Jeff Carpenter
1
COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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If you capture by firewire then what is on your hard drives is exactly the same as what is on the tape. If you’re taking those hard drives to the post house then you’ve done all you can do. They’ll take over from there, you’ve given them the best possible quality.
The ONLY issue I can think of is this: Will they be simply taking your project and openning it up in their Final Cut system, or will you be exporting a final video that they will then import into something else like an Avid?
If they’re using Final Cut, don’t worry about a thing. Feel free to add some filters and effects on your own…they can change them or erase them if they don’t lke them. As long as they’re using your project they have access to the original, max-quality video files.
IF, however, you are going to export your final project for them to re-import, you should not do ANY color correcting at all. Any filter you apply will slightly alter the video which will then be altered AGAIN when they color correct it. You can lose quality this way. But again, this only matters if you’re exporting your project as a single video file or laying it back to tape.
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I have 4.5 GB and I often leave Final Cut Pro (DV only), Motion, and Photoshop open at the same time. From what I’ve seen, when I get into a fair amount of work that uses up MOST of my RAM, but I still have a little left over for the system to play with.
So 4.5 is a very comfortable level for me. Based on my experiences I would describe each amount of RAM like this:
2 GB: Adequate
4 GB: The right amount MOST of the time
6 GB: Some extra overhead for safety, sometimes it will be nice to have
8 GB: A tiny bit too much for now but who knows what Final Cut 6 will want?
10 GB: Please send me your extra money. You have too much! -
No problem at all. It’s just a playback thing. You only have to worry if you like to playback to tape from the timeline. At that point you’d want to turn it back on or use the “Print to Tape” feature.
But for editing, as long as they don’t bother you, dropped frames don’t matter much.
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1) Make sure that dynamic playback is on. This makes sure that your system isn’t trying to stay at full quality video. This will let the quality drop a little instead of dropping frames.
2) Your system is still pretty good but you might be in a situation where you’re not making the most of your system which you need to be doing. I’d suggest closing ALL other applications while you’re editing. Also, go into the Final Cut Prefrences and find the RAM usage section and make sure that Final Cut is using up all the RAM it can get its hands on.
3) Your video card isn’t so hot. Are you using Tiger? It shifts a lot of things from the CPU to the graphics card but if you have an older card then it can’t do as much of that, which taxes your processor. You should call up Powermax or Small Dog Electronics (google them) on the phone and actually talk to someone. Explain what system you have, what monitors you have, and say you’re looking in the $150-$250 range. Probably anything in that price range will help you out although you could spend even more if you wanted to.
I think that doing all 3 of these steps will help you extend the life of your G4 system even more.
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Just a note on the “run it on a Mac thing.”
The reason that XP had to be “hacked,” as you said, is because it uses BIOS to start up while Intel Macs use EFI. Everyone was waiting for Vista to come out with EFI support which should make things a whole lot easier. Well…we recently learned that Vista will still have BIOS, not EFI! Oh well…
It looks like there might be some more expensive versions of Windows (like a server version) that will use EFI, but right now it seems that good old normal Vista will have to be hacked in the same way that XP was in order to run on a Mac.
Anyway, it’s not like I want to run Windows on my Mac, I just thought I’d add a little more info to your post…don’t count on Vista being any easier than XP was to run on a Mac.
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If you’re otherwise happy with your GL1 then a PD-170 should thrill you.
(And they’re still doing a $300 rebate on them through March 31st. Look up the camera on B&H online for info on that.)
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You could try messing around with the playback settings to lower the preview quality. You might be able to turn it into an orange line instead of a red one. You’d still have to render at the end, but you might be able to get some work done before you have to render which can be a big time-saver.
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As for the hard drives, the computer can only hold 2 total, so you can’t add 2 more SATA drives in addition to the system drive.
I suggest getting the 250 GB as the system drive and then buying your own SATA drive in the 300 to 500 GB range and putting that in yourself. Use that second drive for non-video media, making DVDs, and things like that. Then explore external storage options for your video files. Look lower on today’s posts for the thread named “Storage Options” for some info on that and search the archives for a lot more info on external SATA RAIDS, firewire 800 RAIDS, and XSERVE RAIDS.
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It’s probably possible to do a little experiment. Make a guess on how much video you’d have on your drives at any one time. If that were to get lost, how much time would it take to re-digitize it all? How much would that cost you in salary (either for yourself or others) and would it put you behind in your overall work or would you simply work overnight? Would losnig a day of work screw up your deadlines or would you just have to work longer hours for the rest of the week?
Try to come up with a monetary value for a hard drive failure. Once you have THAT you can start to see if spending extra now is really worth it for you or not. For me, the “cost” of such failures is so very low that I have no reason to spend more than firewire drives. It’s good to really figure out just how bad a failure would be for yourself before making a decision like this.
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I really don’t know the answer to this, but my best guess is that maybe the project was created with rectangular pixels and that QT can’t display those sidewise and must turn them into square pixels?
I just made that up, but it’s something to try…make a new project in After Effects that is using square pixels, put a circle in it, export it, and rotate it with QT. See what happens then.
(And if your original project IS square pixels well…never mind!)