[Jeff Carpenter]

Assuming you have 10.3.9, this will do it:

https://www.apple.com/support/downloads/quicktime652reinstallerforquicktime701.html

Although, I would point out that $30 to buy QT7 Pro is not too bad a price for an new version of a program that supports H.264 encoding.

[Jeff Carpenter]

It sounds like your timeline IS 8-bit if your Beta footage is working just fine. What you need to do is capture the DV footage as 8-bit video.

In other words, hook the camera up to the AJA board instead of using firewire.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Charlie’s information brings up another bit of good news for you, Luke. If you do get footage that’s not quite what you want, it sounds like you should be able to raise the midtones with a color corrector to bring out more detail. (Which shouldn’t alter the rest of the image too much.)

You might not be able to do your usual effects with black-level crushing, but at least it sounds like there will be information there for you to play with if it doesn’t quite look perfect at first.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Thanks Jerry. I actually just bought that last night but I didn’t know all that other stuff.

When I get home tonight I’ll have to try all of your suggestions to make sure that it’s actually working correctly.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Exporting via compressor is creating very glitchy exports. Any ideas on that too?
======

YES, me too! I haven’t found a solution yet, but I’m glad to hear others have the problem. I’m pretty sure it happened after that last update…there was one for “pro” users or something like that, I don’t remember exactly what it was called. At any rate, if there’s more than just us it might be an actual problem that needs a fix from Apple.

For the moment, I’ve been using Quick Time to compress which works just fine.

I don’t know about your main exporting problem, though. I don’t export MPEG directly out of FCP so I don’t know if I have that problem too or not. Have you tried exporting a Quick Time movie (not self-contained) and opening it in Quick Time and exporting from there? That’s what I’ve been doing and it works fine. (Although there’s no batch feature. I’d sure like to find a solution to the compressor problem too.)

[Jeff Carpenter]

Do you generally use manual iris when you shoot? Just get in the habit of looking at the faces more than the overall picture. The most important thing for ANY wedding is that the face looks good. With lighter skinned people the face and the background are usually pretty close so it’s not a problem. With darker skin you can still get a good image, you just need to pay more attention to the person and less on the overall picture. You may end up with a slightly brighter background than you’re used to, but it should still be within an acceptable range.

Get a blue gel for your light, if you can. When shooting weddings like that I find that I decide to use my light more, sometimes in areas with a lot of daylight present, such as the entrance to a building. If you can daylight-balance your light that will help you out a lot.

So those are the downsides. Once big upside I’ve noticed in this situation is that you can make your white-balance a lot warmer than usual. A nice, warm image generally looks really nice, but with white people their skin starts to look orange pretty quickly so you can’t go too far. With darker skin, however, you can usually go a little further and they’ll end up looking rosey and cheerful, not orange and clown-like.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Look around to see if you can find deals, but as Ed says, getting one directly from Apple is a good way to go.

I do suggest getting the minimum amount of RAM and then buying two 1GB chips at http://www.crucial.com and putting them in yourself. They’ll charge you $390 for RAM, and you’ll have the 512 MB you took out of the computer as a backup. If you buy the RAM from Apple they’ll charge $850 and you won’t have the extra 512 MB. You can trust crucial’s quality, so there’s no reason not to go to them.

And I DO suggest getting 2 GB of RAM. You’re making a few other speed sacrifices by going with a laptop so getting the max amount of RAM is the best way to counteract that.

The choice between screen sizes is pretty hard to do online. If there’s an Apple store near you I suggest you stop by and open Final Cut on each machine and see how it looks. Obviously, if you’re happy with 15″ then there’s no sense buying the larger one. Only you can decide that, though.

Be sure to buy Apple Care. I don’t always suggest that for desktops, but for laptops that are going to be traveling it’s a safe bet. Also, start looking at nice, padded bags now!

Follow Ed’s advice about external hard drives. The internal drive is 5400 RPM which will make any effort to edit actual video from it a frustrating one. If you want to edit on planes or something like that then I suggest using the media manager to make low-rez files that you could run off the internal drive and then re-capturing them when you get home.

This next link may seem silly, but I think it’s worth the price:
https://www.radtech.us/Products/NotebookScreensavRz.aspx

It’s just a cloth that you put on your keyboard whenever you close your powerbook. I used to find that I would get little smudge-lines on my screen that mimiced the lines of the keyboard if my book was closed for a few days. I notice that that site sells cleaning materials too, it’s probably a good idea to get something. Windex or water aren’t the right things for cleaning LCD sceens, so you should get something before there’s a problem so it’s handy when you need it.

[Jeff Carpenter]

First of all, don’t judge anything by the canvas OR the viewer. What it looks like on an external NTSC monitor is the only thing that matters.

As for iDVD, you don’t have to do any compressing. It does it for you. In Final Cut, go to FILE>EXPORT>QUICK TIME MOVIE. Use “Current Settings,” “Audio and Video,” and “No Markers.” UN-Check the “Make Movie Self Contained” option.

Then, open iDVD and drag that file onto the menu.

That should do it!

[Jeff Carpenter]

I’m nearly certain that it does.

I mean, that’s what I HAVE, so I should know, right? I don’t have an ADC monitor, though, so I don’t like saying for certain if I can’t test it.

This is an ADC, right?

https://digitalfreaks.org/~lavalamp/apple_cinema_23inch/images/10_Setup_ADCDVI_ADC_Male_Connector1_TN.jpg

That’s what the other port on my X800 XT looks like!

[Jeff Carpenter]

But knowing the system requirements won’t help. Clearly his laptop meets them or Final Cut wouldn’t work at all. Since it does, we know it’s possible to run Final Cut.

The issue of dropping frames is a totally different problem. I’d say his system is on the low side, but if he’s working with DV it should be possible to edit. Here’s some thoughts:

* Make sure none of the Final Cut windows are overlapping and that each viewer’s zoom ratio is set to “fit to window.”
* Make sure he’s playing the video off of an external drive that’s at least a 7200 RPM firewire drive that has at least 15% of the space free.
* Go to “System Settings” and “Memory” and set the memory usage to 100%. Make sure all other programs are closed when editing.

There are probably a dozen other reasons he could be having problems, but those are the first 3 that come to my mind. It may end up that he CAN’T edit smoothly on that laptop, but learning the system requirements won’t really help you. They’re just meant to tell you what you need to instal the program itself. They minimum specs are usually not good enough to do a whole lot of work with that program once you instal it.