Importing .mxf Files from an external hard drive...

Question

Any advice or tips would be greatly appreciated. My problem comes close to others discussed, but I haven't been able to find a duplicate post. And I apologize for the length; I just want to give you as much info. as possible (I also put details in my signature) to help you help me.
I shot a short film using Panasonic's HVX200 camera, filming in HD 720p/24p, and downloaded each P2 card through a PC laptop into a LaCie Brick external hard drive. I was originally planning on editing the footage with Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0, but became frustrated with how much trouble it was having handling the .mxf files. Assured by Apple salespeople that FCP 5 would have no problem importing the footage from an external hard drive, I purchased the computer described in my signature.
Now I know that FCP/Apple only supports importing footage from the P2 card directly, and not from an external hard drive. A representative from ProMax.com was able to help me out, however. First, he had me copy the footage files onto my Mac internal drive from the external hard drive. Then, he had me select IMPORT -> PANASONIC P2. Then, I was to highlight the CONTENTS folder and import away. And it worked... sort of.
There are two major problems: 1) During this transfer, not all of the footage is making it across. I import it, and then get the much-talked about "one or more P2 clips failed to import; probable incomplete or corrupt clips" warning. After checking the original video folder on the internal hard drive and comparing it to the number of clips FCP imported, I learned that I had lost around 20 clips/video files at one point. Other shooting day transfers worked completely smoothly with all of the files imported (we split up the footage by shooting day, without touching or changing the CONTENTS folders). So, some transfers work and some don't. And 2) When I try to import the files from our 4th day of shooting, I get a "Selected path does not contain a P2 volume." Nothing is imported.
So, that's my situation, and I'm getting very desperate. I know that I'm not doing things in the Apple-supported way, but I'm really hoping there's still someway to successfully get the files from the external hard drive into FCP completely. It seems to work some of the time.
Final notes: When importing, I make sure to import the entire CONTENTS folder. There is never a LASTCLIP.TXT file listed under it in the window, but some of the days of footage have transferred perfectly, so I'm hoping that's not a dealbreaker. If it is, isn't there some way to rebuild a lastclip.txt file? I don't even know if that's the issue. And one last note: In most of my folders, the "CLIP" folder has a number of files in it. In the 4th day's footage that I can't import at all, I noticed that the CLIP folder is empty. And on the days where FCP isn't importing all the files (like I mentioned above), there isn't a CLIP file for every single VIDEO file. Could this be the main problem? Along this line, is there a way to somehow put the footage on the external hard drive back through a p2 card and then into the Mac?
Okay, I'll stop typing. Thank you so, so much for any help.
Tom
PowerMac G5 (Dual 2.3 GHz)   Mac OS X (10.4.6)   Quicktime 7.1.1 - Final Cut Pro 5.1 - Aforementioned External Hard Drive: LaCie Brick (FAT 32 based)
PowerMac G5   Mac OS X (10.4.6)  

Answer 1

The problem didn't turn out to be as complicated as I had thought. The process I described above ended up working fine, and I'll explain how. And this is a cool workaround, because the AppleCare helpers told me that they didn't think it would work (FCP P2 import is only supported straight from the P2 card/viewer or the camera).
I hooked up my external hard drive to the Power Mac G5, and copied the files and folders onto my internal scratch disk. Then, I opened FCP and chose IMPORT -> Panasonic P2. I chose the "CONTENTS" folder for each day's filming, and imported them in, no problems. There was no visible "lastclip.txt" file shown (under the "CONTENTS" folder or anywhere else), but this didn't seem to cause any problems.
The reason that not all of the footage was bring imported (the aforementioned "one or more P2 clips failed..." warning) was because we were missing clip files (in the CLIP folder) corresponding to certain video files (in the VIDEO folder). Luckily, we had just forgotten to transfer all of them from the original external hard drive, and once we transfered them completely, FCP could read all the video files. FCP needs a clip file for every video file in order to make it work (that's why our aforementioned "Day 4" could not be read; we hadn't copied all of the clip files over with the video files).
Even after we did this, we STILL were getting the "one or more P2 clips..." warning for our Day 5. After taking a look at all the folders, we figured out that there were still more files in the VIDEO folder than in the CLIP folder, even after we transferred them all over. Finally, we figured out what had happened. For some reason, some of the audio files for some of the clips had been included in the VIDEO folder for our Day 5. There is no way we did this accidentally; somehow, the HVX200 placed some of the audio files into both the VIDEO and AUDIO folders. And FCP was trying to read those as video files, and therefore couldn't find the corresponding clips in the CLIP folder. After making sure that those audio files were also in the AUDIO folder, we simply deleted them from the VIDEO folder and stopped getting the "failed to import" warning.
Final thing to share: If we had actually been unable to find the corresponding clip files in our original external hard drive, we had also found a potential solution (that we didn't end up needing to try). You can record from FCP back onto the P2 card, in the hopes that the clip files would be regenerated when you re-import it into FCP. I received a PDF file about this process, and I'm not sure how to put it up on the page here. If interested in this described process (which, again, I can't fully vouch for), feel free to email me at [email protected] and I can forward it to you.
Hope this helps.
PowerMac G5   Mac OS X (10.4.6)  
PowerMac G5   Mac OS X (10.4.6)