[James Goodman]

For my HD work I burn a BluRay disc and connect via DVI to a HD projector for best results. 2 weeks ago I had to show a 8 min video at a fund raising breakfast in a Hotel using their projector which did not have HD capability so I used component from BluRay player to the projector and it gave excellent image quality. I have tried playing a hi res files on my PC laptop but it pauses at 6 min. I try and avoid DVD quality for HD work.

[James Goodman]

Darin

I called the Adobe store and after I faxed them my signed agreement that I would no longer use my PC version and paid them $25 they sent me a full boxed Mac version of my Master Suite CS3. Very easy and fast.

Some people have a windows partition on their Intel Mac and run the PC version of Premiere on their Mac’s – although I have that option I took the plunge and left my era of Windows based video editing behind me.

James

[James Goodman]

Darin

On my machine the projects load quickly (in my estimation) and regards your using a MacBook laptop checkout Philip Bloom who I follow since he is an expert with the Sony EX1 (my camera) and he travels all over the world and edits a lot of his HD footage on his Macbook Pro (admittedly with FCP) – google him and check his website.

James

[James Goodman]

Hi Darin

I have been a Premiere user since the late 90’s and in June of this year looked at upgrading to a new PC so I could edit EX1 HD footage and my PC supplier suggested I go with a Mac so I bought a MacPro 2×3.0Ghz and then changed my Adobe Master Suite to the Mac version for a nominal fee. It works great although the transitions are limited but I do not use many fancy ones. All my friends use FCP and I have been trying it but it has a terrible title maker plus I have yet to find a way to save a trimmed project (where media files are trimmed to within a few secs of what is used in the project) for archive use.

I did not find it any problem using the Mac and it has been very stable but I only use it for Adobe work – I have a PC for general use (email, internet etc.) As a note my Mac sees and upload/download over my network to my PC’s but my PC’s do not see my Mac and I have not bothered to trouble shoot this.

The other reason I am trying FCP is that it works with the Matrox MXO so you can colour grade on a Apple Cinema Display – CS3 will not play realtime EX1 footage via the MXO and Matrox have withdrawn support for CS3 and the MXO. Hopefully Adobe and Matrox with make up and get it sorted out for CS4

James

[James Goodman]

Jerry

I moved to a MacPro tower this summer and for a nominal fee Adobe sent me the Mac version of the Master Suite (to replace my PC version) which includes Premiere CS3 and it installed fine on the Mac Leopard side. I use Sony EX1 footage and it edits it fine.

The only issue I have had is that I also have a Matrox MXO/Apple Cinema combo for accurate colour display and it will not play EX1 footage back unless I disable the playback window in Premiere but FCP also has problems with EX1 footage.

James

[James Goodman]

I have a MacPro quad with a FX5600 graphics card and the Matrox MXO
I have a Apple 24″ Cinema connected to MXO
The MXO also relies on correctly colour calibrating your MXO display

I also have Adobe Premiere CS3 and the latest Final Cut Pro

Output on the MXO does not work well in CS3 and you have to disable the editing monitor window but it still does not play real time

Output on the MXO using FCP works but video is not playing well – jittery via MXO even though ok in program monitor window.
Good enough for colour correction

[James Goodman]

Thanks Daniel

I should have mentioned that I have encoded many times in the past my DV movies to FLV using previous sorenson squeeze for flash and these are on my website vidman.com

It has been about a year (too busy working) since I encoded and have now upgraded all software (Premiere Pro 3.2 for editing and Sorenson Squeeze 5 for compression).

I did take a avi file into Real Producer and made a real media file and it too was dark.

I do have a screen capture image showing the uncompressed video and the flv video side by side but cannot find a way of including it in my post.

James

[James Goodman]

Further to my quest I contacted Douglas Jensen of www. vortexmedia.com

who produced the DVD “Mastering the EX1” which I found very useful. Douglas sent me his NTSC DVD production workflow as follows

“”1) I shoot most of my footage 1080 30P HQ — but I don’t think that makes much difference in the final output.

2) I open a new Sequence in FCP and use the “DV NTSC 48Khz Anamorphic” preset. Or non-anamorphic if the output will be a 4×3 DVD . . . yes, I still do those too.

3) I change the Field Dominance to “NONE”

4) I edit the entire program within that Sequence.

5) When I’m done editing, I then Export a QuickTime movie of the Sequence. I choose “Current Settings” and I do NOT choose to “Make Movie Self-Contained”.

6) I then take that QuickTime movie and bring it into Compressor.

7) I then choose the Compressor preset for DVD Best Quality and modify a few of the settings (such as bitrate), but nothing major.

8) After that file is finished rendering, I bring it into DVD Studio Pro and author the DVD normally.

This is exactly how my EX1 DVD was produced, and it’s the workflow I’ve been using with XDCAM HD for almost two years. VERY SIMPLE. No extra software, no extra rendering, nothing special at all. I do everyting EXACTLY how I demonstrate in the EX1 DVD. “”

I followed Doug’s method but using Vegas and rendered my test as a quicktime as per above but then used Adobe Encore to transcode and burn the DVD

Best results so far and renewed my confidence for going forward with HD (still some flicker on horizontals on buildings in distance)

James

[James Goodman]

Thanks for the link Matthew and was I surprised by the number of issues related to HD and HDV as I have been patiently sitting on the fence before jumping into HD. Looks like I may have been premature

I am playing around with Daniel Alexander’s set of parameters except he is PAL. So far my footage that contains a pan of downtown Vancouver with Lots of horizontal lines on the buildings looks bad. Other pans are just about ok but still any horizontal line shows twitter.

I would like to know the settings etc that Vortex used for the fabulous EX1 footage on their EX1 training DVD

[James Goodman]

Thanks everyone for their input and especially Baz who had a similar disaster – I have yet to get a quote on my deck repair. Luckily I did not plug my camera’s into this machine. This will be my first and last time with Tyan and will stick to ASUS and Intel in future as in the past. Now I too will use a PCI firewire card on this machine.

James