[John Davidson]

You may consider using this Entourage issue as a good reason to dump the MS Office programs altogether. I was very happy switching to address book, apple mail, and also changing my mail to an imap format. Now I can get any email sent or received in the last 12 years on my phone or any computer.
Getting out of the Pop3 mail system has been a godsend. I used to have to organize every computer and phone I used after downloading emails and leaving copies on a server. My usage of Entourage was a holdover of my skepticism that applications that came preloaded with a computer must be sucky. That’s what the Windows world teaches you, anyways.

[John Davidson]

Pro video coalition had a great article about getting the most out of your 7D a few weeks ago. Maybe search their site archives? The included some links to custom setups that give you a better base for color correction in post. I’d post a link by that might be advertising for the competition :-).

[John Davidson]

The issue you’re referring to may be moire, which is the another problem the 7D faces. I noticed it when shooting a speckled concrete driveway the other week. I think maybe reducing detail level can help some. There are others who can possibly help you reduce this if it’s a major issue for you. Perhaps it’s best to think of the 7D as a tool for interviews, scenic broll, low light situations, and a camera you use in unconventional shooting environments where you still want great depth of field (like mountain climbing, time lapses, etc).

A 7D will never replace a RED. It’s important to keep in mind that it’s just one tool in your belt.

A friend once complained to me about the jello effect regarding the 7D. It’s another one of those issues that people contemplate before purchase. He asked me if it was something I noticed when shooting with the 7D – I told him I was aware of it but that unless he was planning to do lots of whip pans and action scenes, it wouldn’t be an issue. He said that he was planning to shoot action scenes with it.
My response to that was “if you’re shooting an action scene that requires choreography, multiple takes, maybe some wires, exhaustive lighting, etc., what the f$#* are you shooting that on a $1600 camera for?”
He ordered a 7D – and a RED – the next day.

[John Davidson]

Was this shot 25p (or 24p)?
The slow motion footage was shot at 720/60p. The regular speed footage was shot at 1080/24p.

What does Cinema Tools do? Is this for Slow Mo?
Yes, If you notice, shooting 720/60p, footage looks like ‘video’ because the footage is overcranked.
If you shoot 10 seconds of footage at 24p, you end up with roughly 240 frames of footage, which is 24 frames per second (the nice looking film frame rate). Shooting at 60p creates 600 frames of this exact same 10 seconds of footage. If you don’t touch it, you get a video look at regular speed. Cinema Tools changes the frame rate that these 60p clips play back to 24p, resulting in 600 frames played out at 24 frames per second, turning that 10 seconds of footage into 25 seconds of glorious, smooth, slow motion.

You could also probably conform this 60p footage to 25p, I live in America though, and since every thing we do is right and perfect, I can’t confirm how that process would work :). Lol!

[John Davidson]

I think the smoothcam made it more prominent. With smoothcam off, this jello is still there, but you’re so distracted by the shakiness of the cam that you don’t see it.

Here’s a link to the nonsmoothcam version so you can see what I mean…

https://www.vimeo.com/8493311

This camera is one of the most awesome pieces of equipment I’ve ever bought. Months later I’m still in love with it. No other camera has held my fascination this long

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[John Davidson]

That’s been our experience as well. The real insult here is that the head of Intuit is also on the Apple board. Quickbooks is one of the most non-intuitive programs I’ve ever tried to use. God help you if your accountant is on a year version that’s different from your bookkeeper.

There really needs to be more competition in accounting software – and certainly more interoperability between versions. Especially if every year the one major player we have updates itself out of function with other versions of itself.

[John Davidson]

For bookeeping, we work in Quickbooks using Parallels/XP on a mac because the mac version is crap. That’s for our accounting – but to coordinate between several of us, we keep a full list of projects, payment status, budget codes, etc., in a numbers document on a shared idisk folder. When a project is completed, I update the document, it syncs via mobileme/idisk to the other macs, and then our accounting person picks it up and has all the billable information.

We also use our own pages document/invoice template to invoice clients rather than using quickbooks. We had problems with quickbooks being slow on delivering invoices – I forget what the situation was, but quickbooks didn’t allow a simple pdf export function at the time. Regardless, all invoices are also stored in mobile me servers, so they’re accessible from my iphone or any computer with internet access.

When it’s time to send an invoice, the Pages / Share function is dead simple and provides a rock solid PDF that our clients love. It works, and keeps everybody happy and not completely attached to a single computer.

[John Davidson]

I did this little ‘project’ a different way just to see how it would go. It was pretty painless.

First, I conformed in cinema tool on the h264 footage. Loaded it all in to Final Cut. Then, I used media manager to recompress to a new project. I haven’t used mpeg streamclip, but this process was pretty darn simple – but it did take about 2 hours to transcode all the clips….

Here are the results.
https://www.vimeo.com/8493311

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[John Davidson]

Right now I’m using a kingston 32 gig 133x elite pro that I got for about 100 bucks. Doesn’t have any issues capturing HD or high speed continuous shooting. I also have a 16 gig sandisk III I think. I’m very surprised/pleased with the kingston, honestly. After paying egregious prices for P2 cards, I feel like I’m in heaven.

[John Davidson]

If you can access everything on it as if it’s an external drive, the operating system shouldn’t be an issue. Little weird that it’s a DMG maybe (Time machine or ‘super duper’ would have been my choices), but if you’re able to mount it, then you’re fine. I still have a Tiger drive laying around here somewhere that I can either boot from or plug n play whenever I want.
Cheers!