[Ed Dooley]

What version of FCP are you using. I believe it changed from 4.5 to 5. In 5+, in the Log and Capture
Window, select Clip Settings. In the Audio area, to the left of each pair of channels (1-2 for example)
there’s a little box with 2 circles in it. Select that box/toggle to link as stereo pairs, or de-select for mono.
In 4.5 I think there’s a drop down box with your choices in the same area.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

Walter,
After seeing Becker’s Norse tag, I laughed out loud when I saw your reply. I imagine an American reading a Norwegian saying, like,
“to be in the middle of the butter melting in the porridge”
Ed
P.S. What *is* the dickens, and how sharp can it possibly be? Time to Google. 🙂

[walter biscardi] “it went to full resolution and looked sharp as the dickens.”

[Ed Dooley]

The biggest difference, and really the only important one, is that Cleaner 6.5 for Mac
only makes Windows Media 7 video, which sucks! (Cleaner XL for PC does WM9) So there’s no
comparison. I have Compression Master, not the upgrade to Episode, and it creates
very good WM9, with lots of tweaks for gamma, contrast, etc.
Flip4Mac WM9 looks great too, with whatever tweaking your QT app has. If you do go over to PC, and if you can afford it, don’t use the free Windows Media Encoder. You have very little control over anything. Go with Procoder, an excellent WM9 encoder.
As for Flash 8 On2VP6, it’s a very good codec, but I still think WM9 looks better (no, I’m
sure it does), and so does Apple’s H.264.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

The easiest product to use with FCP, and a very good one, is Flip4Mac. You can export
WMVs directly out of FCP, or any QT application. We also use Compression Master (now
Episode). Post over at the Compression Techniques forum, though, to get more advice.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

Here’s a P.S.: Have you tried the 3 band EQ and raising the audio level
to the max as you scrub through the frequencies? That will highlight
the offending frequency better. Then you can dial that one down.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

For regular, single frequency hum issues, you should be able to isolate it
pretty easy with the 3 band EQ or graphics equalizer.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

Soundsoap is pretty good.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

I agree, Bob. The scaling in Compressor is much better than FCP’s. AE is better than FCP too.
Ed

[Bob Flood] “actually, i did some resizeing in Compressor, and i thought the result was better than FCP. I go the info from the interweb, by doing a google for up size or re size. Sorry i cannot be more specific, as it was a while ago. but it would be worth it to you to look into it

the primary benefit of compressor is it has a very good interpolation algorithm that makes the blowups seem less blown up.”

[Ed Dooley]

Do you have, or have access to, a VTR with TC window character display, and a DVD recorder?
You could feed the tape through the deck, set the TC character display to on, and burn
directly to DVD (I think).
Short of that you’s have to digitize the footage, put it in a time-line, render it,
export it and put it on a disc.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

I don’t have a pencil and calculator handy to add up the costs, but I would change a few things:
-e-SATA instead of FW (unless you need to move drives to a computer without e-sata)
-Better speakers
-better mixer (Mackie 1202, for example)
-Dell 2407 instead of Apple monitor
Ed

[Mark Raudonis] “You’re gonna need an external firewire storage device: I like the “G-Drive” 500gig.

DV deck: Sony DSR-45

External speakers: Take your pick. What matters to you? Size or sound? For good sound, but fairly large size I like the Tapco S5’s.

Small behringer mixer… really just a volume control.

External keyboard and three button mouse: Logic key and Kensington Mouse.

For serious editing, I’d add a large screen ( 23″ cinema display).

With this list, you’ll still be under $10K. “