[Navarro Parker]

YAY! That did the trick, Jeremy! Thank you. After resetting it in Safe Mode, the Firmware updater automatically launched at reboot and asked if I wanted to install the Firmware. All the Firmware in the IO was completely blanked out! Both the Power and Firewire link lights lit up too.

Yeesh, I wonder what happened to completely kill.

[Navarro Parker]

Yup, tried different FW800 cables. And I can’t blast the firmware, because the io isn’t seen on the Firewire bus. The Aja control panel and firmware updater say no devices can be found.

[Navarro Parker]

Yes, the Aja is the only FW800 item on the bus.

[Navarro Parker]

I would suggest always working with uncompressed file form. JPEG is lousy at compressing documents with text.

If you open your PDF in Preview.app and do a “save as…”, you can select any file format Quicktime supports — like PNG and TIFF — and it’ll save your pages as a bitmap that FCP can read.

If you have Illustrator, you can import PDFs and export them as PNGs or TIFF which are both lossless.

[Navarro Parker]

Keep in mind that 1080p is almost like processing 2K film. It’s an incredible amount of pixels compared to our old SD video.

I would suggest not editing in XDCAM, it’s an incredibly lossy format with long MPEG-2 GOP frames requires a lot of processing power. Plus its 4:2:0 color space makes it crummy for chromakey or motion graphics. I would suggest working in a format that supports 4:2:2 and only intraframe compression (like Uncompressed or ProRes).

[Navarro Parker]

Going the DV route is going to gobble up loads of time. One pass to record to DV, another pass to import the footage.

Have you looked into a Griffen iMic? I’ve digitized dozens of cassette tapes using a standard analog line out connection. It’s provides standard 16bit/48KHz conversion. Considering that all cassette tape is pretty crap, going to hi-bit audio 24bit/96KHz is probably overkill.

https://www.griffintechnology.com/products/imic

[Navarro Parker]

The Core 2 Extreme was, at the time (2007), the fastest iMac Apple made. But the Core 2 Duo 3.06 GHz is now the fastest available for the iMac.

Wikipedia is your friend:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_2#Duo.2C_Quad.2C_and_Extreme
This means that the only major difference between the regular Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme is the clock speed and unlocked multiplier, usual advantages of the “Extreme Edition.” The unlocked upward multiplier is of use to enthusiasts as it allows the user to set the clockspeed higher than shipping frequency without modifying the FSB unlike mainstream Core 2 Duo models which are downward unlocked only.

So while the Extreme edition has benefits for overclocker in the PC world, the only benefit for Mac users was increased clock speed over the normal Core 2 Duo.

[Navarro Parker]

Yup, the XDCAM Transfer app is the key. Launch it, Click the Add button and then find your BPAV file. All your clip icons will load up. Select the ones you want and then click “import”. (You can also set in/out points on each clip too)

XDCAM Transfer will put a Quicktime wrapper on your files. Then any Quicktime aware app will be able to play them.

There’s also a setting to send converted files directly to your open Final Cut project.

[Navarro Parker]

Yes, I’m using 6.0.3… the latest version. Sorry, that was a typo in my original post.

[Navarro Parker]

Compressor merely hooks into the Quicktime technology. Plain ol’ Quicktime Player Pro can also convert AVI. But you must have the AVI codec installed on your Mac for either to work (of which there are gajillions)