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iMove/iDVD will not allow you to burn HD content, to a blu-ray or otherwise. You'll have to use Toast and its BD plugin, but it's reasonably easy to use. You shouldn't have any trouble with it.

I do have the Toast 9 and the plug in, i think a search will find the instructions.
Thanks for your help.
 
Thanks, where can I find some instructions for SSD installation in Mac Pro?

You will need to get an Icy Dock 2.5" to 3.5" drive adapter... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817994064

Then you just drop your SSD into the adapter and mount that to your drive sled in the MP as if it was a regular hard drive.

If your X-25M doesn't come with the latest firmware (v8820) you can update it by downloading Intel's tool, burning it to a CD and booting to it. The SSD you want to update needs to be in drive bay 2 (don't ask... but it won't update the firmware properly if the drive is in bay 1).

If you buy two drives and want to RAID0 them (recommended :D), you can setup the RAID array when you run the Leopard Install using Disk Utility.

That's it.
 
What kind of camera will you be using, and what format do you intend to work on, AVCHD, XDCAM ,ProRes422, 10bit uncompressed, etc and whether your 720 or 1080. Being you said amateur i would assume ACVHD, which would just use a little more CPU being its a pretty good compression. Not familiar with iMovie and what it works with but some of the higher formats are hogs (10bit uncompressed 1080 6min video ~60 gb:eek:)
You asked about 4 and 8 cores earlier, i wouldn't think iMovie would benefit from multicore processing like FCS2 (compressor) does. Use that money for some good HDD's, with HD you'll need it.
And pick yourself up a BD-RE disc to do some practice burns to make sure it works in your BD players and looks the way you want.
 
You will need to get an Icy Dock 2.5" to 3.5" drive adapter... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817994064

Then you just drop your SSD into the adapter and mount that to your drive sled in the MP as if it was a regular hard drive.

If your X-25M doesn't come with the latest firmware (v8820) you can update it by downloading Intel's tool, burning it to a CD and booting to it. The SSD you want to update needs to be in drive bay 2 (don't ask... but it won't update the firmware properly if the drive is in bay 1).

If you buy two drives and want to RAID0 them (recommended :D), you can setup the RAID array when you run the Leopard Install using Disk Utility.

That's it.

very helpful response, thanks.

What kind of camera will you be using, and what format do you intend to work on, AVCHD, XDCAM ,ProRes422, 10bit uncompressed, etc and whether your 720 or 1080. Being you said amateur i would assume ACVHD, which would just use a little more CPU being its a pretty good compression. Not familiar with iMovie and what it works with but some of the higher formats are hogs (10bit uncompressed 1080 6min video ~60 gb:eek:)
You asked about 4 and 8 cores earlier, i wouldn't think iMovie would benefit from multicore processing like FCS2 (compressor) does. Use that money for some good HDD's, with HD you'll need it.
And pick yourself up a BD-RE disc to do some practice burns to make sure it works in your BD players and looks the way you want.

You did lose me a bit here but i think i'll be using AVCHD format from my 5 yr old HD Sony camcorder which records on tape. If i can import/edit in iMovie and use Toast 9 to burn it I'll be very happy. I'll take your advice on practicing on a RE disk first.
Sam
 
Tape, to the best of my knowledge, is not AVCHD. You would either be using DV or HDV; do you have a model number for your camera?

Also, personally, I think money spent on SSDs would be better spend on a speedy disc drive and Final Cut Express, IMO
 
Honestly speaking from what I have read here a 2.66 Quad will suffice for IMOVIE edits with 6-12 gb RAM and hd 4870 GPU
.
HDV will be most probably what you will be editing.

I would say try Sony Vegas and other suite's out there to see which is easier and better.

For your needs even a MBP or a IMac would suffice but from futureproof(relatively) point of view Mac Pro you should get young one.
Again try before you buy and research the software, etc for your needs first.
Cheers
 
Tape, to the best of my knowledge, is not AVCHD. You would either be using DV or HDV; do you have a model number for your camera?

Also, personally, I think money spent on SSDs would be better spend on a speedy disc drive and Final Cut Express, IMO

Sony HDR-HC1.
 
