Step by step editining instructions please!

[coco cardenas]

Hey guys, first off thanks for all the tips!

I am a newbee to the video world...but thank God it looks like i have the equipment to do the editing..

MacBook pro 2.4 w/ 4 gigs ram
external HD

first....how would I go about importing files to work with into FCE? I hear its just wrong to edit from my MBP hard drive...

do i have to copy to my drive and then pass to the HD? Is there a way to import material straight from the cam to the HD, bypassing my internal hard drive?

Any help would be greatly appreciated..

also, what is the best format to film in?

Also, what cables do i need to fullfill these tasks?

[skinnyboy]

Coco,

Those are some pretty basic questions. You may want to get a simple "how to use Final Cut" book - there are plenty of good ones out there and your local bookstores will have them.
If you are asking these questions, you will probably need to ask the next set of questions, and then some more questions. A book will answer them all for you.

But here's your answers:
you can tell FCE in Preferences what drive to use for Scratch Disk. Simply pick your external, and that's where it will capture.

What's the best format to film in? Depends what you want to do. I use Cine Mode and 24p exclusively, but I'm making narrative short films. If you are capturing scenery, for example, you may want a different look. There are lots of threads on this site talking about what formats to use.

Cable - a firewire cable with an A and B end will allow you to capture from the camera to the computer.

Good luck!

[coco cardenas]

i have a firewire 400 and a firewire 800 on my laptop,

my drive is FW800 to FW800

I will have to use then FW400 to import from my cam...what cable would i need?

[skinnyboy]

Coco,

It's a firewire DV cable with the standard 400 plug on one end and a tiny DV plug on the other (that's why I call it A to B, not sure if it's accurate to say that though). Any Circuit City, Best Buy, camera store should have them.

[encendido5]

Hey guys, another newbie here. I have around 6 hours of video recorded and want to put it on my macbook using imovieHD. I only have an 80gb external hard drive though. I imported one of the tapes and it takes up 40 gigs!

All the video is recorded in HD, but I'm just going to put it on a DVD for now, so I probably only need it in SD format. How do I reduce the movie file size? Do I have to reencode it to something else or is there a setting in imovieHD or on the HV20 itself that I can set to make the movie file smaller?

I tried searching the forums but didn't find an answer. Thanks for any help!

[bluegrass]

Wow! I wonder how one tape capture created a 40 gig file? At anyrate, I don't have a Mac but I can tell you file size pretty much equates to quality. If you want a smaller file, you'll have to lower the quality. You can lock the camera in SD and recapture the file but even that might not reduce the file size since they both use the same amount of bytes on the tape. I would think you would have to re render to a lower resolution format to significantly reduce the files size.

Your delima is exactly why you read so many of us talk about picking up and installing external Firewire or USB 250 plus gig drives to our systems. When working in the video world CPU speed, memory, and disk space or "Kings". I have a terabyte online and I'm still constantly deleting video files so I can capture and edit new video.

Anyway, the bottom line is re render, lowering the output resolution and pick up an external add on drive as soon as you can afford to. If a poll was taken among the users here on this forum, I would imagine that very few of us have less than 250 gig of total online storage. The way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised to see some hard drives showing up with the candy and magazines at the grocery checkout. I've already seen some flash drives there.

[encendido5]

Thanks for the tips, bluegrass! I'll have to try and reencode and see how that works out. I might even have to swap out the 200gb HD I have inside my PC into the enclosure to at least get a little more space. I guess you really need a couple of TB's these days...

[pelai]

Hi encendido,

The reason your file is so big is you have not captured it into your harddrive as an HVD-file (it's native format) which would be about 12gigs (same as normal DV-SD) but into another format that is larger. If you use final cut to capture it could be the apple intermediate codec which is great for editing but takes up about 40gigs per DV-tape.
Depending on what you want to do with your footage you could just reencode it to HDV or reimport the footage if 12 gigs is ok with you.
If you are not using final cut then you can always import your footage as HDV with quicktime 7.2.