[Mark Maness]

Well…. Let me say that IMX needs some work in FCP 5.0. At first, I got that stuttering that you mentioned but it was all operator error (OE). We found out that FCP 5.0 has real time support for IMX 50 only. IMX 40 and 30 look like crap in FCP 5.0. So , in order to get rid of all the stuttering, we had to shoot everything in IMX 50. If you have already shot in IMX 40 or 30, you’ll need to use a capture device to capture it at IMX 50 and it will look just great.

Are you using the Flip4Mac plugin? If so, I sometimes still have troubles getting the stutter when importing footage. You HAVE to shoot in IMX 50. There’s absolutely no way around this. Sorry. There’s not much difference in 40 and 50 but FCP 5.0 cannot handle IMX 40.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

Hey Jerry… Its good to know that there is someone out there doing the same type of program as my company. We do hunting and fishing shows and your absolutely right. The Sony HDV is a wonderful compromise to the heavy BetaSP cameras. Myself and my cohort are getting older these days and having a camera on your shoulder for 8 – 12 hours is really tiring and painful.

Let me say that I completely agree with you about your statement concerning machine control and SDI. But we don’t have any problems at all with using firewire for my machine control and I get timecode thru it, too. I’m not sure what capture you are using but I bet its an AJA IO. If so, just add another firewire card to your computer and use it for machine control. Works great. But I have to add that the HVR-M10U deck has a very sluggish machine control, therefore, making logging tapes a little time consuming.

Here’s a tip… Have you ever had problems with your cameras not being able to run when the temps are below 32 degrees? We have but that’s an artifact of a cost effective camera. We had the same problem with our Canon XL1s. We wanted something beefer than BetaSP but digital. So we ended up purchasing the Sony XDCAM series as our main camera. Its a tapeless format using disks and has absolutely no problems with humidity, heat, cold, or extreme conditions such as helicopter shoots or boat running shots while in the boat. You can mess this thing up. Its absolutely awesome. Oh yeah, the most important thing is that it has a pre-record function that can record up to 12 seconds before you press the record button. No more missed shots of wildlife or hooksets on a fishing show. And you can mix HDV with it pretty well. If your looking for an upgrade, give XDCAM a look.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

Well, I may be possible whenever the terabyte processor is available. It way too taxing on the processor of the computer to output HDV thru firewire. And I’m pretty sure that you will this is the case with all of the editing packages that have HDV support.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

Well, the only way you can do this is with a converter box like the Miranda or Convergent Design converters. Otherwise, that’s a sticky situation.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

I can tell you now that its a problem relating to your downgrading of Quicktime from 7.02 to 6.5.2. You’ll need to check with Apple’s website support on how to delete everything to do with Quicktime and then reinstall it.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

I use SATA drives for my everyday operations and have never had a problem yet. BUT, you should know that if you purchase two SATA drives and have them RAIDed together, your reliability wil increase. The more drives, the better the compression. My system is spec for HD so I have a RAID of 8 SATA drives. That is needed for 10-bit uncompressed HD footage. And, two terabytes of SATA is much more cost effective than two terabytes of SCSI. I see where you are going with this but you should look into raiding SATA drives for 10-bit uncompressed. Check drive manufacturers for their standards for video and then purchase based on that.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

Just like Walter said. Your video interlace is backwards. It should all be lower field. Any BetaSP footage is always lower field first. You should select your Easy Setup as whatever you wish before capturing any footage, so that all the settings are the same throughout the entire project. If you do this first, then you footage will match your timelines.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

What Graeme said works just fine. I’ve done that a time or two myself. Now, you can also just export the timeline using Export > Quicktime Movie… then make sure that your Settings are set to Uncompressed 8-bit NTSC 48k. It works great!

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

Well, first of all you are working with DV. Anything better than DV is just wasted time and unnessary. You can’t make the output look any better by outputing it to uncompressed. If your timeline is set to DV, then export using the settings of the timeline and your video should look just fine. The motion and the quality problem you are having, I would have to say that you might have the uncompressed Quicktime settings set to low for the quality you want. Sometimes the default Quicktime settings aren’t right for your needs.

Think of it this way. You need to move a couple of tape machines and you have an SUV to use. That works great, but you choose to use an eighteen wheeler instead. Why? The SUV will work just fine. Now, I’m talking about quality of the video. You can’t make it better but you can make it worse.

If you want to export to uncompressed, then you need to edit in uncompressed. But now, if you edit in uncompressed and want to export to DV, that’s fine but you will be degrading the quality of your video.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[Mark Maness]

Sounds like a neat idea but everybody is correct. When you use the firewire port for the IO LD, you have essentally used up the firewire bus bandwidth. And obvisiously, you wish to record more than just DV if you want an IO LD. If so, then you might want to consider trading your iMac for a G5 tower. That way you can upgrade the system by adding an additional firewire card to control the IO LD only.

And one more thing, if you digitize to you internal drive with what you are wanting to use, you’ll get dropped frames and screen grabs. An internal drive that has you MacOS cannot handle running it and trying to run DBeta or any SDI signal other than low quality DV, such as home movies done with a consumer based camcorder. That’s another reason for the G5. You can add SATA drives for hardly anything and edit DV quality just fine and possibly DBeta recorded using the DVCPRO50 codec. I do this using two SATA drives raided together on a G4 dual 1 gig.

So to answer your question. It would not be wise to try it on an iMac. You need banwidth and expandibility.

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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions