[Jeff Carpenter]

Yes, use Compressor.

For anything under an hour, use a video CBR of 7.1 and AC3 audio.

For 2 hours, use a ‘best’ quality 2-pass VBR and start with an average of 5.0 and a max of 7.0. (And AC3 audio.) That’s just a guess, it probably won’t be quite right. But try it, see what file size you get (for audio and video together) and then re-adjust the average number either up or down to get as close to 4 GB as you can.

[Jeff Carpenter]

When you say “directly in to it” what exactly are you referring to? A second internal hard drive? The boot drive? An external drive? Firewire or USB?

Let us know where this video is going to.

[Jeff Carpenter]

That knowledge base contains dozens of errors and problems related to Windows as well.

So is this proof that Western Digital doesn’t care about Windows users either?

For that matter, there are hundreds of articles on Apple.com documenting errors and problems. Does this mean Apple doesn’t care about Mac users?

Or does it simply show that no technology company can be 100% perfect at everything, and that documenting errors and providing work-arounds is sometimes all they can do?

I really don’t care if you like Western Digital or not, but I find your reasoning to be very strange.

[Jeff Carpenter]

I’m not sure why an external drive would have put anything on your computer. Did you re-format it when you first got it?

[Jeff Carpenter]

>>But I would opine that a multicam job by it’s nature gives you a little more insurance.

– – – – –

Based on your comments here I would say that it gives me a LOT more insurance! This sounds a lot tougher than what I go through.

Thanks for the thoughts. The reason I brought it up is that I know this forum is read by both single and multi-cam shooters. I wanted to explore that difference for everyone else’s sake, and I appreciate reading more about your own perspective.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Mark >> I also attend the rehearsals … Anybody that doesn’t take this extra step is going to suffer problems on the actual wedding day, I guarantee.

– – – –

I feel that this is stated too specifically. Anyone who doesn’t PREPARE for the wedding is going to have problems, yes. But there are many ways of going about this.

Attending the rehearsal is one way, yes, but having an in-depth meeting with the bride (with diagrams and drawings of the location) and checking with the church by phone are also suitable alternatives in many cases.

Out of roughly 200 weddings I’ve shot I’ve only attended 2 or 3 rehersals. I haven’t had a problem yet. Your advice is good in the sense that preperation and planning is critical, but there are many different ways to accomplish that.

(Caveat: I always shoot with 2 or 3 cameras. I see that you guys are both talking about single-camera shoots. So for all I know, attending the rehersal IS critical for single-camera shoots. I’m just offering up my own experiences, I fully admit that it may not apply to people using different setups.)

[Jeff Carpenter]

You shouldn’t put any video media on the same drive that OSX and Final Cut Pro live on.

So unlesss you’ve somehow got 2 hard drives in that Macbook, it looks like external is the way to go!

And no, I’m not teasing you…it’s possible:
https://www.mcetech.com/optibay

But I’d still suggest the external drive. Losing the DVD drive isn’t worth it, in my opinion.

Anyway, yes, always make sure it’s 7200 rpm for media drives no matter if it’s internal or external (5400 rpm for OSX drive is ok). And yes, use firewire (not USB).

[Jeff Carpenter]

It depends on what happened. It’s possible for something to become broken and corupt in a way that a re-format fixes it. It’s also possible a drive has died and must be replaced.

In either case, yes, the data is gone.

For me, it makes more sense to risk the occational re-capture than it is to try and back-up 2 TB of video files every night. If you work in live TV, the reverse it probably true. It all comes down to your workflow and what matters more for you.

You can, for example, RAID in such a way that your two 1-TB drives turn into a single 1 TB drive. In that case, if either drive dies, you’re fine. Everything’s mirrored on the other. You just have to replace the 1 drive that failed and you never have to stop working.

[Jeff Carpenter]

And to elaborate, if you put 2 SATA drives in the Mac Pro and RAID them using the disc Utility, you’ll get a super-fast connection to those drives since it has double the bandwidth of a normal SATA drive. It’s well worth it.

You also double the chances of drive-failure by doing this. I make sure that ONLY media captured from tapes (that I keep) end up on those drives. If they crash, I just have to re-capture. Absolutely everything else (music, graphics, project files, titles) is saved on one of my other 2 drives which are backed up regularly.

So you get speed at the expence of safety, but it’s worth it to me to get faster compression times. By following my rule of vidoe-tape-only on the RAID, I don’t risk too much.

[Jeff Carpenter]

What kind of footage and what kind of work?

It will work fine (with a firewire 800 media drive) for most things, but you don’t have many options for monitoring the video on an external monitor.

So, short answer, the iMac is fine. But you’re talking about spending almost $3,000 for something that’s “fine.”

Rather than that, I’d spend $4,000 on something that’s “super-fine.” For the budjet-minded I’d suggest doing this:

* Refurbished Mac Pro with One 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
$1,999

* 2 GB additional RAM at crucial.com
$200

* 1 one-TB SATA for personal files
$210 on newegg.com right now

* 2 one-TB SATA drives to make internal Media RAID with
$420 on newegg.com right now

* 1 Western Digital MyBook USB hard drive for Time-Machine backup (not baking-up Media Drive RAID, just personal files and boot drive)
$230

* Dell E248WFP 24″ monitor
$380

* Blackmagic Intensity Pro for video monitoring
$350

* Any kind of external video monitor
SD or HD – Based on needs

So without the video monitor you’re currently at $3,789. Yes, more than the iMac, but you’ll be getting a heck of a lot more for that money.

And I listed a BUNCH of stuff. To save money you could scale down on the hard drives (I gave you 3.3 TB in total space, plust another 1 TB for backups) or the RAM (2 GB isn’t as good as 4 GB, but it’ll do) or even the Blackmagic card (I’d suggest it eventually, but you could do that later).

The point is, you can get a pretty spectacular system for not much more than a top-of-the-line iMac.