[Kris Merkel]

Streamclip vs. compressor vs. L&T:

With a full 16Gb card converting to prores422, L&T is takes about 1.5 hours, Streamclip is just over an hour, and while you can use compressor to transcode the files, unless you use Qmaster and multiple cores, takes longer than both.

One item that has not been mentioned, and my be the tiebreaker on which method you choose the use is that L&T adds timecode to the clips.

[Kris Merkel]

I second this!! The Atlanta production community will greatly benefit from more top tier edit suits. Can’t wait for the COW party!

[Kris Merkel]

do you need a separate QT file? if not you could just create a new sequence and drag the original sequence into it. This is called “Nesting”

[Kris Merkel]

Having a bus. with employees is night and day compared to a one man/woman shop. All the above advice has been good especially the attorney and tier based pay rate. Make sure that you are paying your employee what they or the job are valued at.

Along with my Freelance business, I run a Tea House, which is at some times more like a full service restaurant with about 8+ employees. And the #1 biggest issues we ever have is with employees. They are not bad employees( most of them) but with scheduling issues, theft issues, customer service issues ect. managing them is like another full time job. Of course with one employee it shouldn’t take that much of your energy, just make sure that you get “professional” references and that you trust and genuinely like the person you are going to hire, because you will be spending a lot of time together, as well as this person will be interacting with your clients.

Also rework an “employee” into your business plan to make sure that fits in with your long term plans rather than just something that will satisfy your immediate needs. As you go through this process and plug your #’s into your pro-forma you will find a magic # of how many employees you will need to maintain the type of production company you want to have.

Congratulations on your growth and wishing you continued success. The best part about venturing out on this path is that you can grow your business while work is being done.

[Kris Merkel]

All of these suggestions work to some degree and each will be more comfortable to certain workflows. I third what Michael said about copying your media. I haven’t used Grinder yet but my workflow is as follows:

– Record media on card
– create disk image of the card through FCP log and transfer
– Archive copy of disk image to perm. storage
– batch clips using L&T from working copy of disk image

Very few steps involved. It does take a while to create the .img, but I use multiple cards

[Kris Merkel]

If you are laying off to tape from “print to tape” in FCP there is no need to downres. You are, needlessly, going to lose resolution. The down conversion is best done with your AJA or Blackmagic card.

[Kris Merkel]

You cannot own the blame. I would call it evolution of production. After all, the “Robot” is in all of our edit suites. It checks our spelling, reminds us of meetings, production schedules, ect. It can perform more tasks simultaneously than I could do in two days (if i tell it to) While I could satisfy my creativity and spend time creating a simple effect in AE, I, nowadays, reach for a preset in order to keep up with my production schedule and flow.

It makes little sense to not use tools that make our work productive.

Kris Merkel
Quad G5
OS X 10.4.11
FCStudio
CalDigit Raid

[Kris Merkel]

What you are seeing is the interlacing in quicktime. What is your final deliverable? Answering that question will let us help point you to a compression codec. HDV is not a codec that you use to deliver a master.

Kris Merkel
Quad G5
OS X 10.4.11
FCStudio
CalDigit Raid

[Kris Merkel]

I know you said that you do not want to keep buying 1TB drives, but, drives are fairly inexpensive and compact. If you bill for the clients drive in your costs. You can back up whole projects and use a drive dock to mount a disk if you ever need to access data that you have moved off your machine.

[Kris Merkel]

This is also the case when you capture HDV to ProRes. Not sure why there is no batch window, but my best guess would be because of timecode issues with transcoding from the mpeg2 codec into an Iframe codec.

Unfortunately, you either have to capture the entire tape or log your shots before hand and capture clips manually then adjust the clips.

I’ll take the inconvenience of capturing the entire tape for the ease of editing with a ProRes workflow.