[Phil Brockett]

“Base model MacPro is 6 core Xeon. You really should be looking at HP Z400 or Z800 IMHO.”

You are correct. The Z800 is certainly a better workstation and surely has a much, much longer mean-time-between-failure rate than the Pavilion. It also is a better comparison to the MacPro in quality. But really, you can run the same software on the Pavilion (or iMac for that matter) as you can with the MacPro. And the software hasn’t really caught up to the hardware yet and may not for a long time. Refer to 64bit versions from 32bit (which most products came first on the Windows platforms first). Point being is that if the software can’t keep up, what’s the point of bigger, better machines?

A apologize for being a little flip in my prior post. My point is that, from a users perspective, the hardware is more interchangeable than the software (e.g., all the posts about FCP7 being replaced by FCPX and trying to find a software package that would have the shortest learning curve to replace 7, which took them years and years to master).

Assuming most people rely on some type of 3D package as well as compositing software and something to tie everything together (FCP7, X, Avid, etc.), it is the 3D that really requires the computing horsepower. Given a budget of $X, and the requirment for those three key software packages, I’d probably (theoretically) lean toward getting the least expensive hardware that will make those three systems go and also getting less expensive (ie slower) computer(s) to act as a render farm for the 3D thereby no need for the background rendering.

[Phil Brockett]

A replacement for the MacPro may be the HP Pavilion w/ i7 4 core 3.8 GHz; 16 GB memory; 1TB drive; and a Radeon or NVIDIA card. Price around $1800.

[Phil Brockett]

Rumors usually at least some basis in fact. I bet right now there is some DBA canditate pitching a proposed dissertation on this stuff to some marketing professor.

[Phil Brockett]

Jobs was widely quoted saying the layoffs were in “support not engineering.” These terms are pretty vague in the software development field and may have different meanings for different companies. Only Apple (and those laid off) know. Even if they were in “QA/support”, do a google search with “layoff final cut apple” and see what you get. It’s pretty clear looking back that something very serious was happening with Final Cut Pro 7. I don’t know, Final Cut Pro X may indeed be “amazing,” but is it amazing in a good way? I don’t know the answer to that.

I am not a “pro editor” but all the audio issues in FCPX discussed earlier are a non starter. The interlinking between FCPX and Motion make me worry if I were to try to use Motion 5 for a complex composite with large HD files. The list is long and I don’t want to be repetitive.

[Phil Brockett]

I agree. Sometime in 2010, I seem to remember reading about Apple having a mass layoff of the Final Cut “team.” May have read about it here or the Apple rumor site. Anyway, many of the concerns raised back then were either rationalized away or shouted down by other commentators on the site.

A good investigative journalist could easily get to the bottom of this story.

Considering the large investment that many companies had in FCP plug-ins that were effectively EOL’d by Apple as well as the money and time these companies had in the training and investment in Apple products, etc. Apple is taking one big credibility hit on this. They likely factored all of this into their decision to drop Final Cut Pro, which was probably done years ago. It’s depressing and disappointing.

[Phil Brockett]

Audio tracks is a big deal to me. Fairly complicated SFX, music and voice mix are top priority, more so than the quality of video. Being a small producer and an “FCPX fence sitter,” I will likely continue to sit on the fence and watch this forum until I can no longer use FCS 3. (This will also keep me from updating to Lion.) Most likely, an upgrade to a necessary 3D program will force me to make a decision on the editing sw and possibly change the platform away from Apple. The decision will be easy if Apple d/n have workable, mutiple audio tracks by then. I am sure that my situation reflects many of those who use FCS.

Phil Brockett

[Phil Brockett]

I don’t have an answer for your question, but you may want to check on my query at the Panasonic P2 card forum in creative cow about backing up P2 media on the harddrive first then importing it into the editing application.

Or presenting your question there.

Phil Brockett

[Phil Brockett]

No, they were not yours. They were the FCP7 essentials at Lynda.com, which talks about log and transfer “from P2 cards”. I guess they could have meant log and transfer from a copy of the P2 card previously backedup to the harddisk, but I do not think they were very specific or I may have just missed that part of the tutorial.

I saw a thread about the same subject here that was several years old. So this issue must pop up here from time to time. Thanks for being patient. I do plan on watching your tutorial though. I got out my Barry Green book and downloaded the Panasonic P2 management software for the Mac. So I’m ready to do it right this time.

Thanks again.

[Phil Brockett]

Thanks Chris –

Fortunately – I only have one legacy project where the .mov files are the capture scratch. But I am sure there are lots of folks who are not as lucky. The follow on to that project is still on the P2 card in the camera. I like to try to keep things simple. My backup set up is pretty basic – timemachine backup to a 1 TB western digital my book studio.

It may not be a bad idea to get a usb connected hard disk to separately back up the “raw” P2 data.

[Phil Brockett]

How could you not have the camera masters????

Well – Final Cut Pro’s manual as well as several tutorials on FCP by well-respected editors who make those tutorials told me to use the log and transfer procedure of FCP to import the media.

I did go to finder and look at the capture scratch files which are 0077EG.mov, 0085VE.mov, etc. They of course open in quicktime just fine as well as Motion 4. Am I okay on Avid and Premier Pro with these capture scratch files?

I guess the question (rather moot now) is is the “best practice” for Final Cut Pro users to transfer P2 files from the camera using Panasonic’s transfer tool and then transfer them again using FCP’s log and transfer? Seems rather redundant, not to mention the storage space.

I (and many other FCP users) have no experience with Avid or Premier Pro. So these questions may sould sort of basic, but the turtorials on getting P2 media into Avid and Premier Pro seem much much more complex than the log and transfer feature of the discontinued Final Cut Pro.

Thanks.