[David Cooke]

At my business, we saved over $1,300 on about a $15,000 total
instal of 4 desktops, and monitors by getting bids from MacMall
and the Apple Store. Being owned by a large corporation, we
went with Macmall, no problems and used the savings to upgrade to
a larger 23-inch cinema display and more ram.

D’s Video

[David Cooke]

All G5’s with sufficient ram will work fine. A good graphics card is
quite helpful, I’m on FCP 6.0.3 Quad 2.5 PPC, 16gigram, and still
haven’t installed the XT1900 card I bought months ago. Been super
busy and still have the stock card the G5 came with. Knock on wood,
never had a problem, BUT I am only editing mini-dv footage right now.

D’s Video

[David Cooke]

Yes, I too have run into the “capture encountered a problem reading
data from the tape. Even though I work in broadcast TV as an editor/shooter, I also do weddings from home with a Canon XL min-dv’s.
AND I have found that 95% of the time as this equipment ages, whenever possible, use the camera that you recorded the footage on
to actually playback into your FCP system. KNow that adds wear and
tear to your cams heads and deck, but Iv’e had probs when using
a mini-dv panasonic deck.
Anyway, my one capture “BEEF” with FCP is this. EVen when you change to “uncontrollable device” if your tape has a brief glitch
or frame adjustment, it makes FCP ABORT. FCP should just keep recording and should re-generate its own code or have a setting for
you to Make FCP do this. Our old “Affinity” system at work NEVER
gave us aborts even when feeding it something “non-sync”. Don’t
know if hooking up your capture card (not sure if all have this)
to a blackburst or sync generator input to try and stabilize it.

D’s Video

[David Cooke]

Sorry, took some time to reply. I think “yes” I plugged it into the right spot on the board that
“seemed” to fit, but took me a while. seemed hidden and hard to get to, but still could have
not gotten the plug correct. I think I may take it to one of our 2 mac stores and have them
take a ‘shot’ at it.
thanks,

D’s Video

[David Cooke]

So does this mean my Radeon XT1900XT is ‘bad”. Have had it new in the box for 4 months (purchased as an upgrade for my G5 Mac Pro. Just installed it last week between projects and got NOTHING on the monitors and no “mac boot up” sound. Put the original ‘stock’ video card back in to work on my next project to be completed this weekend and everything worked fine. Figured I needed to download some software or driver updates, OR should I just take it in to the local Mac Store?
Thanks
Quad 2.5 Mac Pro, 16gb, FCP 6.0.1, Photoshop CS3, 2 x 500GB G-Tech Firewire 800 drives.

D’s Video

[David Cooke]

We have a Kona LHe card at the facility I work at it works “perfect”. If this is within your
price range.
1Videomilkman

D’s Video

[David Cooke]

Thanks Arnie! My AE skills are quite ‘infantile”. But I’ll show this to the head of our dept.
who works with AE almost every day.

D’s Video

[David Cooke]

We are transitioning to a Full FCP system from an older non-linear system at work, but our
corporation (in our budget) eliminated the monies for an archiving system. We are spoiled from using a “great” Sony AIT system for our older system. So we are a bit stuck, but here is what we are “thinking”.
Since your “Project” files (as we call them- your “Recipe”) are relatively small, we are
going to burn “projects” evey 2-3 months onto DVD’s. We also are going to try and take the
autosave vaults and folders that are “not” your capture scratch folder and burn a dvd for Each project that we do. Now 90% of our work is 30 second or less commercials and only about 10-15% long form, so we are thinking this will work. Saving our camera footage tapes (currently shoot on panasonic dvcpro50) we will not need to back up the acutal video.
Hope this helps.

D’s Video

[David Cooke]

Thanks guys. I’m fairly “young” in FCP experience. At my television job, we are in the process of replacing an older “Accom AFFINITY” NLE with 2 FCP systems. we’re still learning with the books and “playing” around a bit until all the pieces get shipped in, but
and so far “blown away with the things that can be done, and “we haven’t even touched MOTION 3 YET. We’ve got so-oo much to learn!

[David Cooke]

I use the standard keyboard, a Wacom 3 Tablet and the Contour Shuttle Pro. The shuttle
pro works pretty darn well during editing, BUT it has issues when it comes to controlling
the “deck”. Doesn’t work very well. I’m also spoiled because at my real job the “Affinity” editing system (a mac-based proprietary system now 6 years old) has a “KILLER” jogwheel along with extra buttons on its “sidecar” as we call it.