[Jason Porthouse]

Brandon,

If you’re on a budget I’d look at Blackmagic or the new Matrox MXO2. Either will do the job.

Konas are excellent cards, some would say better than the BM but for me there’s not a lot in it. The Kona 3 will cross-convert SD to HD with excellent quality (as will the MXO2 and the latest incarnation of the BM top-of-the-line card) but you’ll pay for the priveledge. If I were you I’d start with a budget and see what you can afford, bearing in mind your needs later. Walter deals with all formats in his shop so the K3 makes perfect sense, but for a smaller outfit you’ll probably find one of the BM cards suits you fine. It does me, and I’m doing broadcast HD on it.

As to the monitor, it will enable you to see an image which is accurate both in color and level (when correctly set up) and indicate to you if there are any obvious gotchas in terms of field order or artefacts that may not show up on a computer screen. A good quality Sony will set you back maybe $500 secondhand, more if you plump for something like a PVM 20L5 (or the smaller 14L5) which can cope with HD too – good for future proofing. I’d look for a 20L5 if you can, just make sure it’s not knackered. If you’re unsure find a friendly local engineer who will have a look at it for a few dollars. The JVC DTV1710 is a good performer too, and commands less secondhand than the Sonys seem to.

HTH

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

[Jeremy Doyle] “Why would you want the shift fields filter on. It’s going from SD to SD so it should maintain lower field dominance.”

Uhh, my bad. I was forgetting that the OP is in the States rather than here in PAL land.

Brandon, disregard that bit of my post – the rest still stands!!

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

Just going to chuck my 2pennorth’ in here.

DV, if shot on a decent camera and lens (the one you’re shooting on is wayy better than the PD150 level) is capable of producing pleasing images. if not the last byword in quality. the problem is that DV format breaks down as soon as you add effects (colour correction etc) and graphics (supers and lower 3rds). It’s just not designed to handle that to anywhere near an acceptable level.

You’re capturing DV/DVCam via Firewire. If you don’t have a capture card, the workflow I would use is this:-

Capture via Firewire

Edit in a native DV sequence to picture lock

create a new sequence – use the presets to make it ProRes(non HQ) or Uncompressed 8-bit (ask the post house doing the final transfer to Beta what they’d prefer)

Select all clips from your DV sequence, then copy (cmd-C)

Paste in to new sequence

Take a look at one of the clips in the new sequence by double-clicking, then look at the Filters tab in the Canvas. It should have the Shift Fields filter on it. If so, then…

Render out to QT using File-export-Quicktime Movie. Keep current settings and make self-contained. Give this to the post house.

That will preserve the best quality without going to the expense of a Kona card, BUT….

You really should be upping the ante for broadcast work. I’d argue that trying to edit ANY video for ANY purpose without an external monitor is hampering you to an unacceptable degree, unless you’re merely ‘offlining’ and someone else is going to take control of the final deliverables. I’d not tackle a broadcast job without the bare minimum of a capture card, decent monitor and a good working knowledge of broadcast standards. If you have an older Mac setup, you could find a SH SD capture card (one of the older BlackMagics) and a decent SD monitor for less than a thousand bucks. Without that you’ll never really know what you’re getting – .

jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

I have certainly heard good things about this:

https://store.creativecow.net/p/63/getting_organized_in_final_cut_pro

it may be just what you need!!

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

You’ll find doing this in FCP is fine as long as you want to simply scale – but anything more complex, like a move, won’t work as FCP can’t smooth all parameters.

I recently cut a doc with around 200 archive stills, and motion did a wonderful job. You just need to get your head around what you need to keyframe…

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

Ryan,

Try 2 x 2 gig on each riser, forget about the 512s. You’ll be in stable FCP heaven I reckon.

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

Just a thought. When I was working on a doc using a J30 a while back, we noticed audio drift problems when batch digitising if the ‘preview’ button was checked in the audio tab of the capture tool. Took this off and no problems after that. Admittedly it was a J30 digitising rushes over firewire, but may be worth trying…

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

Not being funny Alan, but there are a dozen different potential problems that could give you a bad day. You bought the MOTU from a reseller, right? Have you called them? Most resellers worthy of the name would handhold you through the process of getting it working… but I have to say using one of these with an iMac isn’t ideal. The FW issue (having only 1 bus and no means of expansion) will bring up a lot of pitfalls…

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

also, when you run ‘Software Update’ you may need to do this a few times to get the Pro Apps to fully update. Running ‘Repair Permissions’ between each update is a good idea too.

HTH

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Jason Porthouse]

John,

I have a dual 2.66 intel (one of the first ones) and it is a faster render. A client of mine has a Dual 2.0 G5 (one of the last ones) with AFAIK 4gigs of RAM. Rendering is faster on the Intel – I’ve never measured it but i must be twice the speed at least – but the G5 has been rock solid with nary a crash in the 5 or so years she’s had it, so not plans to change. I can’t tell you if the investment in a new machine is worthwhile – for her, the G5 is plenty enough – editing is snappy and there’s no problem with setting the render off over lunch or overnight if it’s longer. The payoff in a faster machine wouldn’t be worth it for her. Same for me – I’d love an octo-core Nehalem but it wouldn’t make much difference to my workflow.

hth

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*