Ok, this is a nights & weekends job. I am cutting this on a G5 dual 1.8 with 1 gig of ram (another 2gigs asre in the mail) and a burly SATA box. I have about 35 hours of HDV (from the Sony cameras) