[Kris A. wotipka]

If you don’t HAVE to be portable, I would go with a Mac Pro system. You options for I/O and storage are far greater. I use a MBPro system and while it hasn’t let me down so far, I would feel better doing larger multicam HD projects on a Mac Pro with a nice RAID attached. Unfortunately, I have to be mobile.

kw

kris@wotipka.com
Image maker

[Kris A. wotipka]

I know that FCP can export between IN and OUT points if they are set. Made that mistake numerous times. I don’t think that you can set markers of a given duration and export multiple clips based on marker location. You can use the markers and set a duration and then come back and match the IN and OUT edit points with the Markers In and Out points and export your clips one at a time. There may be an automated way to do this but I do not know.

kw

kris@wotipka.com
Image maker

[Kris A. wotipka]

Manually dropping in Iframes where they are needed will help on file sizes as well. Unless you really know what you are doing, be prepared for several renderings to get everything tweaked right for file size vs. temporal quality.

kris@wotipka.com
Image maker

[Kris A. wotipka]

I am doing a project where everything is ending up as .flv files. I am exporting the files as 320×240 QT animation Millions+. Separate XML data for cuepoints. From there they go into the Flash Media encoder. Doing just a bit of cropping on the top and bottom to give them a “wider screen” look. 200kb/s deinterlaced in Flash gives me around 2MB/minute finished. Everything stays in sync and looks good considering the hit they are taking in compression.

kris@wotipka.com
Image maker

[Kris A. wotipka]

Do you want to create a DVD or create a FILE? You mention DVD but then you say that it will be viewed and played back on a Mac? Why not just create a high resolution Quicktime file? You can use “just about” any codec / compression ratio that fits your format. The whole thing can be sent FedEx via a USB type drive. Just a thought.

kw

kris@wotipka.com
Image maker