[Bill Hall]

Why don’t you create a new timeline based on the settings of the monitor. Copy and paste your project into that timeline. Adjust one of the pieces of video to where it looks correct and copy and paste attributes.

If you have a bunch of media and it’s not cuts only your best bet might be to export quicktime conversion mp4. Make a custom frame size and set the preserve aspect ratio to crop.

I’d be interested to hear how you solve this though. Let us know.

[Bill Hall]

It sounds like you are in a bit over your head. Not to be rude but you may benefit from a training class to get a hang of some of the basics of working with an edit system.

Still to answer your questions. You can use a firewire cable to transfer from your camera to your computer. You may need to buy a firewire hub or a pci card that has some extra firwire ports. My guess is you are on a laptop if you only have one port. If that is the case a hub may be the way to go. You might also be able to use something like this https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/437092-REG/SIIG_NN_EC2012_S1_2_Port_FireWire_400_ExpressCard_34_Expansion.html .

Your camera has a 4 pin port so you will need a cable that goes from 4 pin firewire to six pin or 8 pin depending on your computer.

I personally love using memory cards rather than tape because it is so much faster to transfer. That would be my recommendation but tapes are a lot cheaper to buy.

You will want to make sure that you set your scratch disk to the external firewire drive you are using. If you don’t Final Cut will save all of your files to your computer’s internal hard disk.

Lastly you can use one of Final Cut’s easy set ups for HDV. Just pick the one that matches your frame size and frame rate. For example if you shoot HDV in 1080 30 P use HDV 1080p30 FireWire Basic. Make sure your camera is plugged in and turned on in VTR mode before starting Final Cut. If it’s not final cut won’t recognize the camera. Then you will use log and capture to capture your footage. If you use the cards you will still use the easy set up as above but you will use file log and transfer to get the files.

My policy is to always capture and edit in the same format I shoot in if at all reasonably possible. The less transcoding the better. Since you are shooting HDV you should have no problems. Final Cut handles that like a champ.

If you decide to use tape and edit a lot buy a deck. You will wear down your camera heads using it as a deck all of the time.

I hope this helps.

[Bill Hall]

First try send to compressor rather than using the quicktime file. Compressor will then use the native files for compression giving you better quality.

What is the bit rate of the smaller frame size .wmv? You may need to pump it up if you have a bunch of quick cuts or camera moves in your video. Really though at that frame size even 500 kbps should look pretty good. What wmv codec are you using? Try using WMV 9 advanced, it has some extra tricks in the bag to help with smaller video.

Try some of these things out and we can go from there.

[Bill Hall]

This is what we use https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/681820-REG/LaCie_301906U_d2_12x_Blu_ray_Disc.html

We mostly burn Data Blu Ray’s but we’ve never had an issue. I always let it verify the data because some disks have failed verification and needed re burnt.

[Bill Hall]

Craig pretty much hit it on the head.

H.264 has a lot of nifty tricks to keep you video looking pretty even with a low data rate.

Most importantly it analyzes the video forward and backwards in time to achieve much better compression.

If you want to get into the weeds check this out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_codecs

[Bill Hall]

If it has XML support can I import the XML from FCP 7?

[Bill Hall]

Although I haven’t been posting at all, I’m an avid reader of this forum. It has played a big part in helping me determine where my team is heading when we upgrade editing software.

Additionally it’s not bad to have a place to debate and let off steam. Most importantly it keeps all of the angry rants off of the help forums.

The discussion in this forum needs to happen. Many of us are islands of knowledge without peers to offer counterpoints. Having this forum allows us to conduct the point counterpoint arguments we need to move forward.

[Bill Hall]

Thanks a lot turns out it was the deck. Sometimes you can’t forest for the trees and miss the easy solution. This should make the HD switchover go a whole lot smoother. I love this little AJA Kona card.

[Bill Hall]

I’m out of the office now and won’t be able to get back to this problem till Wednesday but I’ll let you know how it goes with the mixer.