[Geoff Addis]

Eric,

Take a look at Edius for use by your news crews. Very quick with first class real time performance; you can download a trial copy from Grass valley. BBC news crews are using it here in the UK.

[Geoff Addis]

With reference to Zane’s comments: in my case ingest of clips will be via the EX1’s USB connection using the camera as a card reader for the SxS cards; I will not need firewire for that. Also, as I said before, for my work flow I have proved that using an external drive for the operating system does not impact on performance, neither does the use of a non RAID hard drive. Although these comments relate to native EX1 clips, they may not apply to all formats eg. non compressed, but my workflow is based on EX1 or, occasionaly HDV via firewire.

Please don’t get me wrong, I am not committed to using an iMac as against a MacPro, but as a past systems engineer I want to establish what will be the most effective and efficient configuration for my use based around the ingest and editing of EX1 footage. This computer will be for personal home use, I don’t need all the bells and whistles of a broadcast or film based production environment; I know that I will not be able to achieve 100% accurate colour calibration, but my video will be seen mainly on home LCD/Plasma receivers/displays or projectors and are unlikely to be broadcast so a carefully adjusted second computer display should be adequate – if I need greater accuracy then I will be able to correct in my studio environment. I hope that explains where I am coming from, keep the comments coming in as I suspect many others will have the same type of work scenario.

Thanks,

Geoff.

[Geoff Addis]

I have both FCP and Edius on the same MacPro. Edius knocks the socks off FCP as far as real time previewing without the need to render is concerned and when rendering is needed it is far faster than FCP. The steadycam feature included with Edius 5 is far better than that with FCP and only analyses and converts that part of the clip that is used on the timeline; the inclusion of a curves feature to adjust the picture is great in comparrison to that provided by the colour correction features of FCP. However, Edius does not have the more extensive sound editing features that are included in the FCS suite n’or Motion and lacks some in the alpha channel capability of FCP, but it does have a title program and DVD/Bluray writing direct from the time line. Edius does not rely on proprietry hardware for its performance, but some of the added 3rd party software does benefit from having a good graphics card; if you include the Grass Valley Firecoder Blu hardware then you will be able to render H264 for Bluray faster than real time. Edius 5 also includes transcoding feature that were formerly available only in Procoder 3. The program is stable and rock solid.

Why don’t you download a 30 day trial copy from the Edius site?

Overall I’m very dissapointed with the performance of FCP and cannot understand why anything PC is so quickly dismissed by many in the Mac fraternity.

[Geoff Addis]

I use a MacPro with boot camp so I can enjoy the best of both Windows and OSX programs. Edius Pro flies on the Windows XP system with much improved real time and rendering performance than FCP, but Final Cut Studio has more very specialist tools such as Color and DVD Studio Pro, should you need them. 95% of my work is done on Edius.

[Geoff Addis]

Ref your audio upgrade. I don’t know which Yamaha desk your supplier is suggesting, but we are using an 02r96 desk here with great results in classical music recording. The Yamaha 01 has similar mic pre-amps and its facilities may well be adequate for your needs, it will certainly sound better and give you more facilities than the ProSonus FireStudio. We also use the 02r to provide a control surface for the Nuendo software that we use for sound editing; you can probably do the same with an 01.

Oh, don’t forget to get some good monitoring seakers that have a well extended bass response to reveal all the traffic and othe rumble noises!

Hope this helps,

Geoff

[Geoff Addis]

I am quite happy to bring in all the footage when capturing provide that it has scene breaks. At the moment I have the option of bringing it either via an BM Intensity card or firewire as HDV. The latter is my normal way of working, then I batch convert to ProRes, but perhaps doesn’t give me any gain of simply laying HDV down on a ProRes timeline, any thoughts?

Geoff

[Geoff Addis]

I understand that the latest 6.0.2 update to FCP includes the capability in easy set up to capture HDV via firewire with conversion to ProRes on the fly. Anyone know if this is correct? I cannot load the latest update as it requires QT7.3 and that does noty appear to download here at the moment.

Geoff

[Geoff Addis]

The Intensity Pro is working fine for me. However, do note that this card must be used on an Intel based Mac.

Geoff

[Geoff Addis]

Thanks, Kristian. I’ve emailed support as you recommended.

geoff

[Geoff Addis]

Yes on both counts! Bringing in HDV via fire results in separate clips that I now convert as you suggested; the only problem is the extra time that it takes! If I use Intensity Pro to convert to ProRes on the fly, then I have to manualy split the long clip into individual takes, again time consuming; it’s a pity that breaks in the time code cannot be recognised over the firewire when ingesting via the HDMI port – firewire is used for deck control after all.