P2 Question - "Preview unsupported for this format"

Question

Workflow: P2 is dumped onto powerbook, P2 from powerbook is then dumped to internal drives on MacPro.
The clip was then brought into the Final Cut P2 viewer to watch. It was a crash clip, so we watched it a handful of times. It was never actually imported and converted to a Quiktime.
Now (a few months later) we're going through logging everything for a project and when I went to import this folder, all the clips worked but the last 4 in a row. One of them being the crash clipped that we were watching.
The message the P2 viewer gave was "preview unsupported for this format."
The thumbnail is there, but it won't play and I get the red exclamation point upon import.
Any idea on why this is?

Answer 1

The same thing happened to me last night. Well, not really last night. More like this morning at 1 am. Ugh.
I had three cards stored on the P2 Store. Used P2CMS to view them and verify their integrity. All the clips played fine.
I used P2 Genie to transfer them to a FW400 drive (with plenty of room).
Before formatting the P2 Store, I tried to look at the clips in the P2CMS. Several of the clips had the "red X in a box" icon superimposed. I had seen the "red ! in a box" which signifies that the clip is spanned on two cards and you only have one card in the source folder or in the P2 Store, but never the "red X."
After reading this thread, I poked around in the CONTENTS folder and found that the VIDEO folder was indeed empty on the FW400 drive. (one lesson learned is that the thumbnail that you see in P2CMS and the Log and Transfer window is just that, a thumbnail. It certainly is not the actual first frame of a clip.)
I transferred again, using P2 Genie, and this time everything was fine. Thank god.
I really don't think that I trashed the VIDEO contents by hand. I think something happened during the transfer.
Garret
15" PowerBook G4, 1.67 GHz, 1.5 GB SDRAM, FCP 6.0.1, QT 7.2, OS 10.4.10