[Don Greening]

Minimum requirements to view and edit EX footage on Apple Computers are as follows:

1. Sony Transfer Tool App. (earliest version will work)
2. FAM software driver. (earliest version will work)
3. Mac OS v.10.4.11.
4. Quicktime Pro v.7.3.1
5. Final Cut Pro v.6.0.2

If you have software versions earlier than the ones quoted above you’ll get a blank screen and a warning that the EX codecs cannot be found.

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Vasan Srinivasan] “Will there be a quality difference?”

No difference. The camera you’re using as a deck is simply passing the media through at the same quality level as your aquisition camera would.

– Don

[Don Greening]

Just export a QT movie using current settings, which will be the same settings you used to capture the footage. Just drag the resulting 45 minute movie into iDVD and it will encode your movie to MPEG2 for the DVD.

– Don

[Don Greening]

Michael, never mind. Maybe I should have made note of who the original poster was. I’m awake now.

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Michael Slowe] ” Can you choose which sections of clips you want to acquire or does the whole clip (take) have to come in?”

If you’re referring to that feature using Media 100 I wouldn’t know, as I don’t use it. My comment was directed to you as in: “Michael’s editing life is good again.”

If you can use the Sony Transfer app like I do then yes, you can set in and out points on any clip and transfer as little or as much of it from the SxS card as you want.

Sorry if my “life is good” comment was misleading.

– Don

[Don Greening]

There’s a ton of Photo JPEG sequence presets in FCP and you can find them in this FCP menu:

Final Cut Pro>Audio/Video Settings>Sequence Presets. Scroll down until you find the one that matches your current project settings.

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Mark McFarlane] “It appears my playback problem on a 4:3 CRT was the result of a really crummy DVD player.”

All set top DVD players have an internal set up menu. Even the “crummy” ones. DVD players have to know what kind of TV they’re hooked up to so the player can display full screen and widescreen media at the proper aspect ratio without distorting everything. Even my 12 year old DVD player has a menu, which still works, BTW.

– Don

[Don Greening]

[dorit grunberger] ” So I’m still trying to figure out how to size the H.264 movie to best suit projection. “

You don’t have to. Your project is already at the the proper standard def. aspect of 720×480 so just export using current settings. Export using Quicktime Conversion with H.264 as the compressor. Just make sure the projector is set to display full screen and not widescreen.

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Paul Spillenger] “Will doing it the way my friend suggested result in a better quality DVD than simply dragging the QT movie into iDVD?”

Yes, absolutely. Use Compressor because you have much more control over the encoding process.

[Paul Spillenger] “iDVD doesn’t seem to be able to handle mpeg-2 files, and I wouldn’t know how to put the 2 files into it and have them be in sync.”

If you use Compressor you encode the video to MPEG2 and encode the audio to the industry standard AC3 file format for DVD. Use DVDSP for your DVD authoring program and drag both the MPEG2 file and the AC3 file into a track where they will automatically be synced up. Since you don’t want menus you can create a “first play” DVD in DVDSP by reading this:

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/first_play_warmouth.html

When it comes time to burn your DVD I recommend that you don’t use DVDSP to burn but instead create a Disk Image and use that to burn your disk using Apple’s Disc Utility. You can learn how to do that right here:

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/image_to_disk_stone.html

– Don

[Don Greening]

[dorit grunberger] “Do you think there could be a problem projecting the uncompressed quicktime movie?”

I’ve done it both ways with my Macbook Pro. I’ve played a sequence directly from the FCP timeline using the desktop cinema preview function with the projector as the second monitor. I’ve also played a stand-alone QT movie. In QT Player you can choose: View>Present Movie and use the projector again as the second monitor.

[dorit grunberger] “Should I do a H.264 conversion or a photo jpg to get the size down?”

An H.264 version is what I use and that’s a good idea if you’re playing a self-contained movie using QT Player. Check on the type of projector you’re going to be using. These days a lot of the new ones provide the option to display 720p, so if your movie is high def anyway you can make a 720p version using H.264 and it’ll look great. Your Macbook may not be able to play out smoothly to a second monitor with a less compressed codec than H.264 so this is probably the way you should go. Try doing some tests first, because you don’t want to start dropping frames during showtime. That would be rather……embarrassing.

– Don