[Michael Gissing]

It is FCP. The same lag happens using the keyboard.

[Michael Gissing]

[Alexander Kallas] “Hey, have you guys forgotten MacDrive?”

No. The issue here isn’t a drive that can’t be read on a PC, but a codec in Quicktime. Not the same issue.

[Michael Gissing]

[Bouke Vahl] “But then, how far does bluetooth reach?”

Ten meters on a good day.

[Michael Gissing]

That sort of pixelation in red is fairly typical of DV. I use Nattress chroma smoothing and sharpen plugin to clean that up. It won’t be perfect but it will help a lot.

Also a bit of 3 WAY CC will help, particulalry reducing the saturation as well as pulling the balance away from red.

[Michael Gissing]

[J. Tad Newberry] “(they would just be for client viewing, and maybe logging) and more “universally” readable on a PC”

H264 is pretty universal and a nice lean but food quality codec for distribution.

[Michael Gissing]

They play on your Mac because the correct codecs come with FCP.

Unless the codecs are on your clients computer they can’t play. From memory, it has been mentioned here at the COW whether the HDV & XDCam codecs for quicktime on a PC is available so a search of this forum should answer your question.

[Michael Gissing]

A trick to make the background seem more real is to defocus the image to give an impression of depth of field.

Defocus can be done optically in camera or later with a gaussian blur applied to the clip

[Michael Gissing]

The Lyric Masked Sharpen is much better than FCP plugin.

[Michael Gissing]

I would expect lack of grunt in your computer to simply make the encode longer. Encoding audio isn’t hard.

mpeg audio isn’t too bad, (in fact I prefer it to AC3). Do you get any settings for the audio compression like variable bit rate, maximum bit rate etc? If so then can you try a higher maximum and choose VBR and see if that helps.

[Michael Gissing]

Nattress has a day for night setting in his film effects plugins.