[Jeff Carpenter]

Let’s go over the duplicate part of this process.

What are you using and how are you doing that?

[Jeff Carpenter]

I guess the main point here is to talk with the client about their needs. I’ve mostly done this sort of thing for basketball team captains. In their cases, it’s their direction of the other players and command of the team that is noteworthy. The fact that they can pass and dribble the ball is a total non-issue for them so close ups don’t matter.

But I could see how different positions would have different things that were important. I guess it really can be different every time.

[Jeff Carpenter]

It depends…is there one main computer and one for, like, rendering or something?

I ask, because your best chance is to get Leopard on both machines and use the screen sharing function. Basically, bring up one Mac’s screen in a window within the other. Kind of like running Windows in Parallels, except in this case it’s an actual, physical, other Mac running in the Window.

The reason I ask about “main” computer is that this control won’t be quite as fast and quite as smooth as your current setup. If you’re editing in Final Cut on both machines, this might not work.

But if one machine if doing something like rendering or web browsing or something like that, it would be a prime candidate for being the shared screen.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Nearly all DV cameras allow you to record in from the firewire input.

I can’t promise that it will work, but I can promise that if it DOES work, you’ll get all your video and audio at the exact same quality as it is on the computer. Firewire simply transfers data so nothing will be lost.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Don’t know about the equipment, but for this type of video (college recruitment, maybe?) the best advice I can give is that the important part isn’t so much what they target player is doing with the ball, but how they interact with the rest of the team.

Keep that in mind and you’ll have a much better idea of what your framing should be. Generally it’s something like 40% of the playing field at all times, but by knowing what you’re really looking to capture you can do a better job of adjusting the shot as it needs to be.

[Jeff Carpenter]

This PDF makes it a little more clear.

https://www.flip4mac.com/pdfs/dat_flip4mac_wmv.pdf

You need Studio. You would need Studio Pro if you need a really specific setting, but if not then the regular Studio’s pre-sets are probably fine.

[Jeff Carpenter]

For a new computer I just suggest taking the drive and out re-installing OS X from the DVD onto the new drive. No point trying to clone a fresh install when you can just do your own.

I don’t know if this is silly or not, but in this situation I would replace JUST the boot drive, install OS X, and then install the other 3. I always get paranoid about choosing the right drive for putting the OS on, and that takes care of that problem.

* Use Disk Utility to refomat all drives as Mac OS Extended (also known as HFS+). Turn journaling on for the boot drive but leave it off for the others that will be media drives.

* Holding down the mouse button while restarting will always open the DVD tray. Holding down “C” while re-starting will always boot from the DVD. These both work even when no OS or boot drive is present.

* Disk Utility lives in APPLICATIONS/UTILITIES. You can use that to format drives 2-4. To format the boot drive, launch from the DVD and find Disk Utility in the menus.

* Run System Update multiple times (until it stops finding stuff) BEFORE you install your apps. After you’ve installed everything, do the whole thing again.

* I suggest getting a USB hard drive and setting Time Machine to use it. Very much worth it. Not only can you restore individual files, you can use it to restore the entire boot disk if it goes bad. Exclude your media drives from Time Machine back-ups. Either make a redundant RAID, or (what I do) make sure you ONLY put media on the RAID that exists on tape and can be re-captured if need be. Leave graphics, music, project files, and stuff like that on the boot drive.

Here’s a suggestion:
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/494445-REG/Western_Digital_WDG2T10000N_1_TB_My_Book.html

[Jeff Carpenter]

>>Would you purchase 3 – 2Gb RAM chipsets to get to 8 Gb?

* Final Cut likes to have all RAM chips the same. So if you do this you’ll want to ditch the 2 GB that comes with the computer and buy 8 GB total. Why do this? Well, if you think you’ll some-day want more than 8 GB, you’ll still have free slots since you only used 4 slots. Buying 8×1 will use up all your RAM slots. If you DON’T think you’ll ever buy more than 8, it’s probably a waste of money to buy the 8 GB in 2-gig sticks as opposed to buying 6 GB of 1-gig sticks and adding to what’s in there.

>>Would you just go with the fastest machine 3.2 Ghz or would 2.8 be fine?

* Do you do a lot of rendering and conversions? If you’re contstantly compressing 3-hour shows to MPEG 4 or DVD then you’ll see a big difference. If you only work on :30 spots all day then the speed change won’t matter as much. That’s the part to focus on. Will speeding up conversions and renders make a difference to you? Because that’s the one place you’ll really notice the difference. For anything else you do, it’s all going to be pretty similar.

Remember, this machine is going to give pretty good real-time performance too. The ‘dynamic’ playback setting does a good job of dipping quality when it needs to, just to make the playback smooth. You can render the parts you NEED to, but you’ll find those are few and far in between. These days I generally only render at the end, before output. I’m not sitting around rendering every effect just to preview it anymore.

>>Here is the drive info…

* That looks fine. Someone around here also suggested this the other day:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145167

You could buy 4 of those for $1,020, have a huge 1 TB boot drive AND make a 3 TB internal SATA RAID too! (Using OS X’s disk utility.) Lots of space and super fast. (No redundancy, though. You could also RAID for safety if you prefer and just have less space.)

With 4 SATA drives inside, you can get a lot done before you have to start thinking of external drives.

[Jeff Carpenter]

1) Just buy from Apple.

2) The GeForce 8800 card is worth the $200 upgrade, but any of those cards are really fine for what you’ll be doing. So this is optional, but I’d do it if it were me.

3) Just get the 2 GB of RAM. Buy the rest from either crucial.com or search the archives here on this subject. There are other suggestions in past threads. Upgrading yourself to 4 GB is probably fine for now, but 8 is great too.

4) I suggest upgrading the boot drive to 500 GB. But after that, buy the rest of your drives from other sources. You have 3 slots left. Get SATA 300 drives with 32 MB caches and 7200 RPM. Just make sure it’s a brand you’ve heard of. Seagate, Western Digital, and Hitachi are all fine. Once you find a model, price compare around the ‘net.

5) Any particular reason you’re upgrading the processors to the 3 gHz? It sounds like you keep your computers for a long time. If that’s the reason, that’s fine. Just be aware that you probably won’t notice much difference in day-to-day usage between the 2.8 and the 3.0 gHz machines. I’m not trying to talk you out of it, but just be aware that ‘future-proofing’ is the reason you’re doing that particular upgrade.

6) If you’re looking to save cash, find the refurbished Macs on the Apple.com store. (Lower left on page.) You can’t upgrade the video cards or boot drives in this case, but just go with what’s there and upgrade the RAM and other drives as usual. ANYTHING in there is going to feel a million times faster than your current computer, so it might be money well-saved in your case. Buying new’s just as great too…a suggestion. (They come with the same warranty as the new ones.)

7) You don’t say, but make sure you have at least Final Cut 5.1. In fact, go into your apps folder and select each app. Hit Command-i to open the info. Under “Kind” if it says ‘Universal’ you’re fine. If it says ‘PowerPC’ you’ll probably want to upgrade that program. Check their websites to see if it’s a free upgrade (usually not) or a paid upgrade to get to the Universal version. Take this cost into account before you decide on hardware. (Keep in mind that iLife programs come free with a new Mac. Those will be fine.)

[Jeff Carpenter]

https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86414

Is the RAM installed in pairs, going from the inside to out? In other words, the RAM slots are like this:

C
B
A

A
B
C

Make sure that the same kind of chip is placed in the slots that are the same letters.