I think the mini is DEFINATELY the way to go here… FCP 4.x captures DV clips differently than FCP 3 did… so you’ll be better off using the mini for the job I’d think. If you use FCP 3, they won’t be “optimized” for FCP HD or later.
Well, there are other very tried and true solutions from Huge Systems, and from Medea… there are forums here for them to boot. In fact, the 4 gig fibre channel arrays are just beginning to arrive (these puppies can get up to 500mb/sec + throughput – YOWZA!). They will simply blow the doors off a 2 gig array like the X Serve RAID. Don’t think Apple will be much behind delivering a new X Serve system which competes either… But the Huge guys (my personal favorite) are the most reponsive tech support folks I’ve ever been around, that’s for sure). Just check out the forum here… it’s awesome.
When you create a new project file, what are the presets for the sequence that comes along with it? I’m doing much the same all the time with DV or uncompressed etc… and never see this problem…?
I just talked to AJA about just what all it accelerates… it does as you suggest, but it does it with any video which is also supported with RT Extreme. So we are talking Offline RT, DV, Uncompressed 8 and 10 bit, HDV, DVCPRO50, 100 etc..
If you’re judging the video in FCP’s Canvas… you are not seeing all of the resolution you really have there… does this file look bad externally on a video monitor?