[Dominick Noval]

I purchased a V1U at it’s release last spring. I spent a month in Europe shooting footage over the summer. I work on a MacPro Quad 2.66 and run Final Cut Studio 2. I have been working in Final Cut since 2004 and haven’t been exposed to any other NLE system. With the V1U you have several options as far as capturing into Final Cut as determined by your workflow. If you want the best picture the V1 can offer, 1920×1200, you need to look into a HDMI interface card. I have the Intensity card witch offers dual HDMI ports. 1 in and 1 out. You can run HDMI directly from the camera into the card. In addition the preview out works great on a 52″ SONY XBR 1080p HDTV. Capturing through HDMI limits you to the capture now option. A good codec is the Apple ProRes 422. You’ll need the hard drive space on a fast second drive. A good option is to combine 3 internal SATA drives. Set 2 up as a striped RAID as your media drive, and leave the 3rd for project file data. This keeps your system OS on a separate drive.

The second option is to capture HDV at a resolution of 1440×1080. The footage will still look good on a large HDTV, but you do lose some data during the compression. All you need for this is a Firewire cable. Since your timecode is sent in the signal, you can now batch capture. Start a batch capture and FCP will capture independent clips for each clip on the tape. This is a good option if you need to capture a lot of footage. Capturing in the native HDV 1080i codec is good if you simply need to make basic edits, with few effects. Read up on some of the other codec options.

Final option is to compress the signal into a smaller format via camera options. You can select to export an SD signal if need be. I don’t know why you would.

Anything else?

-Dominick Noval
Ntense Productions
https://dominicknoval.home.comcast.net
https://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/