[Dave Roberts]

Alan,
You are not the first person to ask this question. Here is a thread with some recommendations regarding e-sata cards and drives:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/992949#994637

Best,
Dave

[Dave Roberts]

Hello everybody. I am a host for the new MOTU V4HD forum. Please drop on by!

https://forums.creativecow.net/motu

Although the iMac does have limitations in terms of busses and CPU power, you do have options as to how it can be used with the V4HD and external FW drives.

Please check out the thread here:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/272/6#11

As far as your MacBook Pro goes, that will work fine with the V4HD. Because the MacBook Pro does have a card expansion slot, you can add a separate bus for an external drive, so that gives you a bit more flexibility than what you get with the iMac.

For timeline and capture presets, you can use either “V4HD DVCProHD 1080i50 25fps” or “V4HD DVCProHD 1080i60 25fps”. In this case, the i50 (1440 X 1080) or i60 (1280 X 1080) refers to the raster size.

Best,
Dave

[Dave Roberts]

Zander,
Hello! I’m Dave Roberts from MOTU and I will do my best to answer your questions. Please also feel free to contact me directly at magicd@motu.com or 617 576 2760.

-As some of you know I work for a film school, we mainly work in panasonic cameras, dvcpro-proHD

-so now I’m rigging up some of our dv suites to work with the motu box. The problem comes when people DONT wan’t to use a motu codec,

DVCPro HD is not a “motu” codec. It’s an industry standard. The V3HD does use DVCPro for HD transmission in and out of the computer. For SD, you have the choice of DVCPro or 8 or 10 bit uncompressed.
HD video captured into FCP from the V3HD will be DVCPro HD codec. If you need to work with some other codec, you can then convert it in FCP.

FCP will transcode on playback. In other words, you can play back a non-DVC codec in FCP and send that out through the V3HD because FCP is converting to DVC on the fly on output. To do this however, you do need a very powerful computer. Therefore, if you are using the V3HD for output, you are better off working with DVCPro in FCP.

-or what if they capture dvcprohd, straight out via FW, and bring it into a motu room, Do they have to convert codecs, change sequences etc?

DVCProHD is DVCProHD. If you DVCProHD files from some other source, they will play back through the V3HD. However, if you are capturing video via a Firewire connection directly from a deck or a camera, that is probably not DVCProHD. That is probably HDV, which is not the same thing.
Yes, you can convert from one codec to another within FCP (or Quicktime Pro)

-What about SD editing, I can’t seem to get any of the sd presets to display on either our panasonic 28″ broadcast, or our tiny 19″ SD sony monitor via sdi.

All video outputs on the V3HD are live at the same time. If signal is coming out one output, it is coming out all the outputs. The V3HD either patches through signal from one of it’s inputs, or it passes through playback signal from FCP.
If the source signal is SD, you get SD signal on the SD outputs and a converted signal on the HD outputs. If the source signal is HD, you get HD signal on the HD outputs and converted signal on the SD outputs. The V3HD gives you the standard options for SD/HD and HD/SD conversion.

If you’re having trouble or if you have any questions at all, drop me an email or give me a call. I also plan to spend more time on this board monitoring for V3HD questions (this is my first post here!)

Cheers,
Dave Roberts – MOTU