[David Roth weiss]

The differece between DV and uncompressed when ripping from a DVD is negligible. Unless you are going to broadcast its a fairly moot point.

[David Roth weiss]

Bob,

You’re thinking is accurate. There are only four ways to finish an HDV job properly, and keeping things HDV native isn’t one of them, unless its just cuts and disolves only without titles and efx:

1. Capture directly an intermediate (iframe) format

2. Transcode everything to an intermediate (iframe) format at an early stage

3. Transcode your cut project to an intermediate (iframe) format

There are valid cases for each depending upon the situation.

DRW

[David Roth weiss]

Bogie,

Are you even using FCP ver. 5?

[David Roth weiss]

Bob,

I hope there is an elegant solution for this one, though something tells me this may be one of those inelegant FCP non-features. I hope I’m wrong… Please, somebody prove me wrong…

DRW

[David Roth weiss]

Reins,

8-bit looks great, 10-bit is better. But you shouldn’t let drive space dictate that decision. 300gb hard drives are available now for only $125, so if your aim is to provide your clients with the highest quality product that you can deliver, don’t cut yourself short over a few hundred bucks worth of hardware.

DRW

[David Roth weiss]

[Brett Sherman] “Hopefully Apple will be able to mix formats on a timeli”

I’ll bet you anything that right out of the box the new Final Cut Extreme, premiering at NAB, will allow multiple formats on the timeline. Of course its also rumored to sell at $10,000 MSRP.

DRW

[David Roth weiss]

Arty,

They mean it won’t work with the new quad G5s which require PCI Express (PCIe). I think every company is working on creating PCIe SATA cards now, but so far I haven’t seen one. Sonnet is due to release one sometime this month.

DRW

[David Roth weiss]

Jeffrey,

I’m from New Orleans myself, so I know a thing or two about blue crabs… Crawfish, oysters, and shrimp too… You guys are kind of Ivy League crustacean afficianados by comparison.

DRW

[David Roth weiss]

GG,

See my post above re: Roll Your Own Inexpensive SATA RAID. There is good reason that SATA drives are now the industry standard in all new computers. Firewire is very easy, and it has offered wonderful advantages for indie editors over the last several years, but it as not nearly as fast or reliable as SATA.

DRW

[David Roth weiss]

minoun,

I hate to dispute what Jeremy said, but… Allowing the monitor to scale your 4×3 program will insure that one of two things happens, 1. the material gets distorted and everyone has block heads, or 2. there is no distortion but the top and bottom are cut off, likely including a good bit of your lower third IDs.

The proper way to create a full screen 16×9 Digibeta of a 4×3 program is to create a new 16×9 anamorphic timeline, and drag your textless sequence to the timeline as a nested sequence. Load the video into the viewer by double clicking, and scale up until the sides of the video fill the frame horizontally (approximately 33%). You will notice that FCP automaically masks the top and bottom of your video, centering the 4×3 video in the frame. Now you must go through and raise or lower shots or sequences of shots that are too high or low in the frame. Split the video track at the appropriate points using the razor tool and repsotion appropriately using the motion settings in the viewer.

Once you have repositioned all necessary shots in your timeline, copy your titles from your original timeline and paste onto a layer over your video. You may notice minor edge artifacts caused by scaling, which may or may be acceptable to you. I they are not you will neeed to recreate them in a program other than Boris 3D titler that will allow you to create titles at 863×486.

I just completed a project for television using this method myself. The loss of quality is quite minimal.

Good luck,
DRW