[Bill Celnick]

I can’t speak for Avid, but I edited on Premiere on a PC from 1998 until 2006 when I bought my first Mac and FCP.

I’ve now gone back to Premiere – CS5.5, (it’s changed a bit in the 5 years I’ve been on FCP)and my gut feeling is that if you know FCP 7, you pretty much have the basics of Premiere – yes you may have to look in other places to find effects transitions, etc, yes, keyboard shortcuts are different, but these are things you get accustomed to in days, not years.

Give the 30 day trial version a shot, good chance to get the feel of it.

[Bill Celnick]

Thanks for the link – will be giving them a call.

Best,

Bill

[Bill Celnick]

A couple of years ago I bought an external Blu-ray burner from Buffalo Technology. Even though there was no mention in the specs that it was Mac compatible, it’s worked perfectly with Adobe Encore (Mac version).

I’ve also used it for DVD-R with DVDSP, and burn results have been excellent.

[Bill Celnick]

Don’t know if you meant me or the original poster – back in the day I had issues I was using Verbatim and Maxell media purchased from Tape Resources in VA, spindles of 50 as I recall.

Since then, I’ve exclusively used Taiyo-Uden, although have used the occasional spindle of Memorex from the wholesale club to burn preliminary versions of projects.

[Bill Celnick]

I made the jump from Premiere (PC) to FCP about 5 years ago – needed to upgrade my computers to handle HD, and my problem was the XP was on the way out, and Vista on the way in, and it just didn’t work. I couldn’t invest in an operating system being discontinued, or its successor that didn’t work. Hello Mac and FCP and frustrating learning curve.

Looking at your situation – you’ve already got the PC workstations, I’d go with Premiere CS5 (which I use on the Mac to support a client) rather than investing in the FCP X before its release.

Once FCP X is released and established, maybe look at this again. I wouldn’t invest in new stuff just yet.

[Bill Celnick]

I have never tried your work-flow – that is encoding with DVD Studio Pro.

I have almost no problems by sending my FCP timeline to Compressor, selecting “Best Quality 90 Minutes” (or I make a custom setting if the project is of a different length) – creating my m2v and ac3 files, then importing into DVD Studio Pro.

(my one issue was working with a very long file – 2 hrs 20 min)

I’m assuming that you have a quality DVD burner, and are using quality media.

Finally, there is diagnostic software available – I use DVDinfo, to determine if I have a quality burn or not. There may be other tools on the market as well.

About 5 years ago I had a nightmare, where my discs played fine for me, but skipped for clients – I got DVDinfo, replaced my burner, selected different blank media, and all was good again.

[Bill Celnick]

A few months ago I watched a tutorial webinar given by Boris where they advised FCP users to download the newest version from their site. I couldn’t find the link to post here, so you may want to email Boris customer service for it.

[Bill Celnick]

I will play around with this and see what happens. Thank you.

[Bill Celnick]

Thanks Rafael – I will look into both changing the bit-rate and the other programs if needed – presently I’m re-encoding with Adobe Media Encoder to see if there is a difference there.

[Bill Celnick]

I have used both PC and Mac versions of Encore for years, and have authored Blu-Ray without issue.

I haven’t experienced the crashes you speak of, and I’ve had more than just “Play” buttons.