[Craig Alan]

Thanks,

I will check back later in the week. I know the list will greatly expand.

However I am under pressure to submit a budget.

I thought MC 5.5 already had support for some I/O boards and boxes.

Will the AJA I/0 Express work for both macbook pros and MacPros?

Is there a board that will work for the MacPro?

Again my need is to monitor out for color correction. Other abilities would be a bonus not a must.

I just don’t have the luxury to have a budget that I will spend when ready.

OSX 10.5.8; MacBookPro4,1 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz MacPro4,1 2.66GHz 8 core 12gigs of ram. GPU: Nvidia Geoforce GT120 with Vram 512. OS X 10.6.x; Camcorders: Sony Z7U, Canon HV30/40, Sony vx2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

Hmmm. That’s a real interesting question. I can monitor live out the HV series either HDMI or component. I know that hooking up a camcorder to the Mac via firewire will let you capture — as an isight cam. But thunderbolt is new and I have no idea if that would work. If you are capturing, you do not want to use your media drive and camera on the same firewire bus. Thunderbolt can handle multiple devices. My guess is that the camcorders would need to be configured to output via the thunderbolt standard. I would use a thunderbolt media drive and attach the cam via firewire. But I have no experience. So please post what your learn.

OSX 10.5.8; MacBookPro4,1 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz MacPro4,1 2.66GHz 8 core 12gigs of ram. GPU: Nvidia Geoforce GT120 with Vram 512. OS X 10.6.x; Camcorders: Sony Z7U, Canon HV30/40, Sony vx2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

Thanks Ty,

Your review confirms my hopes for this unit. I need a mixer to mount under small cams for frequent projects shot in short class periods and for (no tech rehearsal) run and guns. I really think this will do the trick and even if the recorded audio is not ideal, I still think it will teach students how to listen with headphones and watch the meters to improve the recording. I agree with you that digital devices with proprietary menus systems are a pain. But you get used to them. These small cams have a bunch all by themselves. Pro cams are actually much easier to use once you need manual control. I wish there was a way to mount the 302 under them. It’s been a real treat to use the 302 after struggling to a degree to get the shure’s fp33’s output to feed a camcorder’s input.

OSX 10.5.8; MacBookPro4,1 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz MacPro4,1 2.66GHz 8 core 12gigs of ram. GPU: Nvidia Geoforce GT120 with Vram 512. OS X 10.6.x; Camcorders: Sony Z7U, Canon HV30/40, Sony vx2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

I doubt that this could be done. They broadcast interviews with the sound of the speaker disguised through distortion and the face masked to protect the identity of the subject. You could only undo it if you opened the original project file and removed the filter. But with the advancement of software who knows. Again even if this were possible they would need to be highly motivated and skilled.

You could also cut out sections of the audio recording by going to a voice over track of an announcer.

OSX 10.5.8; MacBookPro4,1 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz MacPro4,1 2.66GHz 8 core 12gigs of ram. GPU: Nvidia Geoforce GT120 with Vram 512. OS X 10.6.x; Camcorders: Sony Z7U, Canon HV30/40, Sony vx2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

always use the power cord with camera when capturing.

try the reset button on cam to bring back to factory defaults.

try putting camera in play mode ready to play and then booting up editing app

canon has a slightly different standard for firewire and sometimes causes issues.

FC has different capture settings and sometimes changing these helps. same with other apps

try tape in another cam and see if that will capture. however canon cam heads can be out of alignment and tape won’t play well in another cam

worse comes to worse duplicate footage by copying to another dv cam and then using the dupe to capture to computer.

if you only have one firewire bus then you might need to capture to system drive and then copy to media drive for editing.

OSX 10.5.8; MacBookPro4,1 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz MacPro4,1 2.66GHz 8 core 12gigs of ram. GPU: Nvidia Geoforce GT120 with Vram 512. OS X 10.6.x; Camcorders: Sony Z7U, Canon HV30/40, Sony vx2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

Unless the unwanted conversation is constant, you could edit around it by filling in the unwanted conversation with crowd noise that matches from other sections. This will be tedious but doable. To find good matches for the unwanted sections look for similar waveforms coming from the crowd. You can play with levels until the sequence sounds like a natural flow. Crowd noise tends to be a steady buzz and sudden swells. Put the filler on a different track and line up the waveforms to match. Cut out the unwanted dialog and have a listen. You will not even have to cut it all out to make it fairly meaningless.

It must have been a hell of a conversation for someone to want to “reverse engineer” the distortion and recover what they were saying.

