[Craig Seeman]

BTW, in my own testing I’ve been able to playback VC1 files with Flip4Mac 2.0

[Craig Seeman]

At some point when I come up for air I’m going to compare Squeeze’s AVC to Apple’s H.264 in Compressor. BTW Squeeze 4.3 is out today so don’t judge by what you saw in Squeeze which didn’t do justice to H.264 (I’m being polite).

[Craig Seeman]

I think there’s an Apple knowledge base on that issue. Don’t know the answer offhand but just wanted you to know it’s an issue others have bumped into and there’s an answer since you’ve been hanging with this question for a couple of days.

[Craig Seeman]

Squeeze 4.3 update was released today. Comes with an FLV player. YAA! You have to pay another $199 though for the On2 Flash codec but the includec codec seems to work fine. They’ve added metadata support for Flash. They seem to be using their own AVC (H.264) instead of Apple’s

Waiting for my Cleaner 6.5 upgrade. Autodesk says they’re on back order and might be as much as 2 weeks or so before I get it.

[Craig Seeman]

I’ve read of at least one person doing the “iPod” test with a firewire iPod. As Gary implies, the iPod harddrive is reformated so it doesn’t work as a media player. Not sure if it can be reformated back. For some I can imagine having a 60GB portable battery powered firewire drive might be worth the price of a firewire iPod. I’ve heard the transfer is no better, and may be slightly slower than real time.

[Craig Seeman]

Then the first thing he should do is open the WMV in WMP9 Mac (unless he has a PC) and do File/Get Info to see what variant of WMV he’s dealing with.

I suspect going to MPEG-4 or H.264 could result in yet another quality hit. Too much lossy for me. If he has to go that route he might push up the data rate. Won’t make it look better but it can minimize the loss.

Flip4Mac Player Pro is about $50 . . . not free but not like having to buy a full compression app though. If his purpose is to edit the DV file then he’d then be able to import it into iMovie which likely came with his Mac free.

[Craig Seeman]

You can map it to the button bar or actually map to a button on a device. Actually the Shuttle Pro might be more useful for that.

One of the nifty things about FCP is that there are several was to do one task.

Click “empty space”
I find clicking on a empty area in the timeline to deselct the most awkward way. It can be havok if you’re zoomed out or “focused” at some other point in the time line where you have a small clip or transition selected elsewhere that you can’t see.

Making a button
If all you have is a one button mouse doing it on the button bar at lest gives you a place to click and a little visual feedback that you’ve completed the task.

Mapping to a key
Mapping to a single keys is easier than the coordination to hit 3 keys.

Mapping to a physical button on a device (mouse, shuttle pro, etc) is good too since finger and physical button are “right there.”

[Craig Seeman]

If you’re on a Mac you can use Flip4Mac PlayerPro. You can open the file in QuicktimePro and simply save it as .mov or you can use wmv directly in anything from iMovie to FCP. You can of course upsample it too from wmv to dv stream or dv25 wraped in mov too.

https://flip4mac.com/wmv.htm

[Craig Seeman]

And if you’re mouse driven you can just make it a button.

[Craig Seeman]

Flip4Mac has an MXF importer for FCP for use with XDCAM. I suspect they will support XDCAM HD when it hits the market.

https://flip4mac.com/mxf.htm