[Ed Dooley]

P2’s future might be in doubt if they had to cram all those gigs into a 34mm Express Card slot, but my guess is that there will be attchments that
will accept P2 cards and plug in to the Express Card slot. I’m not saying needing an attachment is a good thing, but I *am* saying that saying P2’s future is in doubt is a little extreme.
Ed

[john sharaf] ……. and the future of P2 to me is seriously in doubt because of the new Express slot configurations that are appearing in Apple, Dell and other laptops, which will limit the demand for P2/PCMIA media and therefore the Moore’s Law factor in future deployment of larger and cheaper cards.

Granted the SD cards within the unit have many other uses, and their size and price will most likely evolve, but Panasonic alone will control the implementation of what is their propriatary P2 media.”

[Ed Dooley]

I don’t edit DV, well maybe once. 🙂 I was referring to a number of posts where the DV to UC question came up.
Some of them suggest going 10bit. I don’t have any personal experience as to whether 8bit is sufficient.
I *do* know that banding is/was an issue with some 8bit codecs, and going 10bit was a solution.
Ed

[Chris Poisson] “With due respect to Ed, unless you have a lot of gradients in your graphics, 8bit is fine, and you’ll save disc space.

Have a wonderful day.”

[Ed Dooley]

Ditto, for the most part. We’re starting to include FLVs in the mix. And as soon as Flash 8 gets on more machines, we’ll be doing a lot more.
Ed

[Matthew Brunn] “I compress videos to be downloaded by businesses and personal use all the time and this is my experience. If you have a savvy customer Quicktime is great. H.264 is superior quality. If you are looking for UNIVERSAL playback it’s unfortunately Mpeg-1. I have yet to find a customer that can’t play it. Window Media is next. Then Quicktime.

For quality that depends again on your delivery and bandwidth. If these people are on dial up they ain’t waitin for some 36 MB file to download. For me it’s a snap. It’s a balance. How big a file (quality) vs. the delivery plus Format (QT,WMV,MPEG) = answer.
“

[Ed Dooley]

I think most of the stuff I’ve read about DV to UC for graphics has said the real advantage is going to 10bit UC.
To set it up, go to Easy SetUp and select 10bit UC (Pal or NTSC). Go to Audio/Video settings and select the Sequence
Preset tab. Scroll down to the selected 10bit UC (you can eliminate the easy SetUp step just by going directly here to set
your sequence too), and select edit. There’s a aspect ration choice for DV 3:2 there. Selecting that automatically changes the 720×486
to 720×480. Field stays Lower.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

The chart didn’t format very well, basically, If you own FCP5, get Studio for $99, If you own DVDSP4,Motion2,STPro, get Studio for $199, etc.
Ed

[Ed] “If you own…
Get Final Cut Studio for…

Final Cut Pro 5
$99

DVD Studio Pro 4, Motion 2, or Soundtrack Pro
$199

Final Cut Pro 4/4.5 or Production Suite
$199

Final Cut Pro 1/2/3
$699
“

[Ed Dooley]

[Bret Williams] “Having watched the keynote, Steve pointed out that all of us pro users of Apple products will be offered the universal versions if we send our discs back in and pay Apple $49. So for Studio owners I’m not sure if that’s $49 per app (probably) or what.”

The Apple page seems pretty clear to me:
Ed

>>>Most of the applications that come on your Intel-based Mac are Universal applications, designed for screaming performance with the Intel Core Duo. That includes Mac OS X, iLife

[Ed Dooley]

And SIIG has announced a bunch of different configurations, but I don’t think they’re out yet.
I know by the time I buy a MacBook, there’ll be a ton of add-ons, and the MacBook itself will
probably be 3rd generation.
Ed

[Tom Wolsky] “I think you have a PCMCIA cardbus on the 17” Walter. I don’t know if any one is manufacturing an ExpressCard FW800, though there probably will be one soon. I heard FirmTek has or will have an ExpressCard SATA controller.
“

[Ed Dooley]

Siig has announced cards, but they don’y appear to be out yet. I’ve been looking everywhere. If there really are new cards, then
I say good riddance to FW, hello to SATAII.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

That’s the point, adaptors. The possibility of simply plugging a P2 card into a laptop in the field is gone (unless you
keep an older PB). I think I remember some issues with PBs reading the cards (I could be wrong on this, but I seem to
remember a Mac-only issue); if true, then there’s no reason for Panasonic to work on the issue, since Macs have gone
to the Express Card 34 slot. I personally am hoping for a cute little hard drive plugged into the HVX to avoid P2 cards
until they get more capacity and the price comes down, but the PB in the field *was* a viable option for some folks.
Ed

[Bettsy] “We’re all waiting on 3rd party hardware guys to come up with adaptors, card readers etc for P2. Hopefully the new, faster EC34 will attract some P2 adaptors.
“

[Ed Dooley]

The most important feature of the new laptop (for this forum, I think), is that it doesn’t
have a cardbus slot, but an Express Card 34 slot instead. The throughput of this new
standard is supposed to be great compared to cardbus, but it’s much narrower (in the 34 implementation
anyway; there’s a 54 version, but not in this Mac Book). The talked about option of having your PB
in the field with you to offload P2 cards ain’t gonna happen with the new laptops, unless Panny also changes the size
of the P2 cards (or make an adapter). I do like the new Express Card slot though in general. The
new cards for this slot will allow SATAII NCQ drive, striped as a very fast array for a laptop, a 2
drive SATAII RAID will be much faster than my current 2 drive FW800 portable RAID.
Ed