Epson P-2000 & Adobe Lightroom

[noalbany]

hi all,

 

i use the pana-leica L-1, adobe lightroom, and a recently purchased epson p-2000. i just used the

p-2000 for the first time on a month-long trip to europe and now trying to get the files (RAW & JPEG

header files) into my MacBookPro/Adobe Lightroom. i have not downloaded any epson software (i was told

by a few people that i wouldn't need it with my Mac) and dragging folders from the epson to the

lightroom. all that said, many of the RAW files are showing up blank in Lightroom. i have no reason to

believe that so many files (dozens) could be corrupted. can anyone offer any suggestions or help here?

epson support is completely useless.

[godfrey]

I have exactly the same kit ... Panny L1, Epson P2000, Lightroom v1.1 on Mac OS X ... so I

tested this when I first got the L1 and just now again (not having used the P2000 very

much for the past couple of months). I powered up the L1 and had it record about 100

exposures (RAW and JPEG) onto a Transcend 150x 2G card. Then I transferred that card's

data to the P2000 the usual way. Everything transferred correctly that I could tell.

 

I did my testing a couple of ways:

 

- Drag and drop the folder directly from the P2000's Card directory containing the test

exposures onto my startup drive, do a LIghtroom import in place.

 

- Drag and drop the folders directly from the P2000's Card directory containing the test

exposures onto my startup drive, do a LIghtroom import with copy to DNG format to a

new destination on the startup drive.

 

- Import from Lightroom with DNG conversion directly from the P2000 Card directory to a

destination on the startup drive.

 

In all three cases, everything worked perfectly for this sample of 100 RAW and JPEG files.

Which raises a couple of questions:

 

1) What version of the P2000 software (the software running in the P2000) are you

running? Mine is the latest, v2.51. You can find out what version you have by turning on

the P2000, going to the Settings menu, and looking in the lower right hand corner. P2000

software updates are available from Epson's website.

 

(You don't need any other Epson software to use between the P2000 and Mac OS X, but

you do need to update the P2000 to the latest and greatest software that it runs ...)

 

2) What capacity and type of card are you running? The Epson P2000 is not compatible

with SDHC cards, so you should be using ONLY SD cards with a maximum capacity of 2

Gbytes. Earlier versions of the P2000 software might not deal correctly with larger capacity

SD cards.

 

3) Did you format all the SD cards you were using in the L1 prior to using them?

 

4) Exactly what was your procedure for transferring the files and importing them? Be very

specific.

 

Hopefully, you have not deleted the files from the P2000 as yet and so can do some

experiments. But if you were running earlier versons of the P2000 software and/or used

an SD card with too large a capacity, or an SDHC card, the RAW files might have been

corrupted on transfer to the P2000.

 

Godfrey

[david_littleboy__tokyo__ja]

My sequence of operation is to create a folder on my hard disk (PC, not Mac, though), copy the files from the P-2000 to that folder, and then import them to Lightroom by manually pointing Lightroom at that folder.

 

Works fine, and has minimal chance for me to misunderstand what Lightroom is trying to do and get things wrong. Files may get split up into sub-folders in the P-2000, which tries to retain your card's folder structure, so I have to be carefull to get everything off the card. But I can have a single directory on the hard disk for all a trip's shots, and Lightroom will show them organized by date (or whatever).

 

Anyway, while the P-2000 looks like a hard disk to the Mac/PC, it's directory structure can get a tad convoluted. So I consider it the better part of valor to not let Lightroom look at the P-2000.

[godfrey]

David,

 

The Epson P2000 puts its uploaded files in a very reliable directory structure, repeated

over and over again with consistency. Each time you insert a card and tell it to transfer the

contents, it builds a directory in /Cards. If you haven't done any transfers on a given date,

it creates a day directory according to a template "YYYYMMDD", and then creates a new

directory for each upload on that day in the template "YYYYMMDD.NNN". In that directory,

it transfers EVERYTHING that is on the card it is uploading.

 

For instance, my test yesterday built the directory "20070731" and in it another directory

"20070731.001" which contained directory MISC and DCIM, which each contained

everything (directories, image files et al) that was on the card I uploaded. This is 100%

reliable.

 

Since I have about 20-odd gig worth of RAW and JPEG captures uploaded to the Epson

P2000 from my last

couple of trips, I created a new Lightroom library and clicked the Import button. I piloted

to the EPSON_PV volume, Cards directory and picked 10 day directories at random. I set

the options to copy the image files to a new directory on my startup drive and embed my

basic IPTC information, and put them into directories by date. Lightroom correctly found

and uploaded all 490 exposures, both RAW and JPEG, from four different cameras and

organized them properly.

 

Although I haven't used the Epson P2000 very much recently, Lightroom has done this

properly since I started using it during my last trip around the US in November 2006. I

think

the key to the OP's difficulties are more likely to be the P2000 firmware revision and the

specific storage cards that were used.

 

Godfrey