[Mark Maness]

Here’s my two cents worth…..

Hitachti drives are the best and the fastest for the buck. I have two towers raided together and I am able to edit in 10-bit uncompressed HD without any problems was so ever…..

I have heard too many horror stories with the rest of the drive manufacturers. Hitachti drives are made to be the best and fastest.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

I’m with Jerry… I took the level 1 course at NAB in April using the Apple Pro Training Series book (Final Cut Pro HD), and it follows the book very very closely. So I would have to say that any of the Apple Certified books will work nicely. By the way, in the lower right corner, there is an Apple Cerifed logo and below that will tell you what level of certification that book is for. And from my own experience… I thought I knew everything about Final Cut Pro before I went, but I found out that I didn’t know it all and learned lots of great tips and pointers to help my editing.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

Well, all I can say is that I recieved this system in May and have been using since that time. And yes, I do have a Sonnet Tempo-X eSATA 8 card. All eight of my ports are being used. Now…. the drives that ProMax uses are Hitachti drives.

I do know without a fact, that Hitachti drives are the best all around drives for this kind of work. More reliable than any other.

If Sonnet is having problems with Maxtor drives…. its Sonnet’s problem and they need to fix it because I have been using Maxtor drives as my system drives for the last 15 years without any problems what so ever. It’s not like that Maxtor is an off brand drive that nobody has heard of…

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

I have not had any problems yet. I’ve been using a Sonnet Tempo-X card for about 7 months… no problems. Its hooked up to a ProMax 2T Raid Array.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

Which way are you going?

Are you editing in 4×3 or 16×9?

If your in 16×9, then there’s no problem at all. Just drop the widescreen matte filter on your video and choose 1.78 to 1 as your aspect ratio (but do this before you add the filter to your video clips so that you don’t have to do this each and every time).

Now, if you are editing 4×3 and want your 16×9 as full screen video, you’ll have to change some settings in your motion tab to match your video without degrading it. You have to change you distort tab to these numbers:

Upper Left: -480 -240 or -243
Upper Right: 480 -240 or -243
Lower Right: 480 240 or 243
Lower Left: -480 240 or 243
Aspect Ratio: 0

Now that you’ve done this, you can save this motion as a favorite and then you can use it over and over without having to enter this every time.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

I had that same problem with the same setup. The only way I found to write to tape was using the “Master to Tape” command. Yes… I stripped tape too but it still did not work correctly. You can “Master to Tape” just fine.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

I’ve not had any problems at all with capturing DV footage in another codec. I don’t have to set an offset for mine but you just have to try some good ole trial and error to smooth it out on your particular system.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

It works just fine for me. I use it in our edit room as a backup machine and a secondary machine since money is tight around here, too. We do have one PDW-1500 that we use for our record deck but I have two edit stations and two PDW-1500s were a little above our budget this year.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

Whew…. I thought I was a gonner….. And I’m in the middle of a large project.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

His name is Bruce… Opps…. did I say too much? I don’t want to offend the editing gods!

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions