[Jeff Carpenter]

Casablanca is a proprietary turnkey edit system. I suspect the user base is small and might be wedding videographers who fear having to use a standard computer and all its software complexities.

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I believe it’s also popular in grade schools where they make videos as projects but are more interested in what their acting and scripts look like than how well they learn the NLE.

For those who have never seen one, imagine buying a Mac Mini that came with NOTHING but iMovie on it. That’s kind of what a Casablanca is like.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Do you have iLife 05? iMovie has something called Magic Movie that might be all you need.

https://www.apple.com/ilife/imovie/magicimovie.html

I’ve never used it…but you can see if it helps. Once you’ve done that you could probably save it as a Quicktime movie and bring it into Final Cut to finish off whatever titles and other edits you want to do.

[Jeff Carpenter]

I think ghetto3jon’s point is that he wants the dissolves to be added automatically, without draggin a disolve onto the timeline.

To answer your question, if this is all done with firewire the video itself shouldn’t suffer much. The transitions you’ve made in the Casablanca will have uncompressed the video in that part of the project and then been re-compressed. Now, that’s no different than how it works in Final Cut so you’re fine there UNLESS you do something else in Final Cut, like apply a color-correction to the whole project. Now, most of the video will be effeted for the first time, but your transitions will be on their SECOND uncompress/recompres.

So the short version is: only the transitions should be effected by this plan. But now that you know that, I wouldn’t worry about it. It shouldn’t be anything you could see with your eyes, I’m betting. So go for it.

That being said, I can’t imagine how capturing everything into one system and then re-capturing it to another could be ANY faster than simply dragging the disolves down to the timeline in Final Cut. With your plan you’d be saving about 1/2 a second for each transition you make but you end up having to re-capture everything a second time. Do you really have so many dissolves that you’re saving time with this plan?

[Jeff Carpenter]

You can’t go single to dual. You could get an upgrade for the single chip you have, but I don’t know that it would be worth it. The motherboard will only support up to a certain speed…people who sell chip upgrades could tell you what, exactly. But the point is that you’d spend a few hundred dollars to get slightly better performance when you should really just be watching E-Bay for a few weeks for the best deal you can get at twice that amount and you’ll be much better off.

Budget so that you can buy the max amount of RAM a model can take and you can buy a nice video card too.

Use this page to know what you’re looking at:
https://www.apple-history.com/

[Jeff Carpenter]

Look for Dual chip-1gHz G4 Powermacs on E-Bay OR get a G5 iMac. Get media scratch drives no matter which (internal for the Powermac, firewire for the iMac.)

Both have their pluses and minuses but they’d allow you to get work done. The Mac mini is a fantastic home computer but don’t expect much power out of it for video work.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Then I’d say you should triple-check the capture settings and the sequence settings. (And the clip you’ve already captured.) If any one of those things has the audio slightly different…maybe a different sample rate…it’s possible that the Powerbook just can’t convert it on the fly so you hear nothing.

Try rendering it to see if that fixes it. If it does, that’s not really the “fix,” it’s just proof that one of your settings doesn’t match another.

[Jeff Carpenter]

This is a long shot, but delete one of the audio tracks in the sequence and see if you can hear just the one that’s left.

I’ve had some issues in the past with certain external mics recording similar audio on both tracks and they cancel each other out when playing back.

If you’re having this problem with all kinds of different video than this wouldn’t be it…I just thought I’d ask, though.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Did you use the simulator in iDVD to “play” the disc without burning it?

My guess is that you’ve created a link to another menu with your video as the icon for that link. In other words, you have no video on the disc…just a tiny icon with your video in that. That’s pretty easy to do in iDVD if you’re not careful.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Switches work fine with Macs and PCs as long as you have an external monitor. So no, the iMac won’t work out.

But with Mac Minis or Powermacs you’d be fine. My mom has a Dell and a Powermac. There is a logitech mouse plugged into the USB port on an Apple keyboard. The keyboard and the monitor goes to a USB/VGA switch that runs to the PC and the Powermac. Everything works just fine on both machines.

Using a USB keyboard is easiest since it works with both systems, but you can use a PC-style one instead of a Mac keyboard if you like. Pick the one you use more often. She went with the Mac-style because of the built-in USB hub.

[Jeff Carpenter]

1) If the movies are under 60 minutes than just use iMovie. You could probably get SLIGHTLY better compression using DVD Studio Pro if you took the time to mess around with it but I doubt it would be that much different and you probably don’t want to spend the time doing that anyway. Only go to DVD SP if you need to put more than 60 minutes on one disc or you want to get really complicated with the menus. Perhaps use iDVD for their own projects but DVD SP for the end-of-year class disc. (For stuff like that, burn 2 discs. That’s a good safety measure for important things.)

2) I’ve always had good luck with Verbatim brand discs. Lots of others are good but that’s what I use. Look online for places that sell 100 on a spindle and buy disc-cases in 100 packs too. You’ll save money over buying discs that come in cases. I also suggest getting a printer that prints on DVDs and buying the printable-surface discs. No labels is a time saver but more importantly they prevent off-center labels from making discs wobble in players. That’s something that can mess up home-made discs.

I’m not suggesting this exact one, but I’m talking about something like this:
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=6355106&type=product&id=1076628578574

3) The computers won’t melt down. You should tell the students that if they’re serious about this they should get an firewire hard drive. An 80 GB is about $120 and I’m sure there will be one or two students serious enough to spend that kind of money so it’s worth it for you to point it out to them. For the rest who don’t care that much they should be fine, just tell them that they should be careful to always leave about 20% of their hard drive empty at ALL times.