[Tom Meegan]

I edit and use the internet simultaneously when I’m doing work on the road with my laptop. Works ok, and it is a necessary compromise.

I don’t think this is best practice for a primary system. Hook the primary system up to the internet for your updates, and buy the cheapest computer you can to have email access, etc. Use the old iMac you mention if you can.

Though doing without the separate system will likely cause no issues, I would still not recommend it.

It is unnecessary risk for relatively little reward in my opinion.

Tom

[Tom Meegan]

You’re welcome. I’m glad it helped.

Tom

[Tom Meegan]

Rap,

Your questions imply a lack of experience that may be crippling for this project. If you are serious about moving forward with your project in a professional manner, my suggestion would be to hire a consultant or an editor.

Please don’t take offense to the above

[Tom Meegan]

Rap,

You may want to consider off-lining with DV anamorphic. It is a much more edit friendly format and taxes the CPU much less than HDV. This won’t save you space, but will neither format requires very much. Without system details and the number of hours of footage, it is difficult to make recommendations beyond that.

I spend most of my time in NTSC, and the biggest thing I’ve had to get used to when editing PAL is thinking of 1/3 of a second as about eight frames instead of 10. Video is video

[Tom Meegan]

Set RT to Unlimited RT.

Set Playback Frame Rate and Playback Video Quality to Dynamic.

Close every other app while you are in FCP.

Go to Final Cut Pro > System Settings and then to the Memory and Cache tab. Pull down your application memory to between 85 and 90%. This is a counter-intuitive move, but seems to give the OS a little more play, and makes my systems run a little smoother.

Does that help?

HDV is tough on systems because so many of the frames (14 out of 15 in most cases) are virtual (not I-Frames.) If you are mastering to DVD, you might consider editing in DV anamorphic instead of HDV. Most HDV cameras will do this down-convert as you capture, or you could do the conversion of the captured files in your computer.

Here is a nice article by Larry Jordan

https://www.uemedia.net/CPC/hdvroadshow/articles/printer_13088.shtml

Here is a tutorial on one way to do the conversion

https://www.lafcpug.org/Tutorials/basic_hdvxdv.html

Here is an article from Apple on the same topic

https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302965

Use Google and do some research and you will discover a work flow that will work for you.

Best of luck.

Let us know how it works out for you.

Tom

[Tom Meegan]

Hi Bob,

I haven’t dealt with your issue specifically, but here is the list of files I would look into.

users//library/com.apple.FinalCutPro.plist
users//library/Final Cut Pro User Data/Final Cut Pro 5.0 Prefs.fcset
users//library/Final Cut Pro User Data/Final Cut Pro Obj Cache.fcmch
users//library/Final Cut Pro User Data/Final Cut Pro Prof Cache.fcmch

Preference files to trash when there is app trouble – might be causing the problem;.

root/library/preferences/com.apple.RegFinalCutStudio.plist

I found this one while poking around, and I would bet this is causing the problem for you.

root/library/application support/Final Cut Pro System Support

Houses Custom Setting and Plug-ins. Probably not causing your issue.

I am a bit parnoid, but I would copy these files to a removable drive,

Eject the drive,

Then trash the files individually followed by reboot.

When the system wakes up, see if your installer works.

Good luck.

Tom Meegan

[Tom Meegan]

https://www.amazon.com/Final-Cut-Pro-Avid-Editors/dp/0321166493

[Tom Meegan]

You are going to take a quality hit when you encode the DVD – but you knew that.

If you haven’t done much mpeg-2 encoding and you are picky about quality, it is going to take some experimentation and some reading to get a handle on what works best for your project.

Pick a representative section of your video that is several minutes long and encode the clip in with a variety of settings in Compressor, Bit Vice, Squeeze, or whatever program(s) you decide to test, based on the reading you have done. Burn the results to a disk and watch it on the monitor your cllient will view the video on.

Make critical judgements, and if necessary, try again.

To paraphrase a frequent poster on Apple’s Discussions, “Video encoding is a dark art.”

Good luck.

Tom

[Tom Meegan]

1.) Several points:

A.) Are you viewing on your canvas, or on a NTSC (or PAL) monitor connected through firewire? Your canvas is designed as a content monitor, not a quality control monitor. Firewire is better, but

[Tom Meegan]

I know I’m late to the party here, but here is my take.

In the particular scenario you site, the responsibility for the audio not working could fall to a number of people.

1. Tape operator. If he/she pulled down the playback pots while testing, and did not return them to their detente position.

2. Editor. Did the editor edit the correct sound onto the tape? How much time did anyone on the crew have to test?

3. Engineer in Charge. He/she is responsible to all the equipment and represents the equipment rental company on the job site. If the deck is broken, then he is responsible to fix it or replace it. (This is really a mobile TV position and probably doesn’t apply.)

4. Audio. Did the mixer track the audio when the director said, “Roll tape, Track tape?” The director did say to both roll and track it, right?

5. Director/producer. Was enough time alotted to rehearse? Would the mistake been averted with a proper rehearsal?

6. Technical director. Only if the technical director was directly involved with what I think of as other job functions. Did the TD set up the equipment? Did the TD direct or confirm that an audio – tape facilities check was performed? Did the TD actually roll the tape? Was the TD the one who edited the tape? Was the TD asked to do a technical element rehearsal?

All that is a long way of saying