[William Carr]

Depending on how far into the frame it is, you could zoom in and recenter your frame.

You may not have this luxury if you cannot afford to lose resolution, but up to 10 percent may not be too bad depending on factors of original shot quality, sharpness, and where the final product will end up.

I’ve even had to zoom up a shot to crop out a mic in handheld shots, setting key frames throughout the duration of the intrusion.

[William Carr]

This may be a silly question but, have you tried changing your playback settings: System Settings/Playback Control/Frame Offset? Depending on how you are monitoring you may need to set it to 0. I think the default is 4.

With the FCP-captured clips, do they play in synch if you open them without FCP, in Quicktime?

Worst-case, since this is DV SD, perhaps it’s not so terrible using iMovie for capture and bringing all the clips into an FCP project from there. Once they’re in FCP’s domain, will it matter to your workflow how you got them there?

[William Carr]

Ooops, of course, sorry.
Not needing a driver to get the clips into an edit felt more “native” than needing one!

[William Carr]

FWIW, I moved from a G5 D2.5 with Kona2 and 8TB SCSI RAID to a MacBookPro 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo with a few G-RAIDs and my overall performance is distinctly better.

My main ingest is P2, AVCHD and occasional HDV so no capture cards necessary. eSATA would be nice, but even with humble firewire 800 RAID-0 I’ve cut a DVCPROHD feature, many shorts, docus, music videos– at both 720 and 1080– with no issues.

Point being you may not have to drop 10K on upgrading, depends on overall needs.
The G5 with all trimmings and SCSI RAID cost north of 30K when I bought it all, the MBPRO system above with comparable RAID capacity about 6K. I kept the 23″ monitor from the old sys (and ought to get an MXO for it).

And moving forward with the toolkit does a lot for the morale… like they say on TV, “priceless.”

[William Carr]

Wow, good luck. AVCHD is not recommended for non-Intel Macs as I’m sure you know.

If you’re using 29.97 footage, it’s maybe possible the latest iMovie could get you ingested and you can import those files, but it sounds like lots of crunch time for your processors.

If you have a capture card there also might be a hardware solution using your camera’s HDMI or component outputs, but that might require an additional throughput transcoder from AJA or somebody.

[William Carr]

Actually there is no FCP plug-in for AVCHD, just for AVC-Intra. AVCHD is supposed to be FCP native, but there are issues, plus some of the cameras flavor their media files a little differently.

[William Carr]

You can set in preferences to open new project or last project opened. Take a look around in there for lots of other goodies too, like duration of imported still images and number of undos…

[William Carr]

I use a different model Panny AVCHD that uses SD cards plus a 15″ MBPro, yet, here is a thought:

Since you upgraded to Quicktime 7.5, maybe your current config has issues. This worked for me:

https://37prime.com/news/?p=99

[William Carr]

I would say by now HD is more like progress, less like a “craze”.
And, isn’t the HV20 an HD camera?

– You can always shoot SD with the HVX200 if you want to, and HD anytime.

– DVCPROHD files will likely edit with less strain on your processors than HDV in Final Cut.

– Once I went tapeless I never looked back.

– If you don’t need to be interlaced, why be?

[William Carr]

All your audio may be rendered, but make sure you highlight all audio tracks and specifically select “Mixdown”, then save. This step can make the difference if you notice synch problems or glitches in your export.