[MacDV] question about which G4 to buy for digital vido

[Granville Kennedy]

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On Saturday, May 31, 2003, at 15:27 US/Eastern, gail weisman wrote:

> hi folks,
>
> i'm hoping someone can give me some good solid advice reagarding 
> buying a
> new G4 digital video and audio editing and Midi work. i've been a 
> graphic
> designer for about 12 years so i'm familiar with designing for print 
> and web
> and what i need to do that on my Macs, but i'm CLUELESS about the 
> digital
> video thing!
>

So far, Jim has covered pretty much all the bases except for the audio 
and MIDI.  For that I'd suggest a M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI card.  My 
father sent me his since it won't work in his StarMax and I've been 
real pleased with it.  Being able to run my really old Grateful Dead 
cassettes through a 24-bit converter instead of the built-in 16-bit 
audio of my dual 867 has made a world of difference.  I can actually 
run them through the noise reduction in Amadeus and not have it sound 
like there are holes in the music.  It provides analog in and out, 
S/PDIF (digital coax on a RCA plug) and MIDI in and out.  I've got the 
MIDI in plugged into the MIDI out of my Beheringer V-Amp modeler, but 
I'm not sure if I need MIDI software to get it to play through the 
speakers connected to the computer.  The card also supports 5.1 
surround sound on the S/PDIF lines, which I guess can be run into an 
A/V receiver - but the only spare receiver I have can only emulate the 
effect and I'd need to get some more speakers anyway.  Besides, you 
need some pretty expensive software to create anything with 5.1 sound.  
Right now I'm not willing to spend $99 for SoundSoap, especially since 
I can get good results with the 2496 card and the shareware Amadeus - 
which btw was recently upgraded to handle AAC files among other goodies!

For doing documentaries and shorts, you may be able to make do with 
Final Cut Express, but if you can get Final Cut Pro at the education 
discount price, by all means go for that.  FCP may be able to handle 
all of your audio needs as well, but I'll work some more on the MIDI 
stuff, like maybe some night when I can't sleep and I've found one of 
my missing guitar picks...

As for DV cameras, most folks on this list recommend Sony's - but I've 
been real pleased with my Canon Optura 200MC.  It is the cheapest and 
smallest Canon that has the optical image stabilization system, but 
since it has only one CCD it really isn't suited for professional DV 
work.  For that you need a 3-CCD camera.  Generally, optical image 
stabilization is better than digital image stabilization, 3-CCD's will 
give truer color reproduction than 1 CCD, and the better the optics, 
the better the final result.

For the sound you will probably want to use some different microphones. 
  Any built-in mic on the camera is going to pick up the noise of the 
camera working and other extraneous noise as well.  All the stuff I've 
read suggest that folks are much more forgiving about poor camera work, 
but will quickly dismiss anything that has poor sound quality.  At 
least get a shotgun mike that can clamp onto a brace on the camera, 
perhaps a lav mike and something to work with for the voice over stuff 
as well.

Regards,
		Joey Kennedy.

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