[MacDV] HD file format advice

[CM McDonald]

Hi guys,

Having at long last been able to invest in some new gear, I now have  
a Canon XH-A1 and various accessories including a FireStore FS-4 Pro.  
For now I'm sticking to SD DV at 4:3 as that's what is appropriate  
for the final product people seem to want at the moment. I hope I am  
"future-proofing" myself by being able to do 16:9 SD and HD as well.

I am not quite sure what's best to do when HD acquisition is  
required. The Firestore will change file formats captured on the fly,  
but when I tried telling it to save to Quicktime HD (Apple  
intermediate file format) I couldn't read it properly and it gave me  
a 2 minute 300+ MB black screen movie. The audio was OK.

I believe the camera captures to MPEG 1 when recording HD on tape (I  
had thought that format was dead!)

I will be moving over to FCE 4 on an Intel iMac very soon, but for now:

PowerBook G4 1.67 with 1.5 GB RAM running 1OS 0.4.11
Quicktime pro with MPEG-2 plug in
iMovie 2,3,4 HD5 and 6 (really!) but not iMovie 08

Any comments?

Colin McDonald