[Ed Dooley]

My first suggestion is, tell us what platform you’re on, or want to be on. 🙂
And do you have an authoring program already, or do you want a recommendation for that too?
Ed

[Bill Hamilton] “I am looking for DVD compression software that allows setting of the GOP structure. I am trying to go for very high quality video (as high as possible) on standard DVD. Any suggestions?”

[Ed Dooley]

Microsoft has a free encoder to Windows Media 9, which, along with Flash, is the most
common format on the web.
Ed

https://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/default.mspx

[Ed Dooley]

Read some posts here, do a search, get some sense of what you need to ask in more detail, tell us a lot more about what programs you have, who your
audience is, all kinds of things. And yes 255MB is pretty big. How long is your video?
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

The IO LA is for analogue (like Beta SP) footage-only. It’s a very good product. Go to the AJA site to
learn more about it.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

Do a search, this has been discussed here. AJA says you can’t have anything else on the FW bus when the IO
is being used because it uses all the FW bandwidth. The FW400 and 800 ports share the same single bus, so
having 2 ports doesn’t mean 2 busses. If you have a camera or deck connected you may have problems.
But if you search the posts you’ll find that some people are using it with other devices attached without
problems.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

Since he can capture longer clips when using another card, it seems unlikely it’s that, unless that option changes
when changing cards. :-).
Ed

[Chris] “And you’ve checked in FCP that the “Limit Capture to” is not selected….”

[Ed Dooley]

For that few DVDs, I’d look around your area and use someone local. Most local services
will print your image to ink-jet printable DVDs too.

For the master there are 2 schools of thought, one says as you did that burning at 1x
gives the highest compatibility (fewest errors), others say that burning at the rated speed of
the burner is better. I don’t have a definite answer to that, but for a master I stick with the 1x opinion.
Even though the DVD spec allows you to go higher, don’t go over 8Mbps or so. Going with
an average of 6-6.5 with max at 8 will give a good image. Encoding your audio to AC3
helps keep the bandwidth down too.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

The new MacPro allows you to install 4 SATA drives. You can use all 4 in a striped RAID0 for media
and either install another drive as your boot drive in the spare optical bay or use a FW drive for that.
We’ve used a FW drive as our boot drive in the past with a G4 with 4 internal ATA drives striped, and it
worked great. The people who said it was crazy might have been concerned about heat, a valid concern.
The new Intel chips run much cooler than than old chips, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into a
cooler computer. Apple reduced the number of fans in the MacPro. You have to understand, though, that
if Apple made room for 4 drives, plus an additional optical bay, that they assumed people will fill them up
with drives, and have accounted for that in their cooling design. If you go external SATA, there are a lot of
options. Check out barefeats.com for tests of most of those options. Check out Firmtek and Sonnet for cards
and/or cases, GTech for complete external drive units. There are lots of others, do a search here in this forum
for many discussions on the topic.
HTH,
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

If you follow Tony’s advice, go to the AJA site for the latest driver version.
Sorry, I can’t think of anything else at the moment.
Ed

[tony salgado] “From you test in which you swapped a decklink into your mac I assume you have decklink driver installed also in addition to the AJA drivers?
Well that sounds like a possible user configuration error.
Clear out the BM drivers and if needed do a clean install of the AJA drivers, FCP and the Huge drivers if needed.”

[Ed Dooley]

This is definitely one of those “do a search” times. If you do a “HDV to HD” search of posts, in the AJA IO, AJA Kona, FCP,
Broadcast Video, High-end HD, and HDV forums, you’ll find lots and lots of answers to that.
Ed

[fCPinNFLA] “Do any of you output from your HDV timeline on FCP to a rented HD deck? Curious as to which deck (format) and workflow issues.”