[Adam Smith]

[Atari Norris] “Can anyone recommend the cheapest, fastest way to print out a HD DVD in 720p from a dual intel processor G4 MacBook Pro? I also have access to a G5 and a iMac G5. Thanks!”

I believe the answer was spelled it out in your last thread… you can’t do this on any of those computers without high-end DVD authoring software and a special type of DVD burning drive (HD-DVD or BluRay) installed inside the computer. A quick websearch for “Adobe Encore” and “BluRay burner Macintosh” looks like you’d be around the $600-$800 price range for the two. These would have to be installed in something other than your laptop.

Perhaps your best bet (both financially and time-wise) is to hire a production house with the appropriate gear and experience, and have them author the HD disc for you.

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Video Photographer / Avid Editor / Final Cut Neophyte

[Adam Smith]

[MHancock (promoboy)] ”
The Avid Meridien codecs are standard def. If your frame size is any different than 720×486 (or the PAL equivalent) it will give you a cryptic error and won’t work (as you’ve found out).”

Yup.. can’t create anything in Avid codec unless it’s spot-on.
720×486 and Lower Field First usually gets it.

How’d you even get the codecs to show up? I have FCS2 and while I installed the Meridien codecs for quicktime just the other night, nothing I could do would make them show up as options for quicktime or motion output.

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Video Photographer / Avid Editor / FCS2 Neophyte

[Adam Smith]

The 200 has no verify option when offloading in Firewire Host?
Bummer… yeah that’d be scary.

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Video Photographer / Avid Editor / FCS2 Neophyte

[Adam Smith]

[Dan Barter] “Presuming they’d tell me how they build the DVD, is a 2 pass encode something that I can do on my desktop in order to produce an acceptable output?”

Sure thing, if you have the software for it and some time.

Up until I got this fine MacPro I used TMPG Xpress on my PC for encoding video for DVD… it only cost me around $100 and it worked like a charm (this was on my home system). I’m not sure what to recommend for OSX, as my Mac at work is going on 4 years old and here at home I now have FCS2 with Compressor and DVDSP, but I’m sure there are numerous products out there these days for encoding MPEG2. Perhaps MPEG Streamclip by Squared 5?

With 2-pass encoding, the software first analyzes the video and takes notes on portions of the movie where more or less data will be required to display an acceptable image. The second pass then encodes the file, using the first pass info to apply a more tailored compression plan. Depending on the software, you can also have control over i-frame creation, motion detection/compensation, scene-change detection, and more general speed-vs-quality type settings.

The major downside of course, is time. Whereas a realtime burner will be done in approximately the run time of the project +15 mins or so, encoding MPEG2 can take you anywhere from 2-10x realtime just to create the files, depending on your hardware and encoding settings. Plus you gotta figure you’ll want to make a nice menu in your authoring program, then burn disks, and things can sorta snowball on you… =)

To what extent do you plan to work in-house? If you just need better quality video to work with for your internal projects, perhaps you can ask the post-house to provide full resolution movie files on data-DVD instead of or along with your DVD videos?

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Video Photographer / Avid Editor
Maximus Media Inc.

[Adam Smith]

[beb850] “The former editor that I am replacing used the following steps:

Window > Arrange > Multiply Edits

Then he said to select each Frame by using the short cut CTRL-CMND-4.”

Ahh.. I just suggested using Grab or the mac screen shot feature, and now what you were told to do makes sense…

Command-Control-Shift-4 will allow you to drag a marquee and select an area of the desktop, and save that area as an image to the clipboard.

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Video Photographer / Avid Editor
Maximus Media Inc.

[Adam Smith]

I’m still too noob at FCP to know if there’s a Print Bin type feature like the Avid, but if you can arrange the clips in a bin with large enough thumbnail images, you could then print that bin to PDF or directly to paper, right?

Or (trial and error required here to get the size right) do something similar with large thumbnails and use Grab or the mac printscreen feature to capture an image of the bin. Certainly not the highest quality means to print, but might get the job done.

-Adam

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Video Photographer / Avid Editor
Maximus Media Inc.

[Adam Smith]

[Jan Crittenden Livingston] ”
If you want to see your images and do some metadata management it works just fine. The only place where it does not function well with 7.2 is if you were using it to directly import into FCP, without making Quicktimes. This is a temporary situation, I am sure. But for what you said you wanted to do, I think it will work. Hey if it doesn’t work, uninstall it and move on to P2 Log or Raylight.”

Ahhh… well in that case, I’ll have to give it a try.

Thanks!

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Video Photographer / Avid Editor
Maximus Media Inc.

[Adam Smith]

No I didn’t try it.. I’d heard in other posts that it does not work, and the Panasonic download site says “7.2.0 is not supported”

https://eww.pavc.panasonic.co.jp/pro-av/sales_o/p2/cms/index.html

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Video Photographer / Avid Editor
Maximus Media Inc.

[Adam Smith]

Oohhh… P2CMS is the Panasonic P2 Viewer I was talking about, I have QT 7.2 so I can’t run it.

Rats.

Guess for now I’ll just keep adding directories to FCP, removing them, renaming the folders, and then adding them again to begin importing footage.

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Video Photographer / Avid Editor
Maximus Media Inc.

[Adam Smith]

I can see your point, but in my experience I rarely want every bit of footage I’ve shot sitting on my RAID, and I’m not P2 savvy enough yet to know anything aobut nuking unwanted files out of a CONTENTS directory.

I currently back up my P2 media to a packet tape drive and an external firewire, and I import only the takes & segments I require to edit with… so I do use more storage overall, but the only media taking space on my RAID is the media I’m editing with.

That being said, I do figure I’ll get Raylight eventually as it sounds like a good solution to restoring damaged P2 media files or media with missing lastclip.txt logs…

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Video Photographer / Avid Editor
Maximus Media Inc.