[Mark Maness]

Well, that’s simple… Personally, I would capture everything at 8 bit Uncompressed and edit that way. If your system can handle the pressure, like the Quad G5 you are ordering, then 10-bit is really the way to go but you’ll need a pretty strong RAID system to handle that. Keep in mind that multicam editing requires some serious processing power to operate.

While you are ordering equipment, I would seriously look at the Kona 3 for your main capture card and get a AJA HD10A for your HDV machine so that you can capture HDV at 10-bit Uncompressed. Why not the Kona LHe? Well, you are doing alot of HD quality material and there will be a time when you need to upconvert footage, of which the Kona LHe does not do. The extra bucks will be well worth the time if that need arises and it will.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

Well, in order for it not to switch… you need to double click your clip into the Viewer window. That’s the way FCP has always run.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

Frank…

I’m not sure if your question was answered, or that you were throughly confused but I”l jump into this… Are you using the PDW-D1 drive? Or are you using the PDW-V1 field deck? If you are using the the D1, you can only hook it up via firewire. You’ll have to digitize as a video deck since the Mac will not understand Sony’s FAM mode, its PC based only. You’ll have to create an Easy Setup that will use your D-1 as a video deck to digitize from. The Flip4Mac plugin only uses netwrok access and I don’t believe you can access that thru firewire.

Bad thing here…. I’m sure that Sony did not tell you that the D-1 is not Mac compatitable.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

I agree with Tom… If you still have your Firestore hooked up to your Mac while you are editing, even though you copied the files to your RAID drives, FCP is probably still referencing the files on the Firestore. Try removing the Firestore and relinking your files to the RAID drives. That will solve your problem.

I had this to happen to me early on with FCP and firewire drives copied to a RAID drive. I forgot to remove the firewire drives and I got a similar error.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

No… it doesn’t enlarge anything. Just use the Distort tab on the Motion tab in your viewer window. Change the Aspect to 0 and adjust your left and right side to 320 and -320 (I think that is the numbers…). At least that will get you in the ballpark, then adjust from there.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

Playback offset is set to 7 frames. Seems to work for me.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

What version of Quicktime do you have? You’ll have to have Quicktime 7.04 at least, and if I’m not mistaken, I don’t think a Powerbook G4 will open HDV anyway.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

Well, Scot.. I can tell you from personal experience since we have been using XDCAM for almost a year now. Its the best format available. Let me ask, which deck are you using? The PDW-1500 or the PDW-V1? With either deck you can use the firewire or an SDI output.

The reason I ask is if you plan on using the Flip4Mac plugin, you really need to use the PDW-1500 because it has gigabit network capabilities. You’ll find out real quick if you use the deck on a standard 100 mbit network, it will take forever to download a disk. And if you plan to use the Flip4Mac plugin, you’ll have to make sure that the shooter makes an individual clip for each take, otherwise, you’ll download a large clip and only need a small portion of it. And here’s the real kicker…. Flip4Mac plugin only imports all clips as having eight channels of audio, even if you are only using two channels. Tends to make editing a nightmare with all the wasted audio tracks.

My favorite way of using XDCAM is to digitize in SDI using the IMX50 codec. Here’s another issue you need to know… All of your shooters need to record at IMX50 on their cameras, because FCP cannot handle anything but IMX50, and only on a G5 system. G4’s do not run IMX without dropped frames.

Personally, I love the flexibility and the ease of use with XDCAM. I can record all of my commercials to a single disc and make BetaSP copies very easily. Each commercial can have bars, tone and a slate for each with individual timecode since you write files, not continous tape. AWESOME!

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

Thanks, Tom… You’re right. I just found the same information just minutes ago myself on the web. I also found out that the new Panasonic HVX-200 supports all of these frame rates, too.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

I believe alot of the problem is that FCP doesn’t really have any support for HDV made by other manufacturers other than Sony. JVC & Canon have different ways of recording HDV on their systems. My best advise for you is to contact Blackmagic about supporting the JVC, otherwise, I’m pretty sure you’ll have to have supplimental software like LumiereHD in order to capture from your JVC.

By the way, you do know that the JVC HDV is 720 only. THe Sony HDV is the only HDV that can capture 1080i.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions