imac as monitor/capture device for hvx

[gabriel]

hi,

I have a question wich may have been answered already. If that is the case then I'm sorry and please tell me where I can find the info.

I will shoot some green screen stuff in the near future with the HVX and I'm thinking about buying an imac 24". Here is my question:

Would it be possible to use the imac as a monitor and at the same time to capture the data with it via the fire wire port of the HVX?

Is there any software that allows me to watch my footage in realtime full screen and capture it simultaniously?? Can FCP do that?

[Rush]

FCP will definitely do that, and let you check your IRE levels to make sure that you at 50IRE with the screen, 70 on your skintones, and that nothing is over 100IRE. The iMac has been discussed as a good capture device. An external 7200RPM FW800 drive is best, since capturing 720p to the onboard HDD may give you choppy performance.

[gabriel]

thank you for the quick answer. but why would capturing to the onboard hdd result in a choppy performance? I thought onboard hdd is always better and faster than external hard drives.

[Rush]

That's generally not the case. The onboard HDD is what is used for the OS and editing software. Then you have a Media Drive, either internal or external HDD used exclusively for capturing video, and not for OS or other duties. During the project, you keep the drive in good health by defragmenting it every few days. After you finish and archive a project you wipe the drive clean or move the media to another drive and wipe the original then move the media back.

So an external FW800 or FW400 drive in this case would be your media drive.

[David Saraceno]

Using an iMac as an editing station is an entirely different story than using it as a capture station for DVCProHD.

I don't recommend because there is only one firewire bus; no way to add a second or create an eSATA drive.

Boot drive captures are not advised because capture and OS are sharing the same drive.

If you are serious about this way of capturing, get a desktop and capture to a dedicated internal drive, or a MacBookPro with a firewire capture to an external eSATA drive.

[gabriel]

ok thank you again for the advice but just that I get this right. You are saying that going straight from the hvx to the imac is not a good idea because you can't connect an external harddrive to it because the firewire bus is already taken by the camera. Therefore you would have to save everything on the hdd the OS is on and that is never a good idea.

I've never had a mac yet so I don't know much about the technical issues of them but couldn' I make a new partition? Wouldn't that solve the problem? If I would have the OS on one partition and capture the data on the other one.
Would that work?

And what is an eSATA drive? sorry if that is a stupid question.

[Barry_Green]

Right, that's what he's saying. Making a "new partition" means you're still using the same physical drive, and that's the problem. Capturing to your system drive is not recommended; you may get away with it for a little while but usually it will lead to dropped frames and errors. Conventional wisdom is that you should always capture to a separate drive from your system drive. And with an iMac, you can't do that with firewire, as the firewire bus is taken up by the camera. So you could go to an external USB drive, but USB performance isn't as good as firewire (especially on Macs, which don't work as well with USB as PCs do). So, in general, the iMac really isn't ideal for what you want to do.

For software, you can look at ScopeBox, or put the iMac into BootCamp mode and run DV Rack 2.0 HD under a WinXP partition.

[gabriel]

again thank you very much for all the info. helps me a lot in making the decision what to buy...

hopefully my last question is: would a mac book pro work? I mean the mac book has also only two fire wire connectors don't they share the same bus too?
And can I cut dvcproHD using fcp on a mac book pro with 2,16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2gb ram and a ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 128 MB SDRAM ?? Would that run smoothly?

[cvanp]

Not to hijack the conversation but my question is similar enough that I don't think it merits its own topic.

Suppose the footage was captured on a P2 card and then transferred from the P2 card to the Hard Drive of an iMac by means of Firewire, and than out of the Hard Drive to an external Drive? Would you still face the problems with the loss of frames and fragmenting? (My guess is no, but better safe than sorry). Heck, would you even need to put it on an external drive (obviously it's useful for organizational purposes, but ignoring that).

Also gabriel the MacBook Pro's firewire connectors are 400 and 800. On the iMac I have (which also has 400 and 800) they are two entirely different types of connections.

Chris

[David Saraceno]

again thank you very much for all the info. helps me a lot in making the decision what to buy...

hopefully my last question is: would a mac book pro work? I mean the mac book has also only two fire wire connectors don't they share the same bus too?
And can I cut dvcproHD using fcp on a mac book pro with 2,16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2gb ram and a ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 128 MB SDRAM ?? Would that run smoothly?

A MBP would work subject to these alternative suggestions:

1. Buy a ExpressCard/34 firewire card. Plug the cam into that. Plug an external FW hard drive into the computer FW port.

2. Buy an ExpressCard/34 eSATA hard drive. Plug an external SATA drive into that, and the cam into the FW drive.

OR, get MCE OptiBay Hard Drive, a second internal HD, for the MPB by going here:

http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/

Capture to it.

[toshihoo]

A MBP would work subject to these alternative suggestions:

1. Buy a ExpressCard/34 firewire card. Plug the cam into that. Plug an external FW hard drive into the computer FW port.

2. Buy an ExpressCard/34 eSATA hard drive. Plug an external SATA drive into that, and the cam into the FW drive.

OR, get MCE OptiBay Hard Drive, a second internal HD, for the MPB by going here:

http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/

Capture to it.

Or just capture from the camera on the FW400 input to a drive connected to the FW800 port.