[Ben Holmes]

AFAIK, the ‘no upgrades’ bit is the only difference. If you plan to make a living out of editing after college, then chances are you either won’t have to buy another copy yourself, or can afford to buy the full version.

Keeping up to date with FCP is not important for everybody – professionals and post houses often have to, as they need to keep current so clients can transfer projects, and some editors love to run the latest versions (the clever ones wait until these people shake the bugs out).

Bottom line – the craft of editing changes little, only the ‘bells and whistles’ options alter – you could learn 95% of what you need to know on a copy of FCP1, so take your academic pricing and be content with it!

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[Ben Holmes]

I would think you could duplicate the footage in Motion, mask out the wires with the pen tool, invert the mask so you have a layer with just the wires, then move the mask up a little so you have a layer with just sky of a similar colour. Then move that layer back down so the wires are covered by Sky. Feather the mask or blur the layer a little to cover any gradient joins. Should be OK.

The area on the front of the building might require more work – if the shot is static, you could make a layer in Photoshop using clone tools using a clean bit on the wooden panelling.

If the thought of any of this makes your head spin, hire a pro for half an hour – it’s a very quick fix.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

Open Tools>Audio Mixer. Do you have the master level set way down?

Is the clip mono or stereo? If mono, is it panned to the centre.

Are you monitoring via an audio/video card, or the Mac’s own monitoring?

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[Ben Holmes]

You would get similar performance from a 4 disk raid 5 eSata external array as as internal 3 disk array – a little slower at around 200Mb/s – you might get 220-240 from the internal. So no real difference. The advantage is that there is no need to run a full back-up, and you can attach the storage to another system.

Interestingly, if you take the 3 internal drives you have in one Mac Pro and stick them in another, the second Mac Pro will be able to read the array (I guess Apple disk utility writes the RAID info to the drives).

In practice, eSata arrays are cheap enough that you will spend about the same on one as an internal array with an external backup.

One last thought – get an i7 iMac with the OWC eSATA modification, and save the money for the MacPro and monitor. Those things are serious bangs for bucks….

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[Ben Holmes]

But you can’t do RAID 5 without a RAID card in the machine. For most people, your RAID 0 approach is fine – you could use something like Retrospect to do incremental backups externally to a slower array, or get something better external that does RAID 5 via eSata, giving similar speed to the internal array.

As an aside, I’ve used internal arrays for years, only had one drive fail when the tower was dropped.

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[Ben Holmes]

In addition to what Shane says, I would add that I recently started work on a project using footage from a 5D. This was shot at 25p as I’m in PAL-land, but really no difference for post or workflow.

I used the relatively new Magic Bullet Grinder application to transfer the footage, as it allows for faster encodes (like Compressor it runs multiple processor threads and encodes 8 files at once on my Mac Pro) and also allows me to continue working in FCP during ingest. You can insert timecode or use the original as far as I know, as well as conform to different frame rates (if you shot 720p60 for example this is transcoded and conformed to 1080p24 if you use ProRes) and also generate Proxy files with BITC, for use as rushes on set.

Not a complete product yet, and as such pretty basic at the moment, but it’s cheap and reliable.

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[Ben Holmes]

No – but most HDV problems (I don’t use it much these days) are related to a mis-match on the input/output of the deck and Mac, where one is set to DV, not HDV.

Also, a lot of people report issues with powering up the deck and Mac and connecting it in a certain order – so try a few variations.

Hopefully someone else can offer more specific advice.

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[Ben Holmes]

Quick one – is the deck control setup in the log and capture window? This is needed for print to tape, and can only be set from there or the audio/video settings boxes. Without it, you get no edit to tape…

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[Ben Holmes]

I wouldn’t expect to see any significant speed improvements, for the following reasons:

– The slower clockspeed Nehalem is equivalent to the 2.66 Xeon in most test as far as I remember.
– You still have 8 cores for Compressor work.
– FCS is still a 32-bit application that cannot harness the power of multiple cores and more RAM effectively.

I am holding off any MacPro upgrades until a 64-bit rewrite of FCS which is properly aware of these 8-core machines is available.

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[Ben Holmes]

Hi Salimi

First – FCP is not designed or optimised for editing in H.264. You should transcode the footage to ProRes. You can get a free plugin from Canon that allows you to import and transcode, or spend $50 on Magic Bullet’s Grinder if you prefer to edit while you import.

Second – Never edit from a USB hard drive – they do not transfer data in a way that is friendly for video, and you will never get smooth playback. Invest in a firewire drive – you will need it when you go to ProRes anyway, so get a FW800 drive if you have that port on your laptop.

I have no idea how your laptop could even play 3 streams of H.264 – To get a red bar on the fourth is not suprising.

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