[Andy Taplin]

So if Firewire capture is lossless why capture SD via SDI as some people are suggesting?

[Andy Taplin]

Hi Walter

Using DVCAM you’re saying there is no difference between Firewire and SDI? Maybe it looks the same but surely there are technical differences with compression and suitability for various post work – even with SD? That’s why I

[Andy Taplin]

Thanks Shane

The main reason for the post is that currently I’m working with DVCAM (PAL) on Media 100 but will be moving to FCP this year. In M100 I’m capturing via Firewire and this then gets converted to M100’s MJPEG codec. Results are good but it’s still converting from DV to MJPEG which I would imagine adds errors.

Are you saying you can captre DV or DVCVAM into FCP via Firewire (which is compressed at 5:1 on the tape) and then uncompress it to a new uncompressed codec? This is no doubt a stupid question but where does the extra information to turn it from 5:1 to 1:1 come from?

Andy

[Andy Taplin]

I’ve had problems with Cleaner encoding Media 100 files under QT7 – basically Cleaner (and other encoding software) crashes – so be carefull if you need to encode to other formats.

Andy

[Andy Taplin]

Media 100 may work fine but none of my other QT based apps like Cleaner, Squeeze and BitVice work with QT7. They all crash when starting to compress M100 files. Seems to be very little info on the Cow about this – reinstalling 6.5.2 fixes issues but long term QT7 will be necessary.

Any thoughts?

Andy

[Andy Taplin]

Thanks Greg, I’ll give that a try.

I don’t know why M100 have made this so difficult?

Cheers

Andy Taplin

[Andy Taplin]

It is a hardware card so not cheap but quality is great. I had a difficult piece of 3D animation to encode and both BitVice and Compressor both showed artefacts but MediaPress was perfect – you get what you pay for I guess…

[Andy Taplin]

Thanks Chad.

I’ve been thinking about getting a PC for a while now as there does seem to be more encoding choice and as you say it vcan get on with it whilst i do other things.

I’ll try Flip 4 Mac.

I do use BitVice for MPEG 2 and it’s pretty good but the best MPEG-2 encoding I have seen for the Mac is MediaPress from Wired. It transcodes QT files and they are perfect – no softness or luma/colour differences from the original. It aslo does realtime encoding at very hgh quality.

Andy

[Andy Taplin]

Thanks for the link Chad.

Squeeze would display the QT image but crashed as soon as I tried to encode. At least Apple make it easy to uninstall and go back to QT6!

It is a shame Discreet does not seem to be developing Cleaner for the Mac – it’s a good reliable product.

Apart from Sorenson there does not seem to be much else out there that will encode MPEG, WMV, MP3 etc. on the Mac.

Andy

[Andy Taplin]

I just ‘upgraded’ to QT 7 and M100 seems to work OK, but both Cleaner and Squeeze will not work AT ALL! They both crash when trying to open a M100 movie – even older ones produced with QT 6 installed.

I went back to 6 and everything was OK again.

It would be nice to know what the problem is here?

Andy