[Adam Smith]

If I were doing it again today and planning to start adequate and upgrade from there, I’d get the MacPro with a 250 or 500 GB internal drive and the minimum (1GB?) RAM. I dunno which is the preferred video card on these new MacPro models, but don’t skimp on it. Order 8GB RAM and a couple fat internal SATA drives from trusted 3rd party vendors and install. BTW – I don’t know what the current wisdom is for RAM placement but for my system the sweet spot was 4x 2GB chips and pull out the 1GB Apple-provided RAM.

You should be able to work with DVCProHD from a single or striped pair of SATA drives, and while it won’t get you the best realtime performance ever, it’ll get you going until you can buy the big RAID.

If you don’t have a specific NEED for the P2 Drive, I’d skip it for now too… I get by just fine using the camera to offload cards (firewire or USB) and $1800 is a big chunk of cash for a card reader.

You will want some sort of backup system fairly quickly, but whether it’s the BlueRay drive or some sort of data tape is up to you.

-Adam

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Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor

[Adam Smith]

Just as a rough estimate, DVCProHD at 1080p comes in around 1 GB per minute of footage… I believe I get 70 mins of record time from my combined 64GB of P2 storage. DV50 and 720p-Native clips are around half the size. I’m pretty happy with my 1.5TB RAID so far, but I don’t tend to work on any really long HD projects either.

You’ll probably want enough internal drive space to keep copies of any current P2 footage in addition to any footage on your RAID. For unimportant footage I offload with verify to an internal drive, then duplicate the clips I need onto my RAID. For paying-client type footage I keep another copy of the footage on an external firewire drive. Anything that’s worth saving gets backed up to VXA tape later in the workflow.

And just to be clear, the HPX-500 cannot shoot in the AVC-Intra codec.

– – –
Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor

[Adam Smith]

I don’t know of any specific sites for HPX-500 scene files, but I’d try searching for HVX-200 scene file information since there’s a ton of 200’s out there and you can apply those same settings to your 500. While the two cameras share most of the same setup options, they do have differences (500 is sharper, less noise, more DOF) so I’d use 200 presets as a starting point or reference and tweak from there.

-Adam

– – –
Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor

[Adam Smith]

Oh – one note, on my MacPro it’s not uncommon for most but not all of my P2 cards to mount. You can always check Disk Utility and mount them manually if they’re detected but not showing up on the desktop.

– – –
Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor

[Adam Smith]

You’re trying to copy from camera onto a laptop, right?

You can’t use Firewire Host – that’s for using the camera to format and copy with verify to a directly-connected external drive. You’d connect the drive to the camera, set the camera to PC mode with Firewire Host pre-selected, and then use the camera menu commands to format the drive and copy each slot. The camera will create a new partition for each card copied.

If you want to dump footage onto a laptop you need to put the camera in Firewire Device mode and then the P2 cards will mount on the desktop of the MBP. In this instance you do not use the camera to copy the cards, it’s just acting as a P2 card reader. You use the Finder or FCP or whatever P2 software you prefer to copy (and hopefully verify) the files off the cards.

– – –
Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor

[Adam Smith]

Yup, I tend to avoid any workflow I can’t automagically rebuild a few months down the road, so for the vast majority of the jobs I do I wouldn’t consider it either… but for some people/projects the speed gains could outweigh the risk.

Your right about the QT Ref file, self-contained would be a much safer way to go (and disk space is cheap).

-Adam

– – –
Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor

[Adam Smith]

I’d try placing all the b-roll clips in a sequence, remove the audio, and then use that sequence as the source clip to select, mark in/out and edit into your program sequence.

Or, export that the b-roll sequence as a QT reference movie, then import that movie and make your selects from the one long movie.

Not the best workflow if you need to rebuild the project from scratch some day, but if these are one-time jobs then maybe it’s acceptable.

-Adam

– – –
Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor

[Adam Smith]

To my knowledge, no camera Scene File settings are recorded to clip metadata or indeed anywhere on the P2 Card. Scene Files are held in the camera’s memory and can be saved onto the SD card (or created on a computer and transferred to the camera via SD card).

You might be able to contact the HVX-200 owner and have them save and email the Scene File to you, but if you have that level of access I suppose you could just have them read off the settings while you’re on the phone.

Otherwise, yeah.. it’s up to you and your eyeballs to match it visually.

– – –
Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor

[Adam Smith]

If you didn’t shoot 24pA then you do NOT want to have Remove Pulldown enabled. In fact, I’d double-check to see if you somehow had that box checked when you ingested the original footage.

Also, how are you monitoring the footage? If you’re using an external monitor then make sure you’ve got the right output settings for your video card. If you shot 24p (and not pA or pN) then you probably need the output set to 1080i60, as the 24p look is actually recorded over a 60i signal.

-Adam

– – –
Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor

[Adam Smith]

Shooting in 720pn mode and adjusting the frame rate is the way to do it in-camera, but you can also shoot 720p60 and slow the footage down with the DVCPRO Frame Rate Converter.

Have you watched this tutorial?

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/ross_shane/dvpro_hd.php

“In this Final Cut Pro video tutorial, Creative Cow Leader Shane Ross discusses taking 60p footage shot with DVCPRO HD and slowing it down to 23.98 so that it’s slow motion. Please note that this only works if you are working in a 23.98 or 29.97 timeline.”

Also – you might check to see if you have anything like “Removed Advanced Pulldown” checked when you ingest, it would explain why your 60p footage is landing in FCP as 24p.

-Adam

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Video Photographer / Avid & Final Cut Editor