[Jerry Alto]

Ross- If you are going the uncompressed route two other items to help you on your way. Go ahead and buy a firewire PCI card for deck control and time code (on a doc I’m sure you will want the timecode). We bought one for $19 for the G5 and it plugged right in and gave us a 2nd firewire bus (the AJA takes up the onboard bus). Be sure to set your Z-1 menu; In-Out>iLink Conv>HDV>DV Conv>On and FCP setting to ‘Firewire DV’ machine control. Your capture preset is AJA 8-bit uncompressed US.

Hope this helps.

Jerry

G5 Dual 3GB Ram
FCP5 Studio
External 1 TB SATA Raid 0
Kona LH, Second system w AJA ioLA
Sony Z-1

[Jerry Alto]

Ross- Highest quality for us was to edit HDV native>master back out HDV>go to DigiBeta component analog from Z-1 (with edgecrop for 4:3) for dub master. This method requires FCP5. Next cleanest method is to digitze field footage analog component out of Z-1 into FCP 8 or 10 bit uncompressed (you’ll need a Decklink or Aja card). Once you go HDV-DV you are heading down a steeper compression slope.
Jerry

G5 Dual 3GB Ram
FCP5 Studio
External 1 TB SATA Raid 0
Kona LH, Second system w AJA ioLA
Sony Z-1

[Jerry Alto]

Kim- Never use auto save anymore. It was driving me crazy especially when the project got up to 3 or 4 megabytes and the editing would come to a screeching halt for 2 or 3 seconds while it auto saved. Best habit to get into is hit ‘apple-S’ every 5 for ten minutes. Then at the close of the editing session save to a jump drive or similar which dismounted and NOT part of the computer system. Works best for me.
Jerry

[Jerry Alto]

Benjamin- A real reliable (at least for us) and relatively cost effective external hard drive set-up is a SATA raid. You’ll need a PCI SATA card with external connections, an external drive bay and a pair of matching external SATA drives. You stripe the drives raid 0 with the MAC drive utility and you are on your way. In our case we shoot for $.50 a Gig or less for the drives.

The PCI-X card for our G-5 2.0 is a Seri-Tek (link is https://www.firmtek.com/seritek/ with 4 external connections. We are also using the Seritek 2-bay external enclosure.

When I purchased the drives (6 months ago) I went for two 250’s and they were $129 ea. They handle our 8-bit uncompressed without breaking a sweat and I’ve heard they handle 10 bit also. HD uncompressed requires a whole different level.

Buying the pieces and putting them together is not really that tough… expecially for a college guy. Do a search on the the COW for SATA and I’m sure you’ll find a lot more info if its something you want to persue.
Jerry

[Jerry Alto]

jacalo- It reads like you already have a dual monitor set-up. The cheap way is to go FCP ‘View>video playback>Digital Cinema Desktop Preview’. Just try it. It might be what your looking for.
jerry

[Jerry Alto]

Scott- Matte is right on but I have to throw in my two cents in case you are new at it. Before you take it out of ‘local’ rewind the tape ’till you see the bars/or Black and time code then go to ‘remote’. Then
use ‘assemble edit’ from final cut edit to tape.
Jerry

[Jerry Alto]

Cephus- APACK has been merged into Soundtrack Pro which is part of FCS.

Jerry

[Jerry Alto]

Eric- PCI-X is PCI. I believe X is for the highest bandwidth in the PCI protocol and PCI-X is compatible with all the slower PCI speeds. If you go SATA the PCI card mfg. will specify slot speeds and will suggest which G-5 slot you use for the install. I use a firmtek/seritek card and their external 2 bay enclosure.

Been using the AJA-ioLA for over two years with Betacam SP 8-bit uncompressed. Its been rock solid and the tech support from AJA IMO is the best. No deck link or Kona needed the AJA-ioLA does it all (thru a single firewire connection to the G-5) including 422 machine control, timecode, component, composite, S-video and balanced audio.

Hope this helps.

Jerry

[Jerry Alto]

Stephan- Use the downconvert in the camera or HDV deck as suggested above. In the IN/OUT REC menu choose iLink HDV-DV CONV. Also in the Z-1/HVR-M10 IN/OUT REC menu is the Down Convert menu where you can choose Squeeze, Letterbox, or Edgecrop to make 16×9 into 4×3.
Jerry

[Jerry Alto]

Art- I’ve been running an external Sata RAID for two years with very few glitches. My newest RAID has been running
for 9 months without a hitch. My first PCI raid card was a Sonnet. My latest is the SeriTek 1VE4 with a 1EN2 external enclosure. They are easily installed and straightforward to format. Drives are cheap (we shoot for $.50 a gig or less). I’ve been running Western Digital with few problems but I’ve heard good things about Seagate and Maxtor also. Use the Mac Disk utility to stripe your drives as RAID 0. About 90% of our work is 8-bit uncompressed so we put a load on the system but it doesn’t seem to even break a sweat (no dropped frames).

Now the only hitch is that we are on the cusp of Sata2 with 3.0 GB per sec (rather than 1.5), I see where Sonnet is already delivering the Sata2 PCI card. Most drives I believe are already Sata2. Also be aware that the latest connector is eSata (which is more robust than the original Sata connector) so just be sure you have a match between your card and external drives. But unless you are doing uncompressed HD I feel the 1.5 GB is more than enough but check with Barefeats as suggested above to get a feeling on just what you need.

A couple of things I’ve learned along the way;
1. The Sata protocol says ‘hot-swappable’ but be very careful. We always fire off the drives first then boot the G-5.
We shut down the computer first then turn off the drives.
2. If you swap out Sata drives then boot up and launch FCP it’ll see that the drives have changed and send you to FCP system settings where you select your drives. We always just select the drives we want and move on and let FCP create the folders it needs.
Hope this helps.
Jerry