Never a good idea to have the mike attached to the camera. Not only do you pick up unwanted conversations but you need to be silent through the entire shoot.

OSX 10.5.8; MacBookPro4,1 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz MacPro4,1 2.66GHz 8 core 12gigs of ram. GPU: Nvidia Geoforce GT120 with Vram 512. OS X 10.6.x; Camcorders: Sony Z7U, Canon HV30/40, Sony vx2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

Yes I spent a good 1/2 hour with the porta brace bag figuring out how it was designed to be used. Found the flaps with the vents, had the bottom velcro-ed open. The top open, etc. It has a strap designed to hang under the head of the tripod which I guess would let in more air than not hanging but may interfere with tripod operation.I always used the Ki pro open on a cart next to my audio mixer. Given the overheat problem I’ll most likely never use the bag during a shoot unless it’s a short outdoor run and gun kind of thing. Though for those I’d most likely stay with the native codec of the cam and carry less gear. I think the exo skel. would be the best option assuming you have a tripod capable of handling the increased weight.

Would turing the ki pro off during breaks be a good idea? This particular shoot ran over 7 hours.

OSX 10.5.8; MacBookPro4,1 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz MacPro4,1 2.66GHz 8 core 12gigs of ram. GPU: Nvidia Geoforce GT120 with Vram 512. OS X 10.6.x; Camcorders: Sony Z7U, Canon HV30/40, Sony vx2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

I agree with everything you just said. I can set mine up with two people, pretty easy. It’s fairly sturdy and not too heavy. It’s survived a few set ups but I haven’t used it extensively. Noon can have very harsh intense light and heat and I think talent will be more relaxed under shelter. That said you still need to throw diffused light on their faces .

OSX 10.5.8; MacBookPro4,1 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz MacPro4,1 2.66GHz 8 core 12gigs of ram. GPU: Nvidia Geoforce GT120 with Vram 512. OS X 10.6.x; Camcorders: Sony Z7U, Canon HV30/40, Sony vx2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

Do both. The latest premiere is not all that different from FCP except you’ll need a Mac for FCP. If you want to be a pro, learn to learn quickly. Even though these companies got snobby with you, they are out of touch. FCP is EOL. AVID is still here and premiere is gaining ground. Knowing the Mac platform will be good for you as well. FCP X might catch on. We’ll see. But if this is your profession, know it all. It will get easier with practice. Once you are in the timeline, all these programs feel similar. (except X).

OSX 10.5.8; MacBookPro4,1 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz MacPro4,1 2.66GHz 8 core 12gigs of ram. GPU: Nvidia Geoforce GT120 with Vram 512. OS X 10.6.x; Camcorders: Sony Z7U, Canon HV30/40, Sony vx2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

You can do a search for raid 0 or raid 1 or raid 5 or raid 10 and read a lot of stuff about them. But put overly simply, Raid means that you are linking two (or more) hard drives as one. For editing, raid 0 means drives are seen as one big unit. If your raid 0 say has two 1TB drives then it is seen as a 2TB raid and will be faster than a single 2TB drive. Raid 1 means that it automatically makes a copy of your data — so if one hard drive goes down the other has a copy. Then you can get into combos of the two. External enclosures will be advertised as raid. Some of them allow you to swap out drives and add new ones. Some of them allow you to choose the kind of raid you want to use. Look around the Cow; you’ll see lots of ads for these. Read the features and you’ll understand you get what you pay for. Check out https://eshop.macsales.com. They carry a few good brands including CalDigit and their own brand. G-tech is another solid option. Don’t forget to also order a simple cheap external drive that’s big enough to back up your system drive. Use CCC and clone it. The first time it will take a little time. From there it backs only what’s been changed.

With an Imac you can attach an external by means of firewire 800. This is fine for some lower level codec’s but slower than say esata. Thunderbolt holds promise to replace it and is plenty fast except for some real demanding work. If your Imac has thunderbolt look into this option – it’s very new.

In FC if you have changed where your media is, you’ll get an error message. It is fairly simple to point FC to the new location.

https://documentation.apple.com/en/finalcutpro/usermanual/

Type in “reconnect media” in the search.

OSX 10.5.8; MacBookPro4,1 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz MacPro4,1 2.66GHz 8 core 12gigs of ram. GPU: Nvidia Geoforce GT120 with Vram 512. OS X 10.6.x; Camcorders: Sony Z7U, Canon HV30/40, Sony vx2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.