Jumping ship from Media 100- am I going to be upset?

[Tae]

I think you will be thrilled. It’ll take a week or three to retrain your brain, but the functionality of FCP over Media 100 is drastic. I’ve been trying to get my friend Omar to do this for years. If you ldo indeed dig the switch, please repost why so’s I can email him reasoning from another M100 user. =)

[Tim Danyo]

You will get RT playback on your NTSC, but to see it in it’s complete res you will need to render. There are probably hardware solutions to solve this issue. Quite frankly, the render time is so small on most things that to wait a couple of seconds to see multiple layers rendered is not that big of a deal. I’ve never used a Media 100 system, but it seems like a lost platform to me. FCP is the Apple standard. Welcome aboard!

Tim

[Kevin Monahan]

You don’t need an array if you will be working with DV over FireWire. An extra internal SATA will do. Much cheaper and they come in up to 400 GB volumes these days. Welcome to the fray!

Kevin Monahan
Author – Motion Graphics and Effects in Final Cut Pro
fcpworld.com

[Dan Mirolli]

I think for the most part you’ll be very happy. You may have to contend with dropped frames, a timeline that does not refresh like M100 did but otherwise, it’s a nice step up.

[Justin Ferar]

Do you think multicam will function well on a single SATA? This feature will be very appealing to me. BTW- how many drives can you put in a stock G5 without getting the JAM product. I was thinking to forgo the Medea and just get two SATAs and stripe them.

Thanks!

[John Fishback]

I was a 10-year user of M100 who switched a year ago. I’ve never looked back. What a difference!

John

Dual 2.5 G5 4 gigs RAM OS 10.3.8 QT6.5.2
Cinema 23 Radeon 9800
FCP4.5 DVDSP 3.0.2
Huge U-320R 1TB Raid 3 firmware ENG12.BIN
ATTO UL4D driver 3.20
AJA IO driver 1.3.1 firmware v21-26

[Sean Oneil]

7-year Media 100. Switched last year. Haven’t looked back.

Don’t get cheap though. Buy a Blackmagic card at least, and use whatever disk array you used with your Media 100 (we had an Atto UL3 and that works in a G5). No reason to downgrade your capability to a DV-only system. Blackmagic cards are cheaper than one of Media 100’s bug fix updates.

[David Bogie]

Welcome to the family. Lots of us disaffected Media 100 users here, as you see. I bailed about three years ago so I don’t know what features and capabilities you’re giving up. You will soon forget them, though.

Shop carefully for a realtime full rez solution that you can live with. Not having the hardware codec and realtime alpha support (on lesser machines) is a drag.

I think I speak for the rest of the ex-M100 folks: Very sad to see that ship go down but I don’t think anyone is too sorry. Mostly we’re just glad they won’t be getting any more of OUR money.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Dean Sensui]

I switched last year after using M100 since 1997.

Just about everything happens in real time with FCP HD and rendering on a fast machine doesn’t take much time at all. FCP HD is also far more flexible than M100. I never thought I really needed more than two video streams until I started to work with FCP HD.

Regarding external drives, if you don’t already have a RAID from the M100 system, then I’d highly recommend Firmtek’s external SATA solutions that allow hot-swappable drives. It’s very cost effective and the performance is more than enough for work involving SD video.

I would also recommend using a Blackmagic card to monitor audio and video.

There’s only two things I miss: The way M100 manages media. It’s nice to have been able to re-digitize a timeline without jumping through hoops. I also miss having a “curves” tool for color correction.

Dean Sensui
http://www.HawaiiGoesFishing.com