[John Pale]

Technically speaking, with few exceptions (apps that directly access hardware with kernel extensions), applications in OSX operate in their own memory space (protected memory). Even if they crash, they can’t affect other applications. Because of pre-emptive multitasking, they also do not use up system memory or processor cycles when you are not working in them. You are most likely to have problems with other apps while outputting to tape or digitizing, as that tends to be more demanding on the system.

That being said…being as careful as Walter is certainly not a bad idea, and having a laptop around to do other things would be ideal. But your system should have more than enough horsepower to run Safari and Entourage at the same time as FCP without a problem. DVDSP, Motion or a big Compressor encode might be pushing it.

Remember to turn of your e-mail alert sound.

[John Pale]

You are right Walter…
I was just trying to distinguish uncompressed SD from DV, for in PAL DV differs from the rest of the SD formats in field dominance. This whole subject gives me a headache 🙂

[John Pale]

DV, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50 are all lower field first in NTSC.
DVCPRO HD is upper for 1080i. No fields for 720p

PAL DV formats are lower field first, but SD is upper.

[John Pale]

Does your DVCPRO camera have a firewire connection? If so, then capture using that.

Or make a Firewire to Firewire dub from your camera to the DSR-2000 and record on a DVCAM tape.

[John Pale]

[Andy Mees] “good catch! the danger of living in PAL land and giving out advice … i shall hush my mouth 🙁

“

Hey, your advice was correct for the majority of the planet. (however, since winrockpost didnt say where he was from, I was assuming the US..could be wrong, though)

[John Pale]

Uncompressed SD is Lower Field First in NTSC for most equipment (old Avids and Media 100 used upper)…PAL uses upper field first for SD.

In DV its lower field first for both PAL and NTSC

[John Pale]

Control-Click on any of these Quicktimes in the Finder. Select Get Info in the contextual menu

Go to the “open with” section of the Get Info Window.
Change to Quicktime Player in the pull down menu.
Beneath the pull down menu is a button to change all. Press it and all files of this type will open with Quicktime player.

[John Pale]

[Pelda033] “HDD Drives are internal. 7 days ago they were divided and then this guy came and put them in to stripe. The problem existed even before striping.”

This is probably your problem. The G5 can only have 2 drives (without that contraption for Weibetech). If you stripe them together, its faster, but you will still be capturing to your boot drive, because now you are effectively capturing to just one big drive. Not a good idea to capture to the drive your operating system is running on. Will drastically inhibit performance.

To work effectively with Uncompressed you do need striped drives (a RAID), but you should not be running your operating system off of it. You would be better off with an external SATA RAID or a firewire 800 RAID (such as a G-RAID or Lacie Big Disk). Personally, I am still using a SCSI RAID, but that is kind of passe…you can get more bang for the buck with SATA these days.

[John Pale]

[thefreak] ” The IMX pictures looks fine but whenever I use, and render, the DV-material it looses quality compared to what it looks like originally on the monitor. So something is clearly not right in the conversion.”

Are you capturing the DV through your Decklink SDI or Firewire? If you are using firewire (and rendering), the field order of the DV might be getting messed up because natively it is 720 x 480 rather than 720 x 486 (as your 8 bit stuff is). Try moving it up one line in the motion tab, then render…then see what it looks like.

[John Pale]

[Pelda033] ” My Mac is G5 x 2 – 2.7 Ghz, 2 GB of RAM, 500MB HDD”

Hmm..have you striped 2 drives internally within your G5? (Not really a good idea to capture to your boot drive) Or are you using external drives? What kind of drives? You should be able to get resonably stable playback even from a single 7200 RPM Firewire 400 drive (though not recommended for editing) using 8 Bit Uncompressed (either Apple or Blackmagic).