[Glenn Grant]

It will work and do what you need it to do for now. One of the biggest problems, if not the biggest problem, is you cant upgrade much. I have one that I use FCP all the time, and it is great for rough cuts, billing, email and running the office kind of stuff. But I also have the MacPro for capturing, Motion, encoding, and the all the heavy lifting kinda stuff.

If you look at the long term, you may get three good years out of the imac, that works out to about $833 per year. If you spend the extra 1500 you are looking at for the MacPro, even if you only get one more year out of it, it still only runs you $1000 for year. For an extra $170 a year, I think it is more than worth it. Next time around you will already have a monitor, so that drops out of the equation. And with the better machine you will find how easy Motion is to use and adds value to your productions so you can charge more! Donate your extra proceeds to charity and make the world a better place! Maybe not, but I think your return on investment is better with the MacPro. And it’s easy for me to spend YOUR money.

Of course you have to consider where you are going to be in four years and try to get something that fits into your workflow now and will still work for you then. As you move into more HD work you will incur lots of expenses. It would be nice to know your computer can handle whatever you through at it. You may want to get a capture card, and at least you’ll have the option.

[Glenn Grant]

Glad to know it looks good. I wasn’t sure how it would look, the bit rate seems kinda low for HD.

[Glenn Grant]

Walter,

Have you tried the Apple TV option? I have been thinking that would be a nice options, but I am wondering how the picture quality would hold up? I like the idea that you could store lots of titles and not have to change disks to show something else.

For the OP, I have been sending out HD material on DVD5 that will play back on Toshiba HDDVD players. This looks great but is limited to about 20 mins. I supplied a few clients with the players and kinda filled them in on the format war. The future for HD DVDs looks pretty bleak so I will be looking for other options as well.

[Glenn Grant]

It did take a bit getting used to, but I like this feature.

[Glenn Grant]

Thanks again.

I’ve been using FC since v 1.0 back when it was about $100K cheaper than avid. All this looking around at avid stuff to figure this out sure has taught me a few things. MC does look like a very nice system with lots of cool features. But FCP does what I need it for.

[Glenn Grant]

Thanks Max, you have been very helpful. I just want to be sure I completely understand this before I explain it to them. They seem convinced it can’t work, and I must be crazy because I use FCP.

So the point is to make sure the QT file references the files on the external hard drive and not the original files on their network?

[Glenn Grant]

I don’t have much experience with avid, but you can get MC for the intel macs now. And you can download the codec from there site. So I hope it works.

So when you consolidate, does it also creates a new edl that references the consolidated media on the FW drive? Then from that you make the QT ref file? I just need to make this clear and easy for the guys on the other end.

Thanks,
Glenn

[Glenn Grant]

We are not on the same network, they would put the files on an external drive. But it sounds like it should work.

They don’t want to hassle with the DVD side of things and it is extra income for me. So I want to keep things as easy for them as possible. I would also like to get this sorted out for future high def DVDs because going to tape will not be an option. It will be some time before I can afford an HD deck.

[Glenn Grant]

I have considered that, but that is more for transferring the timeline. They even say on there site that “can” import the footage, but they recommend you recapture on the mac.

This may have changed, but I looked at there site the other day, and it didn’t look like they had any updates.

[Glenn Grant]

Sometime if I am working in a NTSC timeline with HDV footage then I would notice. but then quicktime is doing the transcoding from HDV to SD. But I would think this comes into play more and more with the whole mixed timeline thing. But this is an old habit, and I have not changed much in two years. I wanted to go with whole “best practices” thing