[Bobby Mosaedi]

The Media100 product seems to be geting better and better. We recently decided to go ahead and purchase a final cut accelerated system alongside a blackmagic multibridge extreme. Coming from media100 over to final cut is not easy and i do not recommend it for those who enjoy media 100 for its simplicity. the hardest part is the hardware setup.

Media100 lays everything out to you in a couple of options: acquire uncompressed or compressed SD or HD.

Final cut you must:

set your acquire settings which involves selecting a codec, a resoluton, a pixel aspect ratio, a framerate, and a quality.

then you have timeline settings which MUST MATCH your acquire settings. if it doesnt you will have to software render everything to match you sequence codec.

You also must select video output settings which is a long drop down menu of over 35 items. its pretty overwhelming the first few times.

the biggest drawback of final cut pro is its inability to mix codecs in the same timeline… so if you have some beta footage that you already have digitized at 720×486, then have some dv footage captured at 720×480, you cant mix the footage in the timeline! you either have to render out one of the formats to match the other or redigitize. it can be very frustrating for editors switching over if you dont spend the time to figure out your codecs. this is a major drawback of the final cut system regardless of what hardware you purchase.

also having the nice luxury of “export to after effects” from your timeline is no longer free. you must buy an expensive plug-in to make that happen easily.

also… i dont understand audio in final cut. it seems like in media100 you can have unlimited amount of audio layers and effects happening simultaneously and m100 never skips a beat. in final cut if you import a couple music tracks over one another with some sound effects, you get the red bar and have to render audio!

the fundamental difference between fcp and m100 is the way the two NLEs handle media. FCP keeps media in its native format and m100 converts evrything to its own proprietary codec. well actually not anymore. media100HD now CAN natively playback DV, DVCPRO50, animation, and a number of other quicktime supported codecs without the need to rerender.

i would stick with media100HD if you are comfortable with it. its only going to get better. if anything. media100 seems more “mac- like” to the typical mac user than final cut does with its infinite number or choices. if you have any other questions feel free to email me

[Bobby Mosaedi]

The sony deck you have can do a downconvert through analog. make sure your settings are set to NTSC 480i. Then you can connect to your media 100 HD’s component SD video input and digitize from there.

[Bobby Mosaedi]

also…the flip4mac plugin only works with XDCAM SD material right now.

[Bobby Mosaedi]

I used MPEG streamclip group all my files together and export them out to Media 100HD 8 bit uncompressed. im not sure what media100 does when “updating video media files” im guessing it is seperating the video into fields.

[Bobby Mosaedi]

oh no! the bugs from HD are starting to trickle its way into the rock-solid i systems. Well someone mentioned this problem earlier and a workaround is to turn off the preference for “remember last project opened”. so whenever you open a project it will no longer load the last one opened.

[Bobby Mosaedi]

ha! i knew there was a catch. no uncompressed HD huh? thats kind of flip flop of media 100 and avid from 10 years ago. media100 with “lossless” and now uncompressed with no compressed. well after many debates we ended up purchasing a g5 quad with a blackmagic multibridge extreme FCP system. pretty excited about it. should be arriving here in the next couple of weeks.

does anyone know if m100hd vers 11.0 will be a free upgrade?

[Bobby Mosaedi]

if youre going to share multiple FCP licenses, you wont be able to run them simultaneously if they are all on the same network. it’ll get pretty frustrating pretty quick… if your workstations do not need to be on the internet then you should be fine.

[Bobby Mosaedi]

well its good to hear some positive feedback from a couple of people. any negatives? we have decided to go with the multibridge extreme. i hope it works well for us.

[Bobby Mosaedi]

we too have been using media 100 since 98, and our editors have dabbled mroe in FCP than avid so the choice for us is obvious. i’ve always wanted to learn avid and was hopefully seeking this oppurtunity to get into it, but its probably not going to happen. as we recruit new editors the chances they know FCP are better than avid, so that works well in our favor.

If you get the top-of-the-line media composer with DNXcel for hte mac, do you still have to buy all of avids hardware? or can you use your existing xserve raid and keyboard and cinema displays?

No solution to the HD reference, i probably need to report it to media100. but i dont know how to go about doing that, which number to call or who to email. its all very frustrating

[Bobby Mosaedi]

Hi Dave,

I also own a JVC HD camera and thought my NLE was the problem (media100HD) for digitizing clips (720p30). i used a miranda dec bridge and firewire capture through FCP with no progress. still cant get my clips to capture correctly 100%. I learned that the problem is very likely with JVC. There is a firmware revision out for the BR HD50 deck AND the camera that addresses the way the camera creates the start/stop markers on the tape. we have sent our deck and camera back to JVC and once they return i will play the tapes out of the camera and re-record them to the deck. Im pretty sure i will lose all my start/stop markers but at least i will be able to batch capture so its a start. I suggest you update your equipment as well if you do not know about the revisions.