[Martin Curtis]

It’s a workstation for video editing, not a Word/PPT/email/Facebook machine. Keep it as far from the dead hand of the IT department as possible. This way, you can specify a machine to your specs rather than using the company standard, and you can have it assetted for replacement in a schedule you specify. Downside is if it breaks, you may get no help from IT.

The reasons you specified (anti-virus will affect both available CPU and hard drive access times, and unwanted updates may destabilise an otherwise working machine) are valid and you should lead with that, using anecdotes from previous working environments. Make them up if you have to (“well we took the machines off the network and productivity went up 20%”).

[Martin Curtis]

[Stephen Smith] ” I made one back in collage with Flash MX and I’ve never touched flash since.”
Common story that one…
[Stephen Smith] “o run on a windows. It is a simple line of code that you can copy into a text document.”
Kind of. You can autorun an exe file using a single line dropped into a .ini file at the root, which is fine for running a Flash executable, but not much good for trying to launch, say, an HTML-based presentation. There are programs you can buy that will generate the necessary file, codes and executables to do this, but they cost something. Not much, IIRC, but something.

Can’t do autorun on a Mac. Quicktime had an autorun feature yeeeeaaarrrrs ago, but the autorun feature actually enabled one of the few Mac viruses to propagate (link) so the feature was quietly dropped.

My advice to the OP would be to

• find out what systems you are dealing with. no point in packaging something that won’t run
• do it in Flash if they know how (don’t forget to export the Windows exe and the Mac Projector) but pay attention to the running systems, especially for video encoding. Older systems may not cope with h.264 and CD drives may not be fast enough to deliver the bitrate you want
• alternatively, do it in HTML. I’d do this one but, once again, you need to know what machines you’re dealing with. I love a simple tree menu for making navigation easy, but if you only have a few navigation points you can do something even easier.
• package it on those “Business Card” CD-ROMS. Everyone loves those. Just kidding. Hate them.

[Martin Curtis]

Not so fixed after all. The problem has popped up in a project that was also OK. Turning on waveforms didn’t work…

Scrubbing through the timeline seems to have sorted things, but still no idea why.

[Martin Curtis]

Andy’s Region Blur can do this for you.

[Martin Curtis]

Could you use Toast (or similar) to make an exact copy of them? Unless you were planning on fixing the images in FCP, no ripping/recompression is required.

[Martin Curtis]

[Dave LaRonde] ” I’m not so sure AVC Intra is a good choice for keying: isn’t it a long-gop codec?”

It’s all I-frames. I think of it as Panasonic’s ProRes.

[Martin Curtis]

Does anyone here have an opinion on the utility of “archive quality” DVD media to prevent this happening?

[Martin Curtis]

I use

• ⌘4 to select the browser window
• arrow down,
• return (spacebar to begin playing if desired and spacebar again to stop

and this brings a clip into the viewer. Repeat that key sequence to open the next clip in the viewer.

[Martin Curtis]

I ask “Mac, DVD player, PPT on a work-issued Dell laptop (which run XP, an old version of PPT and have a buggy graphics card driver) or do you want us to put it on the intranet for you?”.
[Walter Soyka] “If the deliverable is for PowerPoint, then yes, it is your responsibility to know how to deliver it with no further instruction”
That’s my most common playback method (so I give them WMVs) though my followup question “do you know how to embed a video into a PowerPoint?” is also met with blank stares.

What follows is a further meeting where they bring me their USB stick, I embed the video into their PPT and give them strict instructions not to move files around, only folders.

I recently had a woman in my studio asking about getting software so she could do the video editing (“it looks so easy”) but when I mentioned embedding a video file she threw up her hands and said (smilingly, in a heavy Russian accent, with lots of hand-waving) “Zat’s too much to remember – I’ll leave that for a young person in my office to do”.

[Martin Curtis]

[Josh Thompson] ” I don’t recommend express. And you will not be able to use Express for HD. “
I edit AVCHD footage (as AIC) on my 2009 iMac in Final Cut Express 4 just fine. With everything (OS, app and media) on the same hard drive, I can stack four concurrent streams of HD and not see a stutter. FCP would be a preferable app though.

On the work iMac (similar to home iMac), I run Motion 3, though it bogs down fairly quickly running the more complex HD tutorial footage from Mr Spencer et al.

The main downside of an iMac is it’s like the education version of software: no upgrade path. Still, we can claim the home one as a tax deduction, amortised at 40% p.a. so a new one every three years is OK by me. (please note: for taxation purposes, all references to “me” using the home iMac actually means “my wife”.)