[Ed Dooley]

If what you mean is sub-frame audio editing, Soundtrack Pro does that.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

Have you opened your manual at all? 🙂 Or have you done a search of this forum? There are hundreds of posts about this here. Short answer, yes you can mix them. From your question, it doesn’t sound like you’ve spent any time trying to understand FCP. The manuals are pretty complete, the indexes in the manuals are too. This forum is a great resource, but my opinion is that people should have the courtesy and respect to at least do a quick search before asking a question that’s right in the manual or found in a quick search. end of mini-rant 🙂
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

And thanks for passing on the link!
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

And when you clicked Search here in this forum, and typed in Gamma Shift, none of the hundreds of posts that came up provided you with help? 🙂
There are many possibilities, try the search then ask again, if necessary.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

I didn’t (quite) say that. Some people don’t like editing HDV and would rather get it into another codec right away. If that’s the case for you, then going to ProRes might be better. I personally edit HDV without issues (except the conform time at the end), but I mostly do long form stuff without the crunch schedule of a 30 second spot.
Ed

[Ian Brown] “Thanks Ed – I take it that your suggestion would be to follow my option 1 ?
“

[Ed Dooley]

Buy a plug-in like ON2 Flix Exporter:
https://www.on2.com/index.php?399

They also have a stand-alone app: FlixPro

It’s been discussed many times in this forum, do a search.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

You have a couple of other options too:
4. Convert to ProRes and edit with that.
5. Do a search of this forum’s posts because this has been asked and answered many, many, many times (this should be moved to number one!). 🙂

Keeping it as HD(V) right up to compression will give you the best results, and as you said, give you the option of an HD DVD later. Stay away from SD DV.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

Raphael’s right about Frame Controls slowing Compressor down a lot, although it sounds like it’s way too slow in your case. As a side-note, if you’re de-interlacing in Compressor, I would set all the frame controls to Best, or you may not get the quality you want. I disagree with the suggestion to scale or de-interlace in FCP though, it’s not a good scaler or de-interlacer. If you have After Effects, I would try that before FCP. Export from FCP using current settings, scale and de-interlace in AE and compress in Compressor (but now you don’t have to use Compressor’s very slow frame controls). It once took me 3 days to de-interlace a 1 hour doc using Frame Controls in a G5 (looked great though).
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

Have you tried trashing your prefs?
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

I have the PortaBrace CTC-3. They also recommend the CTC-4 for the HD series, it’s bigger. Another thing to consider is the famous PortaBrace blue. I considered going with a Kata bag instead, because it’s not as recognizable around the world “Look everybody! I’m carrying an expensive camera! Come steal it!”
There wasn’t a model in stock at the time that would work well for me.
As for carrying a camera on board without a case, airlines changed cary-on size allowances a number of years ago, which made my Porta Brace “Carry On” for my Beta-SP camera too big. It usually wasn’t a problem, but a few times I had to argue with a supervisor to allow it, and I finally started carrying a soft, unpadded canvas bag with travel clothes. At the airport I would put my clothes in the Porta Brace and check it, and carry the camera in the clothes bag (very carefully!). That way it would be protected most of the time and still not have to be checked.
Ed