Newbie HD question
 

So I am finally switching from SD to HD (I know I'm a little behind in times, but money has been tight) anyway what I want to know is, do I need to do anything to my system to edit HD? I am currently using Mac Pro quad with 4 gigs and FCP 2 will this work? If not what do I need to do to effeciantly edit HD?

Thank You,
Bob.

Do you mean HDV or full 10 bit HD?

The set-up you have will be fine for HDV but full 10 bit HD may need some hardware acceleration such as the aja i/o HD to take the strain.

You can get up to 6 streams of HDV on your current system.

Gary,

Thank You. I will be shooting with the Canon A1 so I guess it would be HDV. i figured my system would handle it, but I just wanted to make sure.


Thank You,
Bob.

No probs at all doing HDV with your set-up.

You don't mention anything about disk drives on your system. Whereas external drives connected via USB2 can work for DV, well sort of, you'll find them unhappy with HDV. Big, fast internal drives connected to the fastest interface you can get will speed your workflow.

A sata drive on the internal bus would be best, I think you can also raid two of them up on the mac pro and then you will have superb speed.

Thank You Tripp and Gary. Right now I am just working off of internal and external drives so what if I just went with an external Raid? Also what would be a recommended internal Sata?

Thank You,
Bob.

You could as long as it was connected to a fast interface like SATA. USB isn't going to do it.

I like Western Digital, Seagate/Maxtor are good. I've heard good things about Samsung, but have no personal experience with their drives.

Thank You Tripp. At the expense of sounding stupid because I am the least tech savvy person on earth, what exactly is a SATA? Is it internal? Is it easily installed?

Thank You,
Bob.

Bob

here you can find what you want about SATA

Serial ATA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stelios

It can be either internal or external, usually with a card. New computers come with it as the standard disk interface with connectors on the motherboard.

It's dead simple to install. If you can put a plug in a wall socket, you can do this. Just make sure that you follow your computer's directions for installing new hardware. Things like unplugging the power from the wall and grounding yourself by touching the computer's power supply case prior to picking up the drive. I'm cautious so I unplug all of the computer's external connections before doing anything like this.