[Andkin]

Any speakers that you would use in an editing room should be near-field monitors; high fidelity reproduction of the majority of frequencies at a wide range of volumes but with a very short “throw” or distance from the monitor. Near-fields come in active versions with amplification built in, each speaker requiring an AC connection and passive versions that must be driven by an amp but don’t require AC.

For any public address system for the venues you are referring to you would require some kind of separate PA speakers that should be driven by an amp, although there are self powered PA systems out there if you go to a full service music store that deals in PA systems. Editing with speakers like this would be a harsh auditory experience as they are designed to be loud and to fill large spaces.

Wireless speaker systems that you allude to do exist in the consumer hi-fi world and might fit your bill but they do use signal compression to get the data over the air so quality is an issue.

ak

[Andkin]

Rafael,
It’s not the movie’s length that determines whether or not you should use A-Pack.
You use A-Pack to reduce the overall bit rate that the DVD player has to deal with at any time. If you used the 60min Best setting for your video and left your audio as AIFF you are asking any DVD player it plays in to move a lot of data at once. Most cheaper and popular DVD players have an upper limit of bandwidth that you shouldn’t exceed.

AIFFs will sound better than AC3s but at the expense of universality, as far as it exists in the DVD sphere.

To the original poster,
If you are cutting a mixed source sequence or not you need to export the sequence at the resolution you are cutting at, assuming that resolution was a good choice in the first place.
Some people have had problems with “Export to Compressor” so you could “Export Quicktime” which gives you a movie at your sequence resolution. Drop that movie into Compressor and pick your settings, one for video and one for audio and bring the resulting two files into DVDSP.

ak

[Andkin]

It has happened to me once, on a big project nearing 100MB in size. It forced me to relearn my habit of never quitting with a project open. I close each open project and then quit FCP. I used to be in the habit of doing that all the time but somehow I drifted away…probably my back-to-AVID year of editing.

ak

[Andkin]

If your clips are named appropriately you can do a search in the timeline for all the clips from one camera, select “Find All” which will highlight all matching clips and adjust that audio relatively to the other cameras and do it for each camera.
Throwing filters on every clip in a sequence to fix levels is something I would only suggest doing for off-line cuts or something before final delivery. You’ll still have to go through and listen to every clip to make sure the filter isn’t doing anything wacky and you might as well just do that and adjust levels as you go.

[Andkin]

“Can you down convert the HD files to DV with the transfer software or is there a setting in the camera that will do this?”

I wish for this, and I asked for it at the Apple/Sony show when it came to my town. I got a lot of shrugs as an answer. They’ll either add this to the software or add proxies as extractable editing files. My guess is they’ll go with the proxies solution as they are pushing that on the Sony editing system (Xpri?) which had all the XDCAM HD bells and whistles right out of the box.

We import everything and then use the media manager to recompress to DV. The benefits we get are the ability to be importing in the background while logging already imported clips and adding all metadata. Once the day’s shooting is all imported and logged and tagged we leave the media manager to recompress overnight. We’ve had a few times where the recompress has aborted for an unidentified reason but mostly it’s been smooth. The image quality is great for an off-line and avoiding the pulldown removal by dealing with only 23.976 frames at all times is a nice change.

Having the windows box around is also good because it’s only in the Sony windows software that you can edit the metadata right on the disk. Useful if the on-set crew forget to change the preset naming format we decided on.(3 digits for Episode Number, 1 letter for camera angle, 1 digit for shoot day, and then the sequential number that the camera adds i.e. 103B10005)
Hopefully some of this will be added to the Mac version soon.

ak

[Andkin]

I don’t know of a way to stop it as a setting but if you have the activity window open you can cancel all the tasks that are running in it. I found keeping the activity window open was good for preventing importing twice because of the lag between hitting import and it actually starting. We’re keeping the proxies on a windows junker so anyone can look at them, even after the disks have gone into storage between off-line and on-line. Hasn’t come up that often yet but it’s there just in case.

[Andkin]

We had that problem once or twice in the beginning in 5.1.1 too. Took a trashing of Preferences and a re-install of the Sony utility to make it go away. There are prefs you could try to reset for the Utility as well.
Glad it’s working for you though. As long as you have tested everything you should be alright. That’s not to say that there’s no reason to upgrade to 5.1.1 and when the 5.2.1 upgrade comes down you might not have access to some of the fixes that come with it.

[Andkin]

Interesting. We never bothered to see if that would work. We got the cross-grade to 5.1.1. and started testing and eventually editing. If you are on-lining at XDCAMHD and the footage is coming in all right and you have no other problems, you should be OK. If you are doing an off-line to be conformed elsewhere I would make sure all the reel and TC info matches what’s on the disk.
Last question, does the Import tool recognize what project you are in? It’s in the lower right side of the window.

[Dave Jenkins] “Yes the menu is there in 5.04.”

[andkin] “Are you actually getting a menu option to import XDCAM from within FCP?”

[Andkin]

Are you actually getting a menu option to import XDCAM from within FCP? That was the bit that was added to 5.1.1. The Sony utility can work without FCP open at all and you can bring the footage it copies right into FCP like you would any other Quicktime. Is this what you are doing?

Apple have announced that the other bitrates (18 and 35) will be supported for FAM mode import in the next upgrade, due in a month or so. All we need now is the ability to import and edit with the proxies, be able to modify the metadata right on the camera disk and have it flow into FCP, and allow for an import recompression if you don’t want to offline with native resolution files and the proxies are too small.

ak

[Andkin]

Graphic Converter used to be a free demo on Macs. It should still be out there somewhere. You can batch convert all sorts of files to anything else.
Of course with Tiger’s Automator and Preview you could probably figure out a way to do that with what you have.
ak