Switchers first impressions with Mac Pro

[Floris]

I have a powerbook, and became a mac fan. It was a good reason to switch away from Windows XP. Now I have a Mac Pro and I love it. I've upgraded the system with a 320gb and 750gb hdd from seagate, and 4 more GB. (yes, I did not buy it from apple.com obviously). It's a great system, I utterly love it. It's a shame it does not have bluetooth, wifi and isight, but .. I can live without that. I got a small usb dongle for bluetooth and simply use ethernet (it's not like I am moving the mac pro around all the time anyway). And I can always get a usb camera of course. It's a great performing, stunning looking machine. If only Apple would make new 24" cinema displays like the iMac ones. And my system is complete.

 

[Rowlander]

Question.. do most people keep a copy of the uneditied tape on an archive drive in the event the kids 20 years down the road ever want to watch it uncut... Man, with 50 tapes to go at an average 15GB each.. thats what 750GB of storage.. I never realized that a DVD holds only 4.7GB... so a standard video tape is going to have to broken into 3 DVD's... or do I have this wrong?

Yes, that´s exactly right, 20 minutes of DV footage are almost 4.5 gigabytes. This is how I keep my archive: Play the finished movies out to a new tape AND keep the original raw material tapes.

With Premiere, you can also backup your project file, which lets you "batch-capture" the raw material again and restore the project in very little time and effort. Final Cut Studio supports that too, but I´m not sure Final Cut Express lets you batch capture offline-files. Don´t mind, if you don´t know what I´m talking about, it´s a more important feature in the professional sector.

My advice: Backup finished movies once on tape and if they are short or very important to you, backup them also onto DVD. It´s not that expensive to do that and you have double security.
You should "re-backup" your important archive-tapes every 5 to 10 years since they start to lose the stored information. I have archive-tapes that are 5 years old and they just now start to show first signs of decay.
I don´t bother backing up the raw material, I just keep the tapes. If the raw-material is destroyed or lost, that´s hardly as bad as if you lose the actual finished short movie. In most cases, you won´t want to watch the raw-material ever again any way. Just make sure your final edited movies are safe!

People also didn´t keep the 8mm film pieces after editing back in the day.

 

[AdeFowler]

Hi jburrows500

As others have said, embrace OSX and try to forget some of your old habits, even the good ones! It's like anything new - be it a car or a television - things aren't always in the same place or even there anymore, but after a while you adapt.

Have a play with Automator. You can create a workflow (rename selected items for example) then save it as a plug-in that will appear when you right click in the Finder. Automator and the Finder are both greatly improved in Leopard, but are more than capable now.

Finally, there's a great community here willing to help out 24/7, but you may find a lot of your questions answered (iPhoto and FCE for example) at Apple Discussions

Enjoy your mac

 

[Cromulent]

Question.. do most people keep a copy of the uneditied tape on an archive drive in the event the kids 20 years down the road ever want to watch it uncut... Man, with 50 tapes to go at an average 15GB each.. thats what 750GB of storage.. I never realized that a DVD holds only 4.7GB... so a standard video tape is going to have to broken into 3 DVD's... or do I have this wrong?

DV footage (which is what you have at the moment) does take up a large amount of space. When you have edited your video you then use iDVD or DVD Studio Pro to make the DVD menus etc, once that is done the movie is compressed in MPEG-2 format and that enables you to store films that are a lot longer on DVD. So don't worry, if all your tapes are less than 1 hour 30 or so they will fit on one DVD .

Edit : Should note that this is not for storing video just for work you have finished. If you want to archive your footage use miniDV tapes to store it.

 

[jburrows500]

Thanks to all that offered suggestions and comments... I really appreciate your help..