I don't know what to say....
 

except, WOOOOOHOOOOO. After many years of wanting something this good for filming I have finally achieved my goal. I recieved my xl2 last Friday and man is it awesome. I recorded my niece's play (she was Dorothy in the Wiz of Oz) and even with my total unawereness of how to properly run the thing it turned out great. I am going to record my son's hockey game tomorrow (state championships).

Now only one problem remains. I now have realized that I am not even half way there for the money I have to continue to spend to do the things that I am wanting to do.
I need:
Carrying Case (probably backpack style for filming outdoor adventures)
Way better tripod (any ideas?)
Faster computer with fast dvd burner
wireless microphones
wide angle
400mm ef 2.8
ef adapter
rain cover
oh yea, and software, I notice that there is a lot more threads for vegas compared to premiere. Does this mean that vegas is better or premiere is just not as popular because it is a longer learning curve?

I just wanted to brag a little.

Hello Jeff ...

Your laundry list of needed goodies seems to be in the correct order ... just add cash.

Either NLE will serve you well with the nod to pro being premiere pro. I say this due to the effectiveness of the video suite that opens you up to audio editting, dvd crafting and 3d manipulation with particle generation etc. in after effects all in a cross platform software environment. It just does more.

Start with the tripod and go from there... audio is next.

Jimmy.

Jeff, congrats on the camera buy!

I'm with Jimmy that your list is good except that I think you'll want to quickly upgrade from the stock shotgun mike on the XL2 (alas that means more $). Seach this forum for some really great discussions about the pros and cons of wireless mikes before you drop the coin there.

I'm not with Jimmy on NLE selection and as a user of both would recommend Vegas over Premeire. You'll have to learn the interface of either and the Vegas interface is much simpler to learn (if you don't already know PP's). The Vegas interface is also repeated in SoundForge and Acid, which you may soon learn are very cool products also. Download the trial version of each and play, then decide.

What an awesome idea. I am a flash/dreamweaver user and am not afraid of any learning curve. Before I bought the product I downloaded the trial version. That is what I am going to do. Man, I knew there was a reason I was going to love this site and you guys are it.
I think I will do Vegas first then PP. I watched the demo's they had on PP and thought it was amazing. I couldn't find any demo's on Vegas so I guess I will have to demo it myself.

Thanks guys.
Late
jb

Patrick nailed it...
 

Both manufacturers have demo versions for trial purposes ... this will acquint you with your needs in the best way ... immersed in the craft. As for the demos that Adobe has made involving the lusted after Saleen, they sure hit a home run with those...

Best of luck and here's to an early spring ... it was minus 18 here last night...

Jeff;
Don't forget a RONSRAIL for your 400 2.8. You will need it!! You may as well throw in a RONSIGHT to help find the subject. Might just as well have it all!!!

Best;

Ron

Why not go MAC. If you aren't editing any kind of epic iMovie is a great program and extremely easy to use, And it usually comes stock with a lot of macs.

Ron, I will rons rail on my list. It looks pretty cool but for now I am just wanting to get my video to my computer and it is proving distressing.

I have downloaded both vegas and pp and so far what is working best for me is........hold on..........movie maker. What a joke. I am getting mass frame drops from the biggies but not too bad from mm. I suspect that this is due to the fact that my computer is ancient in computer years.

1ghz
512mb ram (max this thing will go)
120gb hd partitioned (putting the clips onto its own partition)
virtual memory 2gb (has its own partition)

vegas told me I was getting like 21fps
vegas and pp both are giving me lots of frame drop numbers when finished.

ive captured in 30p 16:9

I think that I am up a creek without a paddle until I can get some more horsepower. I am going to see what it does on a mac here early this week so I will see how that plays out. It's a dually 2.0 w/4gb of ram using just iMovie.

If there any settings suggestions to help me stop the frame rate drop i would appreciate it. Also note that I have recieved some requests for my nieces play that I recorded so I would like to put them on dvd so they can watch it on their own tv's.

Thanks,
Jeff

Jeff, welcome. I tried both pp and Vegas and went with Vegas. Listen, when you capture your video decrease your video preview viewing screen. Get the preview screen down as small as you can and still see it. This tends to help dropped frames. Well, at least for me it did. Also, if you go with Vegas, I recommend Vegas 5 and DVD 2. Also, get Spot's two excellant training dvd's. Enjoy the fun. Bob

Howdy Jeff,

Sorry to hear you're having post-production woes! I think if you've got a computer old enough to have a MoBo that won't accept more than 512MB of RAM, you're right that your system is probably the problem here -- not the camera and not the NLEs.

Even so, you ought to be able to get your system tuned to capture without frame drops using any of the programs. The actual editing is where the system really gets taxed...capture should go fine unless the system needs a tune up; something just ain't right if you're dropping frames. My almost 3 yr old and well-used 1.7GHz Toshiba laptop with 512MB RAM and a 40GB/4200RPM HDD captures without a hitch. And Canon's DV-PC disk test utility reports read/write speeds double what's needed to capture.

Simple things that might help:
- Make sure HDD has DMA enabled (PIO mode won't cut it).
- Defrag drives and don't let them get even NEAR full. (Very pedestrian advice, I know, but I PROMISE, it matters!)

Another gotcha is that partitioning a single HDD (especially if it is an older one!) won't really help. The disk's write heads still have to translate across the platters to do both OS tasks and write the file; even if there are two or more logical drives, there aren't any more write heads to do the work). Also, I've read (but can't confirm off the cuff, so don't quote me) that WinXP does better with the swap file on the system drive rather than a separate partition. So if you've got one hard disk doing all the work, you might just get a second 7200RPM HDD to use as a capture and temp folders disk. They're cheap nowadays.

Nevertheless, I doubt you'd be happy editing with PPro on a machine with the specs you quoted. Regardless of the platform and software you choose, there's no such thing as too fast a computer, especially when it comes to video editing...I see a new computer in your future! Fly me up there and I'll build you a great PC completely free of labor charges! ;-)

Thanks Bob and Pete. I am going to try both suggestions (Bob's cheaper one first, lol). I actually did a search file on this subject before I posted and did see that PIO come up and went in and changed my settings there. I think I may catch up on my xp tuning tricks also over at pcvipers.com place and refresh myself on those swap file translations. My hard drive is a brand new 7200rpm (that sata 10000rpm sure looks nice though). Thanks for the input. I'll let you know how it goes.
Thanks
jb

Hi Jeff;
Pete and Bob have good suggestions. I might add that PP requires a pretty substantial computer to edit properly. However, to capture, I have used a rather aged and low powered computer without too many problems.

It looks like you may need to send Pete a ticket!

Keep at it . It'll all work out!!

Ron

Hello Pete,
I have a question related to your post reply.
The issue that I do not understand about the transfer of data from my XL2 miniDv tape is that I have to film a 1 hour concert.
I then have to transfer this from the XL2 to DVD. I have Pinnacle for PC and I have a MAC with iMovie.
How can I take 1 hour of tape and Burn a DVD for the customer?

Do I have to transfer this entire miniDv tape to hard disk and if so, how do I estimate how much hard disk space I need?

"Do I have to transfer this entire miniDv tape to hard disk"

Yes, you will have to put the entire tape on your Hard Drive, edit the piece, and then encode it to MPG2 in order to author a DVD.

"how do I estimate how much hard disk space I need?"

DV is a 25mbs format, meaning it records 25 mega bits per second. There are 8 bits in a Byte.

So, DV takes up 3.125 MegaBytes per second (25 divided by 8)


3.125 MB per second equals 187.5 MB per minute, and 11,250MB per hour.

There are 1024 MB in 1GB (gigabyte).

So, a 1 hour DV file will take up roughly 11 GB of hard drive space (11,250 divided by 1024).


I realize you probably didn't need all that detail, I just thought it would be helpful for you to understand how it was calculated.

Luis,

Doesn't it really come closer to 13 GB per hour? Must be AVI wrapper overhead or something.