[MacDV] Cinema Display and comments...

[Richard Brown]

I recently did NOT purchase the 23" Cinema Display, in favor of a 22" 
CRT for about $2,700 less money. When I was considering the Cinema 
Display, I ONLY considered the 23" as it has vastly better specs as to 
graphics work. The single most important thing you can do for Final Cut 
is to buy the Contour Shuttle Pro. I just finished, on location, a 26 
minute show on my TiBook and never once missed either of my 22" CRT's. 
Width is not crucial when you have a jog shuttle and instant cut to cut 
jumping. While, yes, you can do it on the keyboard, nothing beats a jog 
shuttle, because once familiarized, you NEVER half to look at the thing. 
Ever been impressed with someone who rocks on a calculator's number pad? 
Same thing with the Contour Shuttle. My edit had 27 hours of source 
footage and, though an industrial, has a entertainment cutting style. I 
used to spend more than $600 an hour to edit this kind of stuff (to get 
it close to FCP) in the linear, analog world. FCP, even on the 
PowerBook, is blazingly fast and creative (the only annoyance - 
occasional renders, but WHO CARES?)

However, it is absolutely crucial that you have an NTSC monitor online 
all the time in FCP editing. It is the ONLY way to grade color if using 
color correction, and the better the monitor, the better off your 
results. I use a Sony Broadcast Monitor normally with SMPTE C Phosphors. 
This allows setting to bars, and doing "standardized" color correction. 
If you look at DVCAM footage from a PD150 on such a monitor and a Beta 
SP or DigiBeta on another monitor of the same ilk, the similarities so 
outweigh the differences that when "going home," they could be 
interchangeable. We have. No one noticed. Brave New World..

For cutting, short of color correction, using even just using the TiBook 
for FCP is fine. Newer generation ADS Pyro Drives (the ones that DON'T 
look like their industrial design comes from 1961) work perfectly for 
DVCAM/DV streaming relative to FCP editing. We had eight video and eight 
audio tracks without a hiccup. Remember to mixdown your audio on complex 
edits, however. Trying to play back more than 8 tracks of 48 KHz is 
demanding on FireWire.

Richard Brown