[Ed Dooley]

It sounds like flourescent flicker. It’s often hard to see in a viewfinder (the main reason people don’t catch it while shooting), and can be difficult to see on small monitors. There have been a lot of posts about this over the years, but I don’t remember even one good solution. Do a search though.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

I would agree with everything but this. Barefeats.com has done a lot of comparisons about drive speed for performance, and a 7,200RPM drive isn’t necessarily the best for system drive (although it might be for you), it uses more power too. Slower drives are available with more storage, and may run apps faster than a packed, 7,200RPM drive. Check at barefeats.com to help decide.
Ed

[Ben Scott] “the speed of the internal drive is important for running apps well”

[Ed Dooley]

Can you tell us more about the footage? When you say it’s within a reel of other footage, do you mean it’s a compilation, and that the offending footage might have been shot with different settings? Do you know the lighting, environment, or frame rate of the footage?
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

Except the owner’s a jerk, and his small dog bit me once. 🙂
Ed

[Bob Zelin] “After it’s all done, follow Ed Dooley’s advice – Small Dog is one of the best (and most honest) mail order companies for MAC products. “

[Ed Dooley]

George is right if you have returns, but ground shipping is free at MacMall, and your Mac can be repaired at any authorized Apple repair shop, or it will go to Apple directly under their warranty. As for walking to B&H and Tekserve, that little walk will cost you $250 extra in sales tax (is NYC still at 8.375%?), about $200 in price. Even if they give you a better price than what they say they will on-line, it’s still hundreds of dollars cheaper to buy on-line out-of-state. What’s the risk? If it’s noticeably damaged in shipping, Fed Ex pays. If it breaks under warranty, it either goes to an authorized shop in NYC or goes back to Apple. I’m sure there are scenarios where you simply want to get it back to MacMall, so use a little of the hundreds of dollars you just saved to ship it back.
My office is in the tiny town in Vermont where SmallDog is located, and I still buy from macMall cheaper. But I can walk right in to SmallDog and get Apple repairs if needed.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

Macmall,com always beats Apple’s listed price. But my last Mac I bought from Apple. I called them and said that MacMall was cheaper and the woman said she could knock a little off the price. I was pleasantly surprised. Buying on-line from an authorized mac reseller (in another state) usually also means not paying hundreds in sales tax.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

See that little search window up and to the right? If you type cannot connect to the background process, or just background process, you’ll get advice (2 of the tips are mine, from 2 years ago, and guess what they say? “Do a search” because even 2 years ago it was happening) The Compression Forum has the best answers, including a link to the Apple forums discussion of this very old, very well discuused issue. The Apple link is the best solution because it depends on which version of Compressor you have
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

Did you look in the manual? It’s there. It’s really, really easy to read too. 🙂
Ed

Two ways, Sequence>Settings Timeline Options tab Show Audio Waveforms
or
Menu, User Preferences, Timeline Options, Show Audio Waveforms.

[Ed Dooley]

I’m not in front of my editing suite right now, but the reason I said STP is that although FCP can set keyframes and do sliding at the sub-frame level, you can’t cut sub-frame (I don’t think) and I believe STP allows you to do everything FCP does, plus cutting at sub-frame (and if I’m right on that, I find it much more convenient actually being able to cut rather than doing it all by key frames). bear in mind though, that it is Thursday and I go out with the guys on Wednesday night, so Thursdays aren’t my best days. 🙂
Ed

[David Roth Weiss] “[Ed Dooley] “If what you mean is sub-frame audio editing, Soundtrack Pro does that.”

Ed,

I think you’ll be surprised to to know tat FCP also has sub-frame sychronization of audio and video. It’s described on page 308 in the online manual. FCP will allow you slip audio in increments of 100th of a frame.
“

[Ed Dooley]

Wayne’s right, and there isn’t any better quality than using Current Settings. In some circumstances you may want to convert your file to Uncompressed or Animation, or change your 8bit to 10bit, but none of that will increase your video quality, it will only help graphics and other elements you add to that video.
Ed