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Long-time user, but out of the game for a while
Gentlemen,
I have been a FCP user since ver. 1, but I’m not a professional editor and sometimes go long periods before getting back into a new project. I currently have a 1st gen Intel MacBook Pro 17″ (2.16 GHz) with the max 2GBs RAM running OS 10.4.11, FCP 6.0.3, a Matrox MXO, 23″ Cinema Display and a FW800 500Gb RAID1.
My latest project has about 12 hours of HDV footage shot primarily with a Canon XH-A1 in progressive mode. I had originally captured and was editing in HDV, but that was 8 months ago. I now would like to re-capture over FW with ProRes and have the following questions:
1. Since I am essentially beginning the project from scratch, should I use the opportunity to upgrade to Leopard? (I’ve got about 1 month to troubleshoot any issues an operating system upgrade would create and capture the footage in preparation of the editing process.)
2. I am considering a eSATA 1Tb drive and Express card- should that take care of the space requirements of ProRes? Will eSATA address the transfer speed issues?
3. Any other obvious issues I should be addressing?
Thank you.
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2 Replies
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Leopard seems to be fine, however I’ve kept production machines at 10.4.11. Reliability is still too important to me.
If you have a compelling reason to upgrade, I would go for it. You have allowed plenty of time to trouble-shoot. However, if there is not a compelling reason to upgrade, I would stay with the tried and true until you are done with the current project.
eSATA will be fine for ProRes or ProRes HQ. Here is Apple’s white paper on the subject:
images.apple.com/jp/finalcutstudio/resources/white_papers/L342568A_ProRes_WP.pdf
I’d suggest buying drives with some redundancy to protect against failure.
A TB will be enough to hold your twelve hours, but depending on whether you choose HQ or not, you might not want to put much more on that drive.
Best,
Tom
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Tom,
Thanks for the advice. If Leopard isn’t going to do anything for me in FCP, I’d rather go with what I know works and upgrade later. I never got my MXO to work, so I’ll spend the time working on that next.
Thanks again,
Bill
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