[Jeff Carpenter]

Feel free to erase all your render files. When you open Final Cut it will tell you theyr’e gone and you just say “ok.”

Besides the time of having to re-render, you’ve lost nothing.

[Jeff Carpenter]

It’s sixty something. 63? 64? I’m not sure. But I think you’re safe.

Note that this number is what the firewire bus on the comptuer can handle. I’ve heard it said that you shouldn’t go over 16 FW cables in a single chain. So if you had 30 drive you should do 15 in one chain and 15 on a 2nd chain to another firewire port on the computer.

Not that I’ve ever heard of anyone doing anything close to that in the real world.

[Jeff Carpenter]

I have one but the only thing I’ve ever used it for was a Motorolla cell phone.

But that worked just fine. I can sync contact info and copy photos back and forth over the bluetooth wihthout any problem. Based on my experience I assume a mouse would work just fine too.

[Jeff Carpenter]

I think it’s a Final Cut Pro issue. I’ve noticed as well that shuttling through Avid XPRESS system is a lot smoother than on my Final Cut system and there’s no hardware reason that that should be the case.

[Jeff Carpenter]

You should still keep looking into that logarithmic idea you had. I don’t know how to do it, but it could still be useful. Using my method you might get stuck on a couple of shots…extreme close ups of things, of action shots where everything in the frame matters.

In those cases you could do some kind of logarithmic stretching in JUST those shots but not the others that don’t need it. I’d start with my method, but feel free to mix in different mehods for particular shots that may work better one way than another.

[Jeff Carpenter]

I could zoom so the sides hit the edge of frame, but then I loose a lot of head room.
==============

That’s what you want to do first. Then, slide the whole image DOWN so that the top of the 4×3 frame is now at the top of the 16×9 frame.

Now, third, you have to go though the whole movie and check every shot. There will be shots that you have to cut and slide back UP inside the frame. There will certainly be shots that should be vertically centered or perhaps bottom-aligned. Each shot will have to be checked…nearly every one will look best at a different height from the others. Even ones that look good top-aligned may look better if they’re 10-pixels higher. Or 5. Or 20. It’ll be up to you to pick what you like.

Time consuming, yes, but it will give you the best result.

[Jeff Carpenter]

About half my clients book me 11 or 12 months out. The other half book me 2 to 4 months out.

The later group seems to be people who originally didn’t want a video but ended up being convinced by a recently-married friend to do so.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Did you repair permissions by going into the APPLICATIONS/UTILITIES/DISK UTILITY program?

Try doing the same thing but by running that program off of the OS X CD. Put the disc in and hold “C” while you restart. Open Disk Utility from the menu and run it there.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Well, first off, you can drag it from the desktop back to the list you erased the icon from. It will make a copy back there and that will be fixed.

I’m not sure why you can’t import stuff, however. What you erased was just a shortcut, it shouldn’t have made a difference like that.

At any rate, put the icon back, restart your computer, and see if that fixes everything. If not, report back and tell us what’s going on at that point.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Each copy you make is frozen at that moment. You’ll want to keep making copies. Put the date and time in the name of the copy and you’ll know exactly ‘when’ you are going back to when you open one.