[Richard Martz]

I understand that Medea really makes some fabulous products and they have an edge over the competition with zone striping. However on a purely price/performance basis, it might make more sense to purchase around 50 percent more storage than you actually need but do that with cheaper SATA drives in a RAID configuration. That way the cost per usable GB is still pretty low and will preserve relatively fast speeds and maintain stability.

What do you think of that Walter?

[Richard Martz]

Thanks. I unplugged it and that seemed to return everything to “KANSAS” (normal editworld). All my stuff works but of course there is no footage that I was capturing. I’ll try to capture in smaller bites now that I know this can happen. Do you think I should purchase more memory or is this a CPU issue? Or maybe it is one of those elusive computer kind of things that you really NEVER figure out – we just find a way to work around it.

I did not pour water on it and that also was a great tip! Thanks again and have a nice day. Rock on dude.

[Richard Martz]

I have to agree that the cineframe 30 mode looks like you shot it in film somewhere betweeen 30 frames and 24 but you get the same stutter look of film shot at 24. Just like film cameras, this is most noticable doing Pans as opposed to up and down camera motion (tilts). I would recommend that you also color correct for a more saturated look or that you make those adjustments in the camera. I have a Sony HVRZ1U and I have chosen to do a bit of both. I’ve adjusted the camera to look a lot more like film saturation levels and stretched the blacks as well for improved contrast. I can always go back later and go tor a high contrast look if I want to do that. Capturing the original footage closer to the look I want saves me some time in post. However if you really want to make the footage look “right” then count on a few hours doing color correction for the best result.

[Richard Martz]

I too am having a problem with my brand new FCP system. I’m new to MACs having worked on PCs most of my working career.

Initially when I tried to open up final cut pro it came on and said that the program could not open because I did nt have a deck connected. So I connected my deck as instructed. The program opened fine with no problem. Then I tried to capture some materail. I was able to view my footage for a short time. I put in an in-point and an out-point and the program just crashed. I shut everything down, rebooted and tried to re-open the program and now Final Cut will not open. I have a 2.7 Dual Ghz processor with 4 gigs of RAM, Dual 23″ cinema displays. I bought the Apple instead of an AVID system because my counterparts said this kind of thing was so rare with Apple products. So Im pretty disappointed right now. When I click on the FCP icon in Finder the program sarts to open and then just quits and disappears from the screen. Since I can’t open the program I can’t get to the help menu. The manual doesn’t say anything about this kind of problem. I’ve re-installed the program and that does not seem to help. Can anyone help me?

[Richard Martz]

I recently attended a seminar on Final Cut Studio. Apple’s Soundtrack Pro was featured. THere is a function in soundtrack pro that allows you to eliminate most of the noise and bring it down to a greatly reduced and manageable level. First you identify a short section of the noise you want to remove. Then you use that element to reduce or even eliminate the noise from the rest of the track. The element that was used in our demo was a short section of an interview shot in a motorboat. You could hardly hear the interviewer when the raw footage was examined. By the time they were finished working with it you could barely hear the noise. Remarkable.

[Richard Martz]

Dear Luke:

Thanks for the info. Are you guys any closer to releasing the Multibridge Extreme. It looks like that card will do everything I need and fly my baby to the moon. You’re probably coming back from Amsterdam or somewhere so I’ll not expect an immediate reply but please catch me when you can and let me know where things stand. Have a great day!

[Richard Martz]

Ditto my experience with Matrox. This goes back several years ago and I finally made the same decision you came to. I’m currently looking at one of the Multibridge products. They won’t be out fro a few weeks but it provides both SD and HD monitoring at the same time and will do some HD/SD downconversion as well.

[Richard Martz]

You do have some options on the G5 and that was what I was wondering about.

[Richard Martz]

Dear Jerry:

You are right. The drawback with projection is the cost of lamps. Still you can get about 600-800 hours on a lamp if you are careful with it. Depending on the projector you have, it could cost $400-500 every six months to lamp that projector. So that is a significant expense over the cost of maintaining a CRT display – unless you consider the cost of an engineer. Still a CRT display is really not the same as a large client Monitor is it?

If I wanted to get away from projection then I would do the next cheapest and best thing. Make a trip to Circuit City or Sams Club and pick out the largest HDTV display (Plasma probably, or smaller LCDs). Many of these sets have virtually every concievable connector on them and some even have SDI inputs. They also produce very good color with very low lag. Unfortunately some of the cheaper ones do have a slight bit of a delay so they may not sync up with your audio monitors very well. One advantage to monitoring this way is that you’ll also have a perfect understanding of what the folks at home are going to see. I guess there is really no perfect solution for this situation. But you can solve everything eventually by throwing gobs of money at the problem. HD Jumbotron anyone?

Rock on dude. What-everrr.

[Richard Martz]

I meant to say “the benefits of RAID 0 with the redundancy of a RAID 5”.