[Dcj1900]

Definitely hire a JH-3.

We have cut at DVCPro HD on a dual 1.8 G5 using v5.1.2 as the lowest spec. Since it is an HD format DVCProHD lets you work in a native HD frame size which saved us conform time when we go uncompressed as fewer of the motion effects needed to be remade.

[Dcj1900]

Sorry one more anomaly to share: we are capture nowing the HDV tapes as one long clip and then splitting up the single file into 5 or 6 files to make it more manageable for the editors and less of a strain on our system. Certain of the tapes appear to capture fine but when the capture is finished, the browser in FCP only sees about 50 seconds of the one hour clip even though you can view the whole clip in Quicktime. When we re-import the clip into a new project it still only sees the same 50 seconds or so. However, when we make the clip offline and manually relink it to the Quicktime, FCP see the entire clip as it should.

Has anyone come across this before – in fact has anyone successfully conformed from HDV mini cams in a 50i environment? I think I must be missing something!

[Dcj1900]

Thanks for the response. We dig at DV resolution because we use Final Cut as an offline tool to cut the editorial content of the programme – once that is complete we go in to ‘online’ and conform in to FCP just the final edited sequence at HD resolution. Since the average shooting ratio is approximately 25-30 to 1 it is not practical to capture all the rushes at HD resolution as it will eat up our storage resources.