[Ed Dooley]

I assumed that you hadn’t started editing yet. You can either recapture to DV (as I mentioned in my last post) or
do as suggested by dndobson to render the HDV overnight. If you haven’t started editing, then recapturing as a batch
isn’t much work. If you go the overnight render route be careful of constantly forcing the need to rerender clips when
you play with them in the timeline, it can add up to a lot more time then simply recapturing to DV up front.
8+ hours of tape doesn’t mean 8+ hours of your time. It can be a few minutes of button pushing over 8+ hours.
If you don’t have a Z1U around, or to borrow, then renting one may make the overnight render the best option.
Ed

[David M.] “Does that means recapturing 8+ hours of footage and matching it in the timeline?”

[Ed Dooley]

Can you get your hands on a Z1U? I’m almost 100% sure that they have in-camera downconvert.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

Matrox *does* offer a DVCPro50 codec. I haven’t personally used the Avid codec for DVCPro 50
video on a PC, but they do include DVCPro50 support, and the link I sent you allows you to use
Avid’s codecs in other applications, so you should be good to go.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

On Windows? (which doesn’t support DVCPro natively)
Was the codec you installed DVCPro50 or plain DVCPro? (because they’re not the same thing)
You can buy the codec for PCs though, or try the free Avid codec for Windows 2k and XP:
https://www.avid.com/onlineSupport/supportcontent.asp?productID=92&contentID=3555&typeID=2
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

Kevin,
TechToolPro is useful, and it may help you. But it may not be the problem. I’ve had the same thing happen with
a couple of FW drives; in one case the drive enclosure is a combo FW800/USB2 case. When it wouldn’t mount as FW800,
I could get it to mount as USB2. If I did that and then ejected it, it would then mount as FW800. It was the board inside
the enclosure at fault. With the other case I could wiggle the FW cable. It would mount when it was twisted in a certain way. If
I stood the case up on end with pressure maintained on the cable, it would stay mounted. In both cases the drives themselves were fine.
If you can get your hands on another case you can see if that’s it.
HTH,
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

Actually, Seagate bought Maxtor a while ago. The more recent MaxlineIII series from Maxtor have gotten good performance reviews,
and their 5 year warranty is pretty good. The big 750g Seagate’s seem to be having some problems. Look at barefeats.com, storagereview.com,
and tomshardware.com for reviews of all the drives out there. Hitachi, Seagate, and yes, Maxtor’s are all getting good reviews.
Ed

[Varangian] “for you RAID builders out there, I know there is some consensus on which is the best SATA 2 drive for building a RAID.
I have heard Seagate drives are good, Maxtor I should stay away from.

Can anyone recomed a good 250GB SATA 2 drive & model # based on reliability, speed, price. (in that order)”

[Ed Dooley]

Tough one right now. There are apparently some problems with Seagate’s big 750g drives.
The enw perpendicular drives are the wave of the future, but have some growing pains.
I think the price/performance sweet spot right now are the 500g drives. Seagate has always been
good, but if you check out barefeats tests of drive performance, you’ll get a better picture.
The Seagates, Hitachis, Maxtors, and Western Digitals are usually tested side-by-side. I’m a
fairly recent convert to Maxtor’s MaxLine III drives. Maxtor didn’t have a good reputation for years
(like Western Digital), but their newer drives often are the best performing, and they have the best
warranty for their high-end drives.
Here’s another barefeats test (of hard drives):
https://www.barefeats.com/hard78.html
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

The biggest WMV files we’ve done with F4M are 480×360, and they look great (lots and lots of them). You may be on to something though, Rich. The F4M forum
has a thread about the quality of someone’s 640×480 WMV F4M files. They’re having an image degradation problem that “pops back” for
a brief time, then looks dgraded again. F4M is aware of it and are trying to figure it out. As a general WMV compressor, F4M is very good
(with the one mentioned problem):
Macworld’s review:
>>>In my tests, Flip4Mac Studio Pro

[Ed Dooley]

Go with the internal SATA drives. Much faster performance, and the most inexpensive
solution. You can even put 3 more drives in, and put a 5th drive in the optical bay, or
attach it to the extra SATA connections (2 of them) and have a sceaming 4 drive array.
Ed

Barefeats already has results for internal performance:
https://www.barefeats.com/quad07.html
https://www.barefeats.com/quad08.html

[Ed Dooley]

Did you look at Apple’s specs?
Ed

This from Apple:
Final Cut Pro 4 through Final Cut Pro HD 4.5 require a computer with an AGP video card for installation. PowerMac G5 (Late 2005) models (released October 19, 2005) and iMac G5 (iSight) models feature newer PCI Express video cards. Because of this, you can’t install Final Cut Pro 4.x on these computers. Final Cut Pro 4.x is not supported on these computers.

Final Cut Pro 3.x and earlier do not work in Max OS X 10.4 Tiger. Because Power Mac G5 (Late 2005) and iMac G5 (iSight) models require Mac OS X 10.4.2 or later, you can’t install Final Cut Pro 3.x or earlier versions on these computers. Final Cut Pro 3.x and earlier versions are not supported on any computer running Mac OS X 10.4.

To use Final Cut Pro on Power Mac G5 (Late 2005) or iMac G5 (iSight) computers, please upgrade to Final Cut Studio.