[Bob Cole]

Thank you Matte.

Your method may require a degree of physical dexterity that I may not be able to muster. I was hoping to find a tester that I could simply slide the battery into — and something compact and versatile enough that I could include it in one of my travel cases, and test other batteries as well.

How seriously do you take the concept of “testing under load?”

— Bob C

[Bob Cole]

[Bret Williams] “I’d be curious as to what your istat nano specs are reading. It’s a dashboard widget that tells temps internally and fan rpms.”

How do you access that widget? I would be glad to test this tomorrow. I put three additional 500 GB drives into a MacPro six months ago and it seems fine.

— Bob C

[Bob Cole]

[Chris Babbitt] “I had changed something in the Mastering settings,”

PTT is often a problem for me too — it was the first thing that made me Trash My Prefs.

Could you tell us what it was that you changed in Mastering settings?

— Bob C

[Bob Cole]

[nikkivaporpost] “Latin America.”

I may be wrong, but I think there may be some producers from Latin America who occasionally post in the Business and Marketing Forum.

The info you want (Latin American producers/shooters) may be in the Profiles of the COW, Maybe more of us (incl. me) would post a profile in the COW if there were a way to access the resulting database for queries such as this.

— Bob C

[Bob Cole]

If you use two monitors make sure that your graphics card can support both at the same resolution. But imho one 24″ Dell is plenty big. I bought two but decided to use them for two different computers. Maybe someday if I embark on a huge doc I’ll use them both for FCP, but right now I prefer having two different computers so I can use one while the other is busy rendering or burning a DVD, etc.

— Bob C.

[Bob Cole]

Good points, but could you recommend an action plan?

I’ve been allowing Apple (and a vendor whose name I can’t recall right now) to update my MacPro every time it suggests, unless I’m on a tight deadline. But you’re right about not fixing what ain’t broke. My problem is that as a Mac newbie I’m not sure what’s broke and what isn’t.

Ideally, I’d like to update about two months late, so that any issues can be brought to light by early adopters. If you decline an update, does Apple remind you of it and offer cumulative updates later?

— Bob C

[Bob Cole]

[Nino Giannotti] “www.EFPlighting.com”

Very nice, Nino. Great website, well laid-out.

In terms of lighting and rigging, it’s a big leap from the one-camera, one-subject, one-angle interview to the two-camera, two subject interview, especially where the space between the two people has to be “clean” and the keys have to be boomed.

What, in your opinion, is the ideal location equipment rig for that situation? The best trade-of of great results and portability?

John Sharaf has given this forum some great tips about how to handle the two-camera situation. John has shown the use of boomed HMIs, I suppose in part because the greater output of the HMIs is really helpful, when the key has to be that much further away from the subject.

Two-camera is a challenging situation, beautifully handled by John and Nino, and something I would like to try. I’ve noticed that even on top-line shows, almost every time that the lighting has been subpar, it has been in a two-camera situation.

— Bob C

[Bob Cole]

Thanks very much. I was on TC Read.

But, as you suggested, restarting FCP was enough to turn the timecode from nonsense to reality. I even was able to capture over timecode breaks, though I missed a few seconds at the head of the shot after the break.

I appreciate the advice. I still haven’t trashed pref’s yet — I keep getting into the middle of jobs and don’t like to risk it, but I’m going to try it over the weekend.

— Bob C

[Bob Cole]

Great answers. I really appreciate it.

— BC

[Bob Cole]

[Alexander] ”
QuickTime Pro or iTunes”

Thanks. I guess I was misreading Steve — I thought he meant to convert inside FCP. Do you mean that my procedure (File/Export/Audio to AIFF(s)-choose 48 KHz – import resulting file) is flawed? It seemed to work.

I actually have been quite confused by iTunes, believe it or not. I assume it’s like riding a bike, but if you haven’t seen it done you might never try to get on.

— BC