[John Foley]

There are plenty of inexpensive plugins to Final Cut Pro but not FREE! The work to make a good plugin deserves compensation.

Please visit http://www.thefinalcutstore.com for all your Final Cut needs.

[John Foley]

When doing a fresh installion of the operating system, it is best to take the time to reinstall everything. If that’s not possible you can try using the clone tool to move any standalone apps back to the primary boot drive.

This might cause problems with those files written to permissions and other support applications folders if not restored properly.

As far as FCP specifci plugins – I would say it is not possible to move them from one copy of FCP to a newer one. probably best to reinstall fresh.

Please visit http://www.thefinalcutstore.com for all your Final Cut needs.

[John Foley]

250 GB SATA drives are under $100 these days and are perfect for a boot drive. I’d keep the 160 as a second storage drive for Final Cut Studio applications content.

Personally, I don’t like Maxtor drives but any other Seagate, Hitachi or Western Digital drive is acceptable.

Please visit http://www.thefinalcutstore.com for all your Final Cut needs.

[John Foley]

Generally, you would first clone the entire internal disk drive contents, then insert the software install disk that come wuith your MacBook Pro and erase all the data and format.

Install a fresh copy of what ever MacOS X came with your MacBook and then update to MacOS 10.4.9 and the proper Quicktime version for FCS2. Load FCS2 onto the MacBook and maybe put the content for DVD Studio, Soundtrack and Livetype on an external drive to save desktop space.

If you need to return to the original OS-Applications then go back through the steps in the second paragraph and use the clone tools to bring all the original content back.

Please visit http://www.thefinalcutstore.com for all your Final Cut needs.

[John Foley]

I am not sure why I would want to RECORD BACK to P2 cards on m HVX200?

Can you fill me in?

Please visit http://www.thefinalcutstore.com for all your Final Cut needs.

[John Foley]

This question has come up literally hundreds of time. The same answer as always. NO.
Project files are not backwards compatible. However, with FCP 4, we were introduced to XML.
You can output your timeline to an XML file that can be read back by another XML capable program (IE: earlier version of FCP)

Please visit http://www.thefinalcutstore.com for all your Final Cut needs.

[John Foley]

The current landscape of cameras that are prevalent are DV/HDV and DVCPRO. Not counting the RED camera or any other exotic camera, it’s MPEG-2 and IFrame. The bigger issues are besides which format, how are those formats captured?

Today we have DV/HDV tape, MXF wrappers for DVCPRO onto P2 cards and a host of other choices for using various Sony H Def cameras. Except for DV/HDV, none of the other formats are tape bound. Today we have optical discs in camera and P2 cards in camera. It’s a mind blowing arrangement of who’s on first.

Do you need a capture card? Probably not for uncompression duties. Maybe as a way to display full rez images on a production monitor. Most everything is coming across Firewire these days. Unless you are going to be doing Digibeta or some other uncompressed format, then no.

Then there’s storage requirements; Is on board SATA good enough for your needs?

Please visit http://www.thefinalcutstore.com for all your Final Cut needs.

[John Foley]

Sorry to inform you but I am sure there are plenty of Beta testers that have already used the Studio 2.

Please visit http://www.thefinalcutstore.com for all your Final Cut needs.

[John Foley]

Sounds like a very nice adventure. An HVX200 can shoot DV onto tape and only DV, better known as DVCPRO 25. It can also shoot DVCPRO 50 same as Digibeta and DVCPRO 100/ HD which is either 720p or 1080i or 24p onto P2 cards or stream to a computer over firewire.

I like my HVX200 very much as I have always wanted an affordable HiDef (4:2:2 – not 4:2:0) camera. it’s a little heavier than a Sony HDV camera but it’s really versital.

Please visit http://www.thefinalcutstore.com for all your Final Cut needs.

[John Foley]

Be careful! The late 2004-early 2005 2.7 GHZ Mac does NOT have PCI-express slots!

Only the G5’s shipped after Nov 2005 have PCI-express.

Please visit http://www.thefinalcutstore.com for all your Final Cut needs.