Chopping up raw digital video

[Staffroomer]

Hi,

I've got a whole heap of raw digital video that I want to give to some people to edit. It's on an external harddrive that's formatted for mac. I figure I'm going to have to chop it up so that I can fit little bits onto a bunch of dvds.

I want to keep the video as raw dv.

I'm using Final Cut Pro. How do I chop up the DV using FCP? I can't capture it again because the tapes have been taped over.

I don't know what the PC people are going to be using. So...


Suggestions? Questions..

Thanks very much..

 

[LethalWolfe]

Export small chuck as self contained QT movies. Considering MiniDV is about 13gigs per hour that's gonna be a lot of DVDs if you have a lot of footage. Why don't you just record it back to DV tape and give the DV tape to the other people?

You might want to find out what editors they are using and research the best formats to xfer the material if you decide to hand them files.


Lethal

 

[Staffroomer]

Yeah, I've got a few Gigs.. What a pain... This seemed the easiest way.. Curse the incompatibility of the mac formatted hard drive!!

I wonder if I could put it on my laptop and then throw it on the network... Hmmmmm

 

[RedTomato]

Why not buy a second external HD, and copy onto that then send it off?

A 300GB drive is $100, and 40GB drives can be had for about $20. You don't need the newest or fastest drives - even a 5 year old 40GB drive will still be far faster than a DVD, and can be used again and again.

Is this helpful?

xoxo ..RedTomato..

 

[Espnetboy3]

I do believe in spending the extra money for a good hard drive. Especially if your editing and have media on it. Yes for 190-200 i could have gotten like over 200 gigs on some drive, But for that Price each i bought 2 LaCie D2 7200rpm fw4-800 hard drives. Just seems worth the investment to me .

 

[Staffroomer]

Why not buy a second external HD, and copy onto that then send it off?

A 300GB drive is $100, and 40GB drives can be had for about $20. You don't need the newest or fastest drives - even a 5 year old 40GB drive will still be far faster than a DVD, and can be used again and again.

Is this helpful?

xoxo ..RedTomato..

I don't understand, how exactly would that work? I'd have a harddrive formatted for PCs and I'd plug it into the harddrive for mac and transfer it? How would this transferring take place?

 

[RedTomato]

Buy a firewire enclosure, and put the disk in it.

Format it in FAT32 (this can be done with Disk Utility in OS X (should be in the Utilities folder in Applications)

Stick your footage on and you're off. Plug it into a PC or Mac and both should be able to read it fine.

A couple of gotchas:

- it seems if you have OS X 10.2 (jaguar), it won't see external drives above 128GB.

- Also FAT32 can't store more than 4GB in a single file.

I'm not sure if iMovie / FCP is able to automagically get around this or not - I'll leave that to someone who knows better.

cheers

Tomato

 

[Sdashiki]

to exchange and transfer raw DV you ALWAYS use digital tape, the original format you got it in the first place.

if you cant use DV tape, capture the footage into the proper chunks (there is never anyway a 60min tape cant be cut into some assemblance of "parts") and use a portable hard drive.

burning DVDs is a waste of time and money.

if PC people will be touching your stuff just format the HD as a PC drive.

 

[Staffroomer]

OK, from now on I'm going to set FCP to break them up into 4g bits. Now I wonder if Ulead is compatible with the .mov files or whatever fcp captures the files as

 

[rjphoto]

Edit video on a PC? They can do that now? Wow!

Just Kidding... come on...

I vote for the external Hard drive in a Firewire box.

Everybody needs a Firewire box. Pop an internal HD into that little puppy and you're up and running.

So, how many Gigs are we talking here?

The out put to tape it also a great idea and let the PC guys capture with the setting that suit them best.

It's not that hard. Plug in a DV Cam to the firewire and choose out put to tape. You may need to manually hit record on the camera. So models handle the tape roll for you, some don't.

This also gives you a new back up.

 

[virus1]

well why don't you just cut it up with quicktime pro? it comes with final cut.

 

[Staffroomer]

It really is a pain working with these PCs..

I'll elaborate on the situation:

I'm a teacher and I have a class full of kids editting video for a project. They have to use PCs because that's all that is available. There are so many problems and hinderances it is truly silly.

I'm on a very limited budget. At the moment I'm just getting them to import it from tape (via usb2 not firewire) so they can edit it on Ulead. Ulead isn't that bad btw.

The problem at the moment is that the local drives on the networked pcs are not writable for some inane reason. The tech guy is working on it.

What a joke.