[Tom Matthies]

If your PowerPoint presentation has lots of effects and builds then Keynote is the way to go. I just finished a corporate training video using Keynote to export the PPT and it worked great. As mentioned above though, some tweaking might be necessary since there are so many versions of PowerPoint floating around and not of the features or transitions in one version will necessarily translate to a different version, especially when going from PC to Mac.
iWorks is pretty cheap as well, about $80 retail. Well worth it.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

I had a similar problem with a G5 dual 2.3 machine. It turned out to a bad stick of RAM. Replaced it with a new one and it’s been stable ever since.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Try this.
On our older Sony DVW-500 series decks it’s menu item #713 – V.Setup Reference Level. If you have a newer deck, it should be a similar menu item. Change the value from 7.5% down to 0% and it should record your video with 0% setup and maintain the super black in your graphic.
Worth a try.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

I’m still running six LaCie drives and will until they fail. I won’t replace them with more LaCies however. I’ve added a G-Raid and a Huge Sysrems raid in the last year. No problems with either.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

I like Final Cut for almost everything else, but I feel that Avid’s color corrector is superior to FCP’s.I especially like the curves feature on the Symphony’s color corrector. The secondary color correction is very handy as well. There are a couple of plug-ins for FCP that will get you pretty close to Avids CC, and worl well but they are fairly expensive.
WOW! I actually caught myself saying something nice about Avids. Mark it on your calendar everyone.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Just a general question about your film. What frame rate was it shot at originally? 24fps, 30 fps or some other variation? And what frame rate was it transferred at? Most importantly, did the telecine frame rate match the camera frame rate? I’m wondering was your film possibly shot at say 24fps while the telecine was running at 30 fps or some variation of these speeds. It could account for the speed difference and the lack of pulldown.
Just a thought.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

I concure. Use Keynote, export as a quicktime movie and import into FCP. When you export, you have the ability od determining how long a given Power Point “slide” will display before changing to the next slide or the next build. Plus Keynote has nifty features for live presentation that Powerpoint lacks. I just used it this past weekend to edit PowerPoint graphics into a live training video and it worked very well.
Pretty slick and pretty cheap too!
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

I’m guessing that you are running a mic level (-60db) into the line level input on the back of the computer. There isn’t enough signal level for the computer to work off of. When you use the Mackie mixer, it’s boosting the level of the mic up to line level which the computer can take in. Try getting a mic pre-amp for your microphone to boost the level up before inputting it to the computer. Also, if the mic requires phantom power, the Mac will not provide it. You will again need a pre-amp that can provide the bias to the mic to power it. Or…just continue running it all thru the Mackie if that works OK.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Sounds like a good plan.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Well…
Right now I’m running 8 LaCie FW drives, an 800GB G-drive and a 2TB Huge SCSI raid on my Quad G5. No problems at all. (knock on wood!) My Aja Io is also attached to the computer’s internal FW400 bus. The FW drives are running off of a pair of SIIG FW800 PCIx cards. With the six extra FW ports, I have a couple of the older FW 400 drives daisy-chained together. I only use them for DV25 projects. Each FW drive is striped to another drive of the same make/model giving me 4 striped pairs of FW drives altogether. It’s a lot to hang on one platform, but so I’ve not had a single drive related problem while running over 4TB of assorted storage. 🙂
Tom