[Dennis Lisonbee]

The other two items to look for wear are the firewire connection and the RGB connectors. If you have a card reader, the Firewire is not an issue. If you don’t monitor HD with the RGB output, that is not an issue.

[Dennis Lisonbee]

I’m certain you have read the FAQ page here: https://www.duel-systemsadapters.com/support/faq.cfm
Other that the suggestions there, I can’t help as I’m using OS X.

[Dennis Lisonbee]

Yes, it is the Duel-Systems DuelAdapter Card. About a hundred bucks.

https://www.duel-systemsadapters.com/?productid=DP-0001

[Dennis Lisonbee]

Richard,

Thank you for your prompt reply, and your opinion.

This is a very timely issue currently being discussed in higher education right now. Yesterday a guest speaker, a professional photographer from industry, discussed what Adobe is doing with our students. I am certainly “trolling” to find out what other professionals think about this issue.

To save bandwidth, I would appreciate hearing from other professionals directly. You may email me at lisonbde@uvsc.edu

Sincerely,

Dennis Lisonbee
Associate Professor
Digital Media
Utah Valley University

[Dennis Lisonbee]

Don’t forget to repair disk permissions. I would also run a program called Disk Warrior on all the drives. You will need to Boot the G5 off the Disk Warrior disk to run it on the system drive. I noticed my local Comp USA has copies of Disk Warrior.

I’ve noticed that the network will sometimes cause the spinning ball. Shut down anything connected to your network.

[Dennis Lisonbee]

This is a little late, but this is an issue I was faced with two years ago when using compressor for a High Def show. The Director of Photography was VERY” upset with the blacks and the gamma when we did our test DVD. We all went round and round with this and finally discovered that when the high def goes to tape it changes the gamma and black levels because in the MAC way of doing things FCP changes the gamma and black levels to match the monitor so that we see it correctly. When it goes to tape those levels are automatically changed. When it goes to DVD IT IS NOT CHANGED and as a result when you play it back on a DVD player and Monitor the gamma and black levels can look very bad. It is even worse with High Def than DV. Only people that know what they are watching for will notice the shift in DV to DVD.

After my colorist did the mathematical calculation he changed the gamma and blacks in Final Cut Pro, compressed it using compressor and DVD looks great! I’m surprised that after several years someone else discovered this!

[Dennis Lisonbee]

I had a MacBook Pro for several weeks. Like Jerry says, it runs ALL the Pro apps like a champ and it is faster than my Two Year, Nine month old Dual G5. (When I was bored I installed XP on the MacBook Pro and ran 3D Max. Yep, it ran very well.) Hated to give that laptop back.

So. . . . I will be ordering a MacBook Pro soon to replace my four year old TiBook. If the dual core Intel for MacBooks are fast, the Quad Tower will blaze, thus I’ll WAIT to replace the G5 when the Quad Intel is released. That could be sooner than later the way Apple is cooking these days. (Of course if I had some very high end projects this summer that required more processing speed than a Dual 2G G5, I would order a Quad today simply because of profit.)

So. . . . If down the road you need a lot of raw processing power for rendering, wait. If you need something now to impress your friends and to get fat checks from clients, The MacBook Pro 17 is the ticket.

[Dennis Lisonbee]

The track will be exported as independent tracks. That is the beauty of OMF. In Pro Tools the work flow is to export to OMF is:

1. Export the FCP sequence to OMF
2. Convert to Pro Tools using DigiTranslator
3. Open In Pro Tools

If Nuendo imports OMF files right into the program, your workflow will be simplified. Others may have more experience with FCP and Nuendo.

[Dennis Lisonbee]

Apple sent us an Intel Macbook Pro with Logic and FCP 5.1 to test. Other than speed differences, you will not even know you are on an Intel Mac. It’s a beautiful thing. However, FCP 5.1 will read 5.0 files but 5.0 will NOT read 5.1 files.

I’ve been using a TiBook 400 and 500 from the day they were released and shipped. After testing the Macbook Pro, I can’t wait till my new one comes in. In my mind the new Intel Macbook Pro is the finest all around personal computer yet.

Yes, I installed XP on it and yes, it works like one would expect on an fast Apple/Intel laptop. Playing around with Windows on a Mac gave me a chance to compare these two operating systems side by side. I won’t waste the bandwidth or time sharing my observation.

[Dennis Lisonbee]

One other comment when communicating with your IT people. Spend some time explaining what bandwidth and processor requirements your editing system needs. Groupwise is a network/server issue that is designed for email and so forth and can jam up bandwidth very fast and spread other bad things very fast.

I think we are going to see a trend in the future where many video editors and multimedia people will be doing the IT part in place of an IT department. I have two recent graduates who were hired to do IT and Media. One in San Diego and one in Salt Lake City. They learned the IT part, not because they took classes, but because we teach troubleshooting and they found it was easier to learn networking and keeping computers running themselves (troubleshooting) than relying on an IT staff that did not know a thing about the bandwidth and processors requirements of video. As corporations have financial difficulities we are going to see a lot of IT people out looking for work.

In one of our meetings when the Professors were trying to explain the needs of gigabytes of storage space and fast fiber networks to IT people one person dared to bring up how easy it was to get MAC’s to communicate over fast networks. One of the professors that taught networking got very mad and said companies like Apple were going to run IT people out of business and that was immoral.

So it is time for all editors and media guru’s to learn the black art of networking because I think that this professor could very well be a prophet; companies like Apple could run a good number of high paied IT people right out of business.

Again, my 2 cents.