[Tom Matthies]

Also remember to enable “Super White” in the Video Processing tab in the Sequence settings pull down menu. If it’s set to “White” it will clip the highlights as well.

Not my monkeys. Not my circus.

[Tom Matthies]

I just bought a used 2012 MacBook Pro for that very reason. It took a while to find this particular machine, but it was worth it. Just installed an SSD this weekend and loaded it up with 16Gb RAM. I also removed the DVD drive and replaced it with a 1Tb conventional hard drive. I found a Thunderbolt/eSATA adapter to use some of my legacy external RAID drives with the laptop and also found a USB3 to HDMI adapter for a second monitor. In the meantime I keep my old 2009 Mac Pro running Snow Leopard just for FCP7. I haven’t upgraded anything for a while and it’s been rock solid running FCP, Adobe 5.5 Suite and a boatload of utility applications. Not so much as a hic-cup in years. The secret is to get it running well and then DON”T TOUCH IT.

Not my monkeys. Not my circus.

[Tom Matthies]

It depends. What kind of batteries are they?

Not my monkeys. Not my circus.

[Tom Matthies]

We have three units from LiveU and they work pretty well. Our reporters have almost stopped using the Live trucks because of the convenience of the LiveU packs. They’ve been in use for almost a year now and the News people haven’t managed to break them yet. I guess that says something…

Not my monkeys. Not my circus.

[Tom Matthies]

You could probably get away using a key-framed garbage matte to isolate the tie. Do your normal blue-screen key and then use the garbage matte on the layer above to cut in the tie over the keyed composite. Depending on the footage, you could probably get away with a diamond shaped 4-point matte to do the job.

Not my monkeys. Not my circus.

[Tom Matthies]

How far away from your switcher will the cameras be? You can run an HD-SDI signal through a high quality co-ax cable up to 150-200 feet without too much difficulty but more than that and you will likely have problems. It will depend on and vary with the exact equipment used.
Also, looking at the feature sheet on the JVC cameras, I noticed that there was a Network adapter box available to work with the cameras. It looks as if you could run your video over a network cable and recover the HD video from the adapter boxes.
You will also need some sort of an intercom to communicate with the camera people.
I’m not sure what you would need the Video Hub for unless you have a lot more sources of HD video. Its a routing switcher. What were you thinking of using it for?
The ATM switcher will support graphic overlays as well. Have you considered how you will build them?

Lots of moving parts for even a small project like this but it is easier to do than ever before.

Not my monkeys. Not my circus.

[Tom Matthies]

Above you mentioned uploading an image from a BRAND NEW COMPUTER. Is this the computer that you are using to run FCP7? If so, what version of Mac OS are you trying to run FCP7 under? Its known that FCP7 can/will run with issues under the newest OS versions coming from Apple. This could explain the issues you are having.

Not my monkeys. Not my circus.

[Tom Matthies]

Just go through your tape and mark in/out each clip with enough heads on the incoming mark to be a bit more than your preroll. Most of the time you can get away with a 2-3 second preroll. Go through the entire tape logging the clips. After that, go and do a batch capture of the clips on the tape. With a little luck it will be pretty much automatic at this point. When you are finished, you will have a bin with the captured clips in it and timecode that matches the original code on the tape.
If there are timecode breaks throughout the tape, you cannon just capture the entire tape at once, but you can use the Uncontrolled Device preset to capture the entire tape using the Capture Now command, but the resulting timecode on the clip will have no relationship to the timecodes on the original tape. If matching timecode isn’t an issue, this way should still work.

Not my monkeys. Not my circus.

[Tom Matthies]

I think you could also just go into the information columns in the Browser and change the field order to the correct setting before putting it into a timeline.

Not my monkeys. Not my circus.

[Tom Matthies]

It’s been a while since I used the DV format,but if I remember, shooting at 32k sample rate allowed an additional two audio tracks to be recorded along with the normal 2 stereo tracks.

Not my monkeys. Not my circus.