[Michael Sacci]

Cocktail is much prettier to look at :-). I bought the family license years ago and so far all the upgrades have been free. And command line tools scare me, I did like to see a UI.

If it ain’t broke, it can easily be fixed.

[Michael Sacci]

High end authoring house and major studios have encoding stations that start at about $25K and go up to $250K. CinemaCraft engine is the basis for many of them and it now available for the Mac and is very reasonable at $800.

[Michael Sacci]

On going maintenance I use 3 apps routinely
For system I use these about every month
Cocktail, this cleans out all the caches and logs (think it is about $30 download)
Diskwarrior, rebuilds finder directory

For FCP
Preference Manger (same people that make FCS Remover) both are must have apps.

For new installs always clone your existing drive, that way there is no risk. Then reform your system drive and update system, than FCS, update that, then install current drivers and other software.

[Michael Sacci]

Yeap, without a loupe of some kind filming outside in daylight is useless. The loupe also makes for a much better shooting position with the camera against your face.

I got the Z-Finder 2.5x and love it, I wear glasses and it works great.

[Michael Sacci]

Either capture card will work fine, I would capture as ProRes SD.

Compressor does a great job with well produced SD from DigiBeta, so you may want to give it a shot. If you movie is long and need lower bitrate you may want to look into other encoders. CinemaCraft is probably one of the best but it is $$, BitVise is really affordable and does a little better at lower bitrates than compressor. Don’t know how good adobe’s encoder is so I cannot comment on that.

DVDSP can produce Professional DVDs.

[Michael Sacci]

if it is happening in every app, could be a bad keyboard, or the mapping of system commands. Just any other command anything work, like command-s?

[Michael Sacci]

Do you know how to capture a DigiBeta tape? DO you have a capture card?

You can produce 1st rate DVDs with a number of software programs but what do you have, what type of system do you have.

You have to give us something to go on.

[Michael Sacci]

Change the sequence to ProRes, if you are rendering to the DV timeline that maybe the issue. You never want graphics to go to DV if you don’t need to and the only reason you need to go to DV is you already DV footage you are working with.

Then you can judge samples but make the DVD in DVDSP but don’t burn a disc just you DVD player to play the VIdeo TS folder. Also DVD is low res 720×480 (or whatever the PAL version of that) so when you watch it on a computer you can be blowing it up a pretty good bit.

[Michael Sacci]

Check out https://www.imagineproducts.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1&products_id=3

[Michael Sacci]

A subclip is not stored anywhere, they are just boundary markers to the original full clip (that is why you can remove them at any time.

You may want to check out https://www.videotoolshed.com/product/13/recut
I believe that will give you the quickest path to separate clips.