[Bob Pierce]

Thanks, everybody for your input – you guys are great. I’ll try compressing the audio, which I haven’t tried yet. I’ve always stuck with aiff and a 2 pass VBR of 6.2 (or less, for longer pieces), which if I’m not mistaken is within DVD limits. Maybe not. I’ll also try a slow burn with toast. Regarding replicated disks, I’ve always had the attitude that I want to have a good usable DVD-R to send out so that I know that I’m not duplicating the defects. Some of my clients want to run thousands of disks, which could be a very expensive mistake!
Thank you,
Bob Pierce

[Bob Pierce]

Thanks Richard, that’s interesting. I have experimented with other settings in the past, but I’m unsure of which way to go to improve reliable playback. In other words, is it better to compress the video (and audio -?) more in order to put less demand on the player (at the expense of quality, of course) or is it easier for the playback device to have less to de-compress??

I’ll try these settings and get back to you.
Thanks
Bob

[Bob Pierce]

Thanks, Ben. I’ve had this trouble with both the Mac Pro and the MacBook Pro, both of which a very spanky new. I’ve only used Taiyo Yuden DVD-R 8x. Does anyone else out there have better luck with DVD+R? I know some people use Toast to burn the disks – is this a better way to go?
THANKS
Bob Pierce

[Bob Pierce]

Getting back to the original question: aside from the internal/external question, It seems that no one has had any problems with heat filling the Mac Pro with drives. I think in principal I agree with Walter, that it’s just better in general to stick to external drives, but the cost difference here (and ease) makes it extremely enticing to just throw some drives in there. So many decisions to make with this stuff!

[Bob Pierce]

Thanks, guys, your input is greatly appreciated. I think I’ll probably go for it, as soon as the intel version comes out.
Bob

[Bob Pierce]

Thanks everybody for the feedback, you guys are awesome. It does sound compelling, and I was thinking about a dual boot setup with FCP, which leaves my options open. My remaining questions are:

How well does the HDe work for creating dvds? Currently I’m exporting my media 100 programs out as reference to compressor (after a longish render) and mpeging that way. Final Cut seems a tad better in this area – or faster, at least (could be that screaming fast Mac Pro, of course!).

Does HDe handle multiple tracks of video as FCP? This is essential, I think.

Do HDe’s effects (dissolves, blurs, color correction) work in real time or do they need to be rendered? How does it compare to FCP in this respect? On the Mac Pro FCP is quite amazing with this stuff I must say, and so I’m hoping the universal binary HDe (when it comes out) will offer similar performance.

Has anyone used it with Producer? I would really love to be able to take projects home with me to work on a laptop (or make small changes without having to drive back into the city). This is a pretty huge advantage to FCP.

And the BIGGEST QUESTION: Do you guys feel that Media 100 is serious about continuing to support these products? They doe seem to be revitalized these days and I hope the bug fixes and improvements will continue.

Thanks again for all the input!
Bob