[Jeff Beaumont]

I may be too late in jumping into this conversation but FWIW:

If you are making a significant investment in a mic the biggest consideration is what makes YOUR voice sound it’s best. The AKG C414-P48 was my favorite V/O mic as a recoding engineer (other peoples voices, not mine) but is very expensive for a home studio and I find that it gives a harsh edge to a lot of women’s voices. Experiment before you buy.

Also the mBox mini is a good choice as long as you want to learn ProTools. Othere intefaces from M-Audio or other companies with Bias Peak LE sotware is a much more appropriate choice if all you are doing is recording V/O.

You mention “high quality mp3”, which I feel is a bit of an oxymoron. I would suggest a loseless format like .flac. If you an and the client are on high speed connections even .aiff or .wav should be no problem. you just can’t e-mail them. Getting an audio file small enough to email is a compromise (IMO). Learn about FTP or file sharing with Skype or even services like sendthisfile.com or MobileMe so you can give your clients large files without loosing audio quality.

Jeff

Jeff Beaumont
Producer/Editor
Willow Creek Community Church

[Jeff Beaumont]

“If Quicktime and iTunes hadn’t become joined at the hip….
if Apple wasn’t so obsessed with consumer-based, money-generating applications…
and if Apple hadn’t taken its eye off its original intent for Quicktime…
…we’d only — and blissfully, I say — be up to version 5 by now. “

Wow. You’re pretty pissed.
A major corporation, obsessed with making money, Who’d a thunk it?
Of course if they weren’t making all that money, they might not be so interested in developing FCP.

You know, nobody is FORCING you to upgrade QT. You can just turn off Software Updates and blissfully stay with whatever stable combination of OS, QT and FCP you choose. In fact that is what most people SHOULD do, unless they are willing to suffer the occassional meltdown.

And FWIW, I don’t think you really understand what the “original intent” of QuickTime was. But that’s a whole ‘nother discussion.

[Jeff Beaumont]

You call it a “Stinkin’ Media Container” so you inadvertantly stumbled on the answer… or at least part of the answer.
What can you put in a container? Pretty much anything.
Wouldn’t it be scary if some one figured out a way to spread a virus through a QuickTime movie? It could be done. So I for one am glad they are making security updates.

[Jeff Beaumont]

That is probably the answer. We store our project files on the SAN which doesn’t launch then the computer boots. I have notice that the Recent Projects list reset everyday ever since we got a SAN with FCP 5.
I’ve also noticed that if the Recent Projects list resets itself in the middle of the day for no reason it is a symptom of corrupt preferences.

[Jeff Beaumont]

My reason for the original question was not to report that FCP only uses 2 GB of RAM. I know this isn’t true because that part of the users manual that shows you how to manage RAM and Caches show a screen shot of a system with 8GB of RAM.
I need to know exactly what preference to trash or what other steps I need to take to make FCP see the new RAM.