You mean DV or HDV. Tape formats aren't actually HD like BluRay HD. BluRay is meant at its fullest to be 1920x1080 with progressive frames (you'll see it labelled 24p, 30p, etc). The progressive frames is one of the main features of BluRay quality. To my knowledge DV/HDV will do interlaced frames not progressive. Interlaced is what you see on standard tv and dvds. through some conversion you can change your interlaced footage over to progressive to take advantage of the smooth beauty of BluRay. I don't know iMovie so i don't know if you can do that natively in that. Thats the easy fix.
Now, if you have HDV, your still kind of in luck. If its recording at 1440x1080 (best HDV tape resolution i've come across) you still have 1080 and it'll fix the aspect ratio so it'll fill the 1920x1080 in post processing and you won't have the grainy pixelation that comes from scaling up from lower resolutions. (like watching a 640x480 video full screen on a 1920x1200 resolution monitor)
If you just have DV or your HDV isn't up to 1440x1920, then it will kind of be like watching your dvd's on a bluray machine where its upconverted. It will still look better, but not quite like a good BluRay movie.
Best to try to plug your camera into your tv and you'll see what your going to get.
I know this has been kind of long winded, but i didn't want you to be shocked if you put all this time and money into burning BD discs and the video didn't come out as good as you were hoping. Just know that the limiting factor here is your camera.
Heres a link that goes into DV and HDV formats a little more in depth.

http://library.creativecow.net/articles/kolb_tim/hdv_vs_hd_primer.php

if you put up your camera model number i can tell you better what your going to be looking at. You might not need to put all that money into faster drives *solely* based on editing HD footage, because it might not be full HD you'd be working on now. If you upgrade your camera later that changes.
hope some of this might have helped.
 
just noticed you had put up your camera model.
it is 1440x1080i, so you'll just have to deinterlace and will be good to go. you'll hear people say HDV is not true HD, but only HD when compared to SD, blah blah. You can read about that on your own (search HD vs. HDV)
but for your questions:
That $2500 Mac Pro will be more than enough to handle it (a decent MBP would also handle it fine) You will need some hard drive space, a full 60 minute tape will take about 13 GB of HDD space when you import it if you shoot it in HD and not SD mode. And the most time consuming event will be importing your footage from the tape to computer. But theres no getting around that with tape :(
The creative cow site has lots of knowledge on the video side of the house also, especially when it comes to the editing programs.
 
For HD only you will likely be using programs that can utilize 8 cores. If that is the case a slower octo core may be the faster machine for you or spending more on the machine and working much faster.

I'm wondering if Final Cut Express will use the 8 cores, since I'm in the same position. I will buy a Mac Pro soon, just need to decide which version to get. 1 x 2.93 quad or 2 x 2.66 octo.

The other point that stops me to buy it is the memory, I want to get 12GB of RAM, I know I can get it from OWC but I don't want to be stuck with only 16GB eventually.

I have the money to get the same configuration as driphone. As I will be using it to processing non professional video shots of my family from a Panasonic SD 5 (AVCHD 1080i)

I currently own a MacBookPro 2.6 with 4GB of RAM but I find the encoding very long.

I use the combination of Final Cut Express to Edit the footage, iMovie to add some effects that I can reproduce with FCE and iDVD for the encoding to DVD (dual layer)
 
just noticed you had put up your camera model.
it is 1440x1080i, so you'll just have to deinterlace and will be good to go. you'll hear people say HDV is not true HD, but only HD when compared to SD, blah blah. You can read about that on your own (search HD vs. HDV)
but for your questions:
That $2500 Mac Pro will be more than enough to handle it (a decent MBP would also handle it fine) You will need some hard drive space, a full 60 minute tape will take about 13 GB of HDD space when you import it if you shoot it in HD and not SD mode. And the most time consuming event will be importing your footage from the tape to computer. But theres no getting around that with tape :(
The creative cow site has lots of knowledge on the video side of the house also, especially when it comes to the editing programs.

Wow! I feel like I'm back in college...thank you for such a detailed explanation of the issue. My camera is aging, should I be looking to buy a newer camera? will it be a major upgrade to my Sony?

I now own my first Apple Tower. This machine is a monster:D
 
If your going to upgrade your camcorder, and you go with AVCHD, get more disk space. When iMovie or FCP/FCE ingests AVCHD, it creates very large files in aic/prores depending which you use.
 
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