[Jeff Carpenter]

Would the date happen to be July 16th, 1969? Just a guess.

At any rate, it sounds like you have a bad battery. Check out this link:

https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86790

And scroll down for the section on “Replacing your Battery.” It’s basically a little watch battery that helps the computer remember the time while it’s off. I’d say that’s your most likely problem.

[Jeff Carpenter]

After leaving it alone last night it eventually logged onto all the network drives it was having trouble finding. (I had taken them out of the “login” portion of my user preferences, but they eventually came online by themselves later.)

This solved all my problems and the system seems happy.

But this still seems wrong to me. The computer should be able to exist without all the drives being loaded, but at the moment it seems to be VERY unhappy whenever that happens!

[Jeff Carpenter]

I think you need to find out if they expect this to be like a VCD where the video will play right off the disc or if they expect this to be like a CD-ROM where people will use their computers to open the disc and play the file with their computer’s media players…more like a web page but in disc form.

[Jeff Carpenter]

I let it sit for half an hour, and eventually it came up with a note that it is unable to connect to my G5. (Note that the G5 has no problem connecting to the iMac and transferring files between them.)

So I’m not sure why it can’t connect, but that shouldn’t be an issue…it shouldn’t be locking up my computer for half an hour because it can’t find a network drive! That seems to be what’s going on, though…it can’t find my G5 so it freaks out and won’t let me do much of anything.

I’ll mess around with trying to get it to actually connect, but as I said, there’s more wrong here than just that. Any thoughts are appreciated.

[Jeff Carpenter]

I would guess that the EASIEST way would be to just go into the ‘Motion’ tab and then ‘Distort’ and set it to 3 or 4. Then zoom in to 104 or 105%…whatever it takes to eliminate the black bars you’ve created on the sides of the image.

Shoot in front of a background that’s a hanging cloth or other backdrop and no one will notice that it’s distorted slightly.

The alternative is to do the same thing, but put the person on a green screen. That would allow you to change the person without altering the background (so the background could be anything), AND you wouldn’t have to blow-up the image, which would mean a slightly sharper person. Obviously this way would take a bit more effort.

[Jeff Carpenter]

H.264 uses interframe compression, just like DVD video. What this means is that just playing it requires a fair amount of computer power. It’s really meant as a web distribution or iPod format, for playback only. Putting that on top of a pro app like Final Cut Pro is probably going to tax your system to begin with, and on top of that you’re changing direction and speed of the clip playing…to sum it up, I’m not really surprised you’re having trouble. If you don’t have the space to do this at DV resolution (about 650 GB) then I suggest converting it all to something like the offline photo-JPEG formats.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Well, that will allow you to CONNECT them, yes, but each application will be constantly confused about which one it should be using. I suspect that the first one turned on will be the one the programs “see” and the other deck will be ignored. I suppose you’d be able to turn one off and the other on but you’d have to remember to do it in that order and you may have to close the program you’re using in order to switch without problems.

I’d get something like this:
https://www.signvideo.com/firewire-switch-ieee-1394.htm

That way you’ll never accidentally leave them both on and have trouble with the computer taking the one you didn’t mean. With a switch it would only be possible to have one available to the computer at a time. (You still might have to shut down Final Cut before making the switch…you’ll have to experiment when you get it.)

[Jeff Carpenter]

So far they’ve replaced the Powerbook, Mac Mini, and iMac.

Of those, only the iMac was a 64-bit computer, previously. Given that it could only take 2.5 GB of RAM before and is a consumer-targeted computer, I can’t think of a single reason why it needs to be 64-bit. Not even Final Cut Pro gets any advantage from a 64-bit computer vs. a 32-bit. It’s most useful for some science applications and super-computer farms, neither of which tend to use iMacs.

I am sure that the Intel Powermacs will continue to have 64-bit chips. The iMac never needed them in the first place…it’s just that they only had one version of the G5 chip so that’s what they got.

[Jeff Carpenter]

it would be good if there was some kind of widget manager
======

Do you not have the widget called “Widgets?” It should be the fist one on your list. it lets you turn certain Widgets “off” so even if they’re on your system, they don’t show up in the tray.

[Jeff Carpenter]

That’s normal. Digitized Beta is 720×486 while DVCAM is 720×480. Some programs chop off the extra 6 pixels. It looks like the Avid shrunk the frame so that it all got in, but that leaves you with a little extra space on the edges.

There are only 2 solutions at this point. 1) Blow the footage up slightly and perhaps sharpen it a little to make up for the softening you’ll get or 2) accept that the black part is outside the action-safe area and most people won’t see it on their TVs.

Of course, now that people watch DVDs on computers, option #2 is less popular. But I’ve never been a big fan of #1. But those are your choices.

(Unless you have some way to re-dig the Beta footage in such a way that it just crops the extra 6 pixels off and doesn’t shrink the image in the first place. I can’t even BEGIN to explain how you would go about that but it is a possibility.)