[Alan Okey]

Try 0.5 or 0.25 with the blur.

[Alan Okey]

How about using cameras that support a direct-to-edit solid state workflow, like Panasonic P2 or Sony XDCAM EX? Or what about using Firestore drives on each camera?

[Alan Okey]

Hi Adam,

I have just a general comment, not specifically tech related. What part of filmmaking do you enjoy the most? If you are doing everything right now (shooting, editing, finishing, etc.) then you’re going to find that it’s extremely expensive to do everything really well. On limited funds, it might be a better idea for you to partner with others who have specialized interests in the field rather than trying to do everything yourself.

Figure out what you love the most, whether it’s editing, shooting, directing, etc. and concentrate on that. Most people who aren’t independently wealthy or who don’t want to owe their first and second born to the bank can’t afford to pay for a great editing system (complete with a proper video preview monitor, good audio monitors and large/fast RAID storage), a great camera, a great sound package, a great lighting package, etc. And even if you can afford the gear, it takes a lot of experience in each aspect of production and post production to achieve master level status.

You can certainly rent what you need whenever you need it, but it’s hard to be an expert in everything. Pool your talents and resources with others in your field so that you can concentrate on playing to your strengths while you develop your skills in other areas rather than becoming a slave to the process or being overwhelmed (both technically and financially) to technology.

[Alan Okey]

Regarding Firewire 800 vs. eSATA:

https://www.barefeats.com/hard51.html

Excerpt:

“The main key to the speed advantage of Serial ATA is that each drive not only has a dedicated port but each port represents a dedicated data channel capable of 150 to 300MB/s, depending on the host adapter used.

With FireWire 800, the drives are typically daisy changed on the same 100MB/s data channel. Even if you install a FireWire 800 PCI card with 4 ports, those four ports share the same 100MB/s data channel — as if they were daisy chained. It would take three PCI cards plus built-in FireWire 800 to equal four data channels.”

As for the HDElement, it is shipped as a turnkey product. It must be purchased fully populated and does not support third party hard drives. However, you are assured of exhaustive QC testing and full warranty support from a single vendor in the event of any problems.

[Alan Okey]

3:2 is misleading, because DV uses nonsquare pixels – the pixels are taller than they are wide. The square pixel counterpart to 720×480 DV would be 640×480, or 4:3. Just forget about 3:2 and think of it as 4:3.

[Alan Okey]

Here’s how to work with your camera and Final Cut Pro:

https://www.2-popforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=106943

The Mac Pro does have USB 2.0 ports, by the way.

[Alan Okey]

You don’t need a new computer, you need media drives that don’t suck. That rules out Firewire drives, which are totally amateur hour. Take the plunge and get a real RAID:

https://www.caldigit.com/HDElement/

https://www.caldigit.com/HDOne/

https://www.CalDigit.com/HDPro/

Read this thread:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/228/686

Excerpt:

The HD Element is a RAID 5 array package that is expandable, and is the CHEAPEST professional configuration on the market today. This means that no one has any excuse to not have a SAS/SATA RAID 5 configuration any longer for their professional editing or graphics workstation.

-Bob Zelin

I’m guessing that your current storage has no fault tolerance/redundancy, which means that if you lose a drive, you’re in a world of hurt – or at the very least, you’re in for a lot of recapturing.

There’s no good excuse to rely on cheap external drives for video storage when there are great, affordable solutions that provide excellent performance and redundancy.

[Alan Okey]

[Shane Ross] “Native editing of EVERY codec, even ones that haven’t been invented. AVCHD, MXF, BRAV, VOB… “

I’m really looking forward to the full native support of codecs like BFD, WTF and LMAO. Unfortunately, LOL will not be supported in this release, although OMG support is rumored to be coming soon in a point release update.

[Alan Okey]

[Doug Beal] “This error message usually means your disk system is too slow.
hopefully you are not on the system drive. Media should ALWAYS be on another physical drive.

An other consideration would be available space on said drive. over 80% full and you begin to run into problems, or not very often but fragmentation can be an issue if you have copied and deleted a lot

Lastly make sure the drive you are playing your media from is formatted MacOS instead of FAT32. Highlight the drive icon and press “command” and the “i” key at the same time “

And please, please PLEASE don’t use an external USB drive for editing video.

[Alan Okey]

Final Cut Pro is not well suited to making high resolution slide shows. It’s designed to work with standard and high definition video formats, which are 720×480 (NTSC DV), 1280×720 and 1920×1080 (HD). Your large stills (2848X4288) are being automatically scaled down to fit within the lower resolution of the video format of your sequence. If you export your finished slide show at a higher resolution, you won’t get back the quality you lost in the initial scale reduction.

A better option would be for you to to use Keynote or PowerPoint, which are better optimized for high resolution slide presentations.

How do you intend to display your slide show? Are you planning on using a computer to present the slide show, or did you want to play it back on some type of video format, i.e. Blu-Ray, DVD, DV tape, etc.?

Please provide some more information about the intended purpose of the slide show for more useful feedback.