temporary editing solution

I need a clever solution here...

I'm snowed-in on Cape Cod and thus can't get home to my main FCP rig (FC Studio 2 on a MacPro) to begin a job on schedule tomorrow. I need a way to get started on a rough cut here so I can finish the job when I get back, hopefully midweek.

Here's what I've got to work with:

- About 70 minutes of DVCPROHD footage on a bus-powered FW drive.
- iBook G4 with FCP 4.5
- iMac Dual Core running Snow Leopard, but no FCP for this system and no install disks.

I thought I'd be able to do some work on the iBook, but something in the chain isn't fast enough, as I can monitor and log audio, but can't get anything like smooth playback of the video. The iBook only has 768MB of RAM; is that my main bottleneck?

I thought maybe I could use something like iMovie or even a little app I found called Movie Funnel on the iMac to get a rough-cut going, and then go XML back to FCP, but without FCP installed on the iMac, it won't play the DVCPRO HD footage (I get audio but a white screen).

The job's budget doesn't really have room to rent a bay, even if I could find one around here, or to buy FCE, which I could do, but I can't imagine what else I'd ever use it for, so it seems like a real waste. Does FCE even export an XML?

Any ideas?

First thing I'd try is to move the footage from your bus-powered drive to an internal drive, or at least some of it, if your internal drive can't hold all of it. My first instinct is that this is your weak point.


www.derekmok.com

i agree with Derek. I think most bus powered drives only run at 5400rpm so if you can buy a 7200 rpm external FW drive, you should be able to get a start on the project. The RAM is below the recommended amount (I think it was 1gb back then) but it should still play one layer fine. Your other option is to down convert the footage but the drive upgrade should get you going. I had the same situation with a G4 powerbook. The footage wouldn't play very well off the FW bus powered drive that I was using in the field to dump P2 footage.

If you can't get a drive and need to use the imac, you could download QT Pro and I think that should give you the codec needed to play the files. I am not sure if you can export XML but at least if you had a rough cut it would take long when you get back to re-create the cut by looking at the time codes.

You can open the FCP 4.5 project file in any later versions of FCP. Some things like speed ramps may not translate well. XML from FCP works too. I don't think it works with fce/iMovie.



www.strypesinpost.com

Quick follow-up: I got back home and hooked that bus-powered FW drive up to my Mac Pro and it performed just fine - read/write/multiple layers of video, etc. So the bottleneck was some combination of processor and memory, not the drive itself.

Thanks for everyone's suggestions.

If it was that simple. A faster drive can help reduce the reliance on the RAM and cache to stabilize the bandwidth, especially if the sustained throughput of the drive and interface is not capable of handling the video stream without dropping frames. But this is provided the processors are fast enough to decode the video in real time.



www.strypesinpost.com