Help w/ basic FCP6 edit suite

[Tom Meegan]

What format will you shoot?

How will you deliver the final product?

The answers to those two questions will largely determine how much computer and what additional equipment you will need.

However the short answer is to buy the best you can afford. It will last longer and have fewer issues, not to mention save time everytime you render or encode.

Best,

Tom

[Jeremy Sexton]

Shoot on 35mm and HD, hoping to stay more on the HD side. produce braodcast quality for tv. I hope that helps?

[Tom Meegan]

35mm can be telecined to:

D5
HDCam
Digital Beta
BetaSP
DV

etc. These all have different requirements for capturing.

HD can be acquired in a variety of flavors that make very different demands on a system:

HDCam
DVCPro HD
HDV

come to mind. Yet more ways to capture. Each choice effects your needs.

Also, there are a number of strategies/CODECs for capturing the HD footage:

Uncompressed
ProRes
DVCPro HD
Native HDV
Apple Intermediate CODEC
DV down convert for off-line

and others.

You mention that you might outsource the output. This would have a large impact on your needs. Here is some examples:

Down convert to BetaSP using analog component
Down convert to Digital Beta using SDI
Deliver on DVCPro HD tape
Deliver on HDCam or D5 to a dub house
Deliver on DV tape for dubbing at the broadcast station
Use of an online delivery solution for broadcasters

All of these solutions could have an impact on your needs.

My suggestion would be to talk a consultant to discuss your needs, answer your questions, and help find out what the issues are. Alternatively, talk to ProMax. They put systems together for a living.

What follows is a list to get you started at the high end of what you describe. You should be able to scale back once you know what the work flow would be. I may have left out a few (or more) things here, so be sure to hire an engineer or system integrator like ProMax to put all of this together. I included both a tower and a laptop to give you the flexibility to work on location or do demos in client offices.

A top end maxed out Mac Pro with a Kona 3 card

A top end MacBook Pro with an IO HD

An SATA or Fibre Channel Array from Ciprico or CalDigit or Sonnet or Dulce or fill in the blank

A very good external RAID from LaCie or G-Tech or similar and an ExpressCard adaptor to connect it to the MacBook Pro

The best CRT you can afford (Sony 14 or 20″ L5)

A very good LCD for monitoring HD. Search all over the Cow for recommendations.

External Scopes

Very good near field monitors (Yamaha, Genelec, Tannoy, etc)

An appropriate sub to go with the near field monitors

A mackie mixer to route your audio sources to the monitoring.

The cabling for the tape decks or similar you are going to need for capturing and outputting

The tape decks you need to buy, or budget to rent or outsource.

UPS to protect against power failure.

Best wishes,

Tom