[Herb Sevush]

You can be as creative as you like but you still can’t get there from here … HD is more than just as increase in pixels.

Also you don’t want to use an HDV timeline – create either an uncompressed 8 bit timeline, if you have the drive capacity and speed, or a DVCPRO HD timeline. HDV is a major headache and is best seen as an origination medium only – I wouldn’t even put HDV originals on a HDV timeline. Don’t worry about your pixel shape – FCP will take care of that for you when it renders your material to HD. FCP is fine with PAL. You will have to decide upon an HD frame size, 720 or 1080, and a frame rate, although 24P makes the most sense, since you’re going to film.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Herb Sevush]

Steve –

The FCP multi-cam work flow is actually better and more efficient than the *edit system, although their are some drawbacks. The 2 most important pieces of advice I can give you is to make sure that in the “viewer” window the “sync open” option is checked, and then use the supplied “multi camera editing” keyboard layout you can find in TOOLS / KEYBOARD LAYOUT. Since I use the multi-cam 95% of the time I’ve made my own modified keyboard layout so that I never have to use the mouse for multi-cam editing. As an old *editor I’d be glad to answer any specific problems you or your staff are having if you want to contact me.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Herb Sevush]

The main limitations with projecting DV encoded video are not merely pixel count – they are the loss of detail in DV sampling, and the base problem of NTSC recording – interlacing. Neither of these problems would be addressed in your imaginative but cumbersome work flow. Any HD format would be superior, even HDV.

However, if you want to try it, just shoot as you suggested, import normally, then drop your video onto an HD Timeline. Rotate and position your 2 streams of video and be prepared to render away.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Herb Sevush]

Communicating accurately with tape decks is number one among the many things Final Cut does not do well.

My Panasonic 1200A is off by 12 frames, straight out of the box. My solution was to create a new capture preset in the Audio/Video Settings menu. You can create customized presets with off-sets — but beware – a 1 frame offset does not always off-set by 1 frame (that would be too simple) for my 12 frame problem I had to create a 29 frame off-set – arrived at by trial and error. But now that it’s programmed in, the deck is frame accurate.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Herb Sevush]

Will –

I agree with David wholeheartedly – the CHV plug-in is the best solution for credit rolls in FCP. There is no jitter.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Herb Sevush]

Scott –

A single “rack unit” is a dimension of height when using rack mounts. It’s equal to 1 3/4″ and has 3 vertical screw holes.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Herb Sevush]

Walter –

Of course Apple would have to change the underlying data structure to fix the innumerable bugs and annoyances that plague this product. I never thought they were so stupid as to intentionally annoy their user base — if it were easy they would have fixed things years ago. And I know that it’s very expensive and time consuming – but I don’t really give a shit — none of my clients care if a necessary revision is hard / time consuming / expensive to do – if there’s a problem that I created I either fix it or look for new clients.

If Apple doesn’t address their underlying structural problems they will loose out to either Adobe or some other player that is willing to do the work. And I will not be among the last to jump ship.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Herb Sevush]

Borjis –

Yes, I guess that’s what it’s for … but it doesn’t work that way unless you then drag the now “independent” clips into a new project and then run media mangler from there. Otherwise “make independent” is a wee bit useless.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Herb Sevush]

You don’t have to spend $400 for a 250GB drive – there’s nothing special about the drives you get from Apple. Just pull out a dead drive and write down the serial# and order it directly over the web – the Hitachi 250 MB drives are under $150.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Herb Sevush]

Nathan –

I have the same setup – 2 sides (each at raid 5) striped together at raid 0 – and I’m getting about the same speeds – around 200 till you get to around 60% full. Which is very disappointing when compared to the Medea FCR2X which is running on the same fibre channel and gets speeds closer to 300MB/sec for a lot less money.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions