I’m going on a shoot on the east coast tonight, and not getting back until Wednesday. My goal is to eliminate a bag from my normal travel situation, and replace my Macbook Pro with the iPad. The biggest obstacle for this is the P2 footage I’ll be shooting.

I have four 32GB cards, and one 16. In the past, I’ve offloaded footage to my laptop every couple days. This assures that the footage is safe, and that I can format a card if it came down to it.

On this trip, I’ll be dumping each full card directly into an external HDD. I was looking for an expensive adapter to do this, but as it turns out, the functionality is built right into the HPX-170. The camera plugs directly into the drive, and dumps partitions of the raw P2 data directly into a drive. Once you get home, you plug it in a computer, and (in theory), it’s all right there.

My biggest fear is the external drive eating shit. I didn’t have time to order the “official” A/C adapter, so I got one of those scary “all-in-one” deals with the interchangeable tips and voltage selector. The worst case scenario is that the A/C adapter decides to blow up my drive, and all the footage inside.

If this works, life will be awesome. I’ll be able to go on trips without risking my expensive-ass laptop, and without slinging quite as many bags around. In the past, it’s always been a gamble between having enough P2 storage, or bringing a computer to facilitate offloading. I’ve always seen media management as one of the downsides of P2 versus tape, but this might solve that whole issue for me.

This is the excitement that I get to live with every week.