.
Progress Bar: Displays overall percent completion and file-by-file progress during the copy process.
Copy Cards or Disks: The BPAV contents of any mountable volume (drive) can be copied.

You can purchase ShotPut EXpress for Mac or Windows via Imagine Products.

2 Responses to “ShotPut EXpress Automates SxS Media Offloading”

Feed for this Entry Trackback Address

1 Dan Montgomery Apr 29th, 2008 at 9:22 am

I should also point out that we’re not exactly new to this business. Imagine Products developed the first Mac viewer for P2 and released it at NAB 2006. We set the “Gold Standard” for *fast* previewing of P2 clips by using a QuickTime reference file to re-wrap on the fly–a trick Apple took notice of and quickly implemented into FCP 5.1.

Anyway, our videologger, HD Log for Macintosh, was later enriched to perform P2 offloading. Essentially incorporating a multiple card copy tool into the logger as this is often the first step in the process.

So, for us, working with the SxS cards was a natural thing for Imagine Products to do.
2 Nat Turner Aug 13th, 2008 at 4:23 am

Hello Dan,

I have used a similar tool for digital still RAW files, and am looking for something to better manage “capture” of files from my EX1.

I am particularly interested in the renaming capability. Breeze Browser, the still application I referred to is not the greatest. But, it does have the greatest, most flexible renaming capability. With a string of parameters like a WORD formatting string, one can put together a filename structure including both fixed sub-strings and variable data from the camera shot data.

Seems to me the same thing could be done with EX1 folders/files. Can your product do anything like that?

Regards, Nat