[Jiri Fiala]

You can always buy a cheap USB drive and install SL on that. Intel macs support booting from USB drives. This way you can test everything while not putting your current setup to any risk whatsoever.

[Jiri Fiala]

As for backing up the project files, the safest bet is probably dropbox.com. It creates a local folder that is synced to a online storage automatically, AND you can restore any previous version of it via their web interface. Give it a try, you get 3gb free storage.

[Jiri Fiala]

After some time, you won’t even watch the keyboard. Let the muscle memory do its magic. No need for color keyboard. As for the jog wheel, it depends on what NLE you use. I used it a lot inPremiere, but in FCP now, it’s useless due to the way FCP handles jogs and shuttles. It basically emulates keypresses, meaning you WON’T be able to get smooth jog movement. Too bad, I liked the smoothness in Premiere.

[Jiri Fiala]

I am on clean installation of FCP7 and Snow Leopard and it’s a crash ride too. It crashes all the time. I’m seriously contemplating moving back to 10.5.8.

[Jiri Fiala]

Thanks for your exhaustive answer, Scott. I would still like some kind of monitoring for 720p 25 (from 110E, as you rightly guessed), because we do more and more color-grading intensive work and occassional broadcast. Otherwise I am happy with our standard HDV to ProRes workflow (even on a lowly C2D iMac with 3 gigs of RAM!). On longer-form projects, though, I would like to be able to batch-capture HDV to ProRes, which is not possible now (even in FCP7).

[Jiri Fiala]

You can do it in FCP7 (by dropping the transition not on the edit point, but on the middle of any of selected clips).

[Jiri Fiala]

I have found that a straight cut (no fade) to black, then several frames of black accompanied with some audio overlap can be really powerful. But it can get old pretty quickly too.

It depends on the nature of your material, of course. But as Mark said, audio, with some kind of J or L cut, is a great thing to utilize when moving between scenes.

[Jiri Fiala]

Or, you can insert some kind of bumper – ten frames of static (in picture as well as sound), flyover logo or something in that area.

[Jiri Fiala]

Thanks. It`s a shame it`s so perfectly fluid in Premiere and extremely laggy in FCP 🙁

[Jiri Fiala]

Hell yeah Michael, that did it! I had Linked Selection toggled on with auto-selected V1 🙂

Thanks!