[David Rowan]

There is a way to “kickstart” Compressor. You open up the utility called Terminal and type in some magic code and hit enter, then your password and enter, and then quit terminal and Voila Compressor works!

The problem is I dont have the magic code with me here at home, but if you search the Compressor discussion group at Apple you’ll find it. I’ll try and remember to post it here tomorrow when I’m back at work.

DWR

[David Rowan]

OH, and if you do end up with a PC you should consider Vegas instead of PP, I know a few Vegas users and they are very satisfied.

DWR

[David Rowan]

You can also contl click on the clips in the bin and modify them from there. You do this on the name of the clip, not in the column thats says “V” or “V2A” etc…

DWR

[David Rowan]

I just captured from the Sony directly into FCP 5 with two different codecs and both worked fine ( HDV and Apple Intermediate)

DWR

[David Rowan]

I double-click the clip I want in the timeline so it opens back up in the viewer. Then from there I drag it back down to the timeline to the new track I want it on (If I’m synching it up the I leave the snapping on).

Watch the little arrow that appears as you drag into the timeline, depending on your position in the timeline it will either point right (insert) or down (overwright). My guess is your duplicating the footage from 3 to 4 right? so you’ll want to overwrite it. It actually takes a little hand-eye coordination.

Once you do the double-click to get it up in the viewer you can also overwrite the video with the usual edits like hitting F10, but you have to make sure you have moved the video patch from V3 to V4, and that you have in in-point at the start of the clip. This is one of the very few cases where I actually prefer to drag and drop.

DWR

[David Rowan]

Wouldn’t it be easier just to export a FCP movie and burn it with iDVD?
Whats the advantage to playing out and recording on an external DVD player?

Here at my TV station we use Panasonic DVD recorders for our airchecks and for straight tape-to-DVD dubs, so I see the advantages they have, but I just dont get using them coming out of an NLE. Unless you dont have a superdrive.

DWR

[David Rowan]

In FCP 5 the option to monitor or not monitor is in the record tool. Go to clip settings and down by the audio buttons in a box to turn on “preview”.

DWR

[David Rowan]

We just did a little test with the Z-Cam on my FCP system.
We were able to import over firewire from the camera both in the HDV and in the Apple Intermediate Codecs (1080i60). No difference that I could see between those on the test.

I pulled the clips into a normal DV NTSC Timeline an rendered it. I tried letterbox, a full top to bottom Pan-&-Scan size and also blowing up the clip to 100% and pisitioning it so that only a part was visible in the DV Canvas. It look great in every version.

Now our main purpose for using the camera is to shoot stuff that will be composited in Promos and Spots, so We had to get the clip into After Effects. The HDV and Apple Intermediate did not work in After Effects. So I up-rezzed it to Uncompressed 1080i and that woked in AE and still looked fine. The Up-rezzed clips even played on the desktop monitor using my SATA-Max Raid from Promax. Of course I only have the 20″ displays, so I had to cut the view size to half.

During all this several people told me verbally that they didn’t like how the Sony took pictures (Artifacts in high-contrast settings and on motion) and that they were waiting for the JVC camera to come out.

DWR

[David Rowan]

There might be something wrong with the project file that FCP is trying to load as it opens. Try finding some other project and doing the double-click-to-open method (instead of starting FCP directly).

If you don’t have some other project just take the project file(s) that was last open and move it, hide it somewhere. When FCP tries to open and can’t find the project then it should just open with a new “untitled” project.

If this works and FCP opens then you can try doing a File-Open- and see if your project will work. If it crashes FCP or the program hangs, then you will know for sure it was your project file and you can try opening one of the backed-up version from Auto Save.

Good Luck

DWR

[David Rowan]

What about capturing it as DV and then upconvert the clips? That is, export them from FCP as HDV, or use Compressor to do the job? Would this look better, worse or any different than doing it on the fly through an HDV device? I know this would take more time, but if you use compressor perhaps it could work on it in the background while you do other stuff.

DWR