FCE vs FCS2, Quickstream and Blackmagic

Thanks to all for the good advice on using QT as an end product. I'll stick with authoring DVD's, but that brings up a couple of other issues for me that I'd like advice on.

I am using a Canon XH A1, shooting HDV at 24f. I currently have FC Express and iDVD, and the results I get are less than stunning! Without getting too technical at this point, would using FCS2 offer me significantly better quality, or just more features? My educational videos are of simple, outdoor narrative scenes, and I have little need for a lot of DVD extras.

Second, would using a hard drive capture like the Quickstream, which would enable me to transfer mpeg2 files directly to my computer hard drive, rather than using Apple Intermediate, be an advantage in terms of output quality? Or does it all get get compressed the same in the end?

Third, I've heard that using a Blackmagic Intensity card would change the HDV to an I-frame format. Is that true, would it be an improvement, and is there a way I could use it given that my Canon is not an HDMI camera?

Thanks very much,
Michael

Hi,

The differences between FCExpress and FCStudio are really the codecs that FCStudio support.

While FCExpress does only DV and HDV, I believe FCE only has the Apple Intermediate HDV codec but FCStudio has the HDV full codec.

When authoring DVD's , DVD Studio Pro has much more to offer that does iDVD. The MPEG-2 content brought into either (DVDSP or iDVD) is the same as it is your responsibility to encode Quicktime output to MPEG in the best way possible.

I don't know if FCE comes with Compressor, but it is a GUI that controls Quicktime Pro in ways that simply dumping a video file into iDVD or DVD Studio Pro does not allow.

I don't know much about Quickstream, but what ever utility to encode MPEG is the quality you are going to get in the final product. It can not be stressed enough, that the encode operation is key to a good looking DVD picture.

>which would enable me to transfer mpeg2 files directly to my computer hard drive, rather than
>using Apple Intermediate, be an advantage in terms of output quality?

You would not want to be editing mpeg2 files. If you have FCS 2, capture as ProRes and edit, capture as HDV and edit in ProRes, or capture as HDV and render in ProRes, then export that self contained ProRes mov file and encode in Compressor.



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