I fixed it. Turns out that if you take too long to connect using putty you just miss the opening text.
So, immediately launching the Putty connection after pressing the esp board restart button got me there.

I also wanted to post the solution to another problem I ran into.

I was getting this ...

I have it installed and I have been poking at the example code but the example code doesn't compile for my esp32p4.

So i have been trying to reverse engineer it. but there are a lot of #if statements and configuration references that I can't seem to find.

for example the capture_stream_main.c ...

I am currently building a project that requires the hw h264 encoder to stream 1920x1080@30fps.
I am trying to test out the esp_h264 component using the test_app_main code.
It looks like it is uploading correctly, but the ascii art that is in the app_main() never shows up in terminal.
I tried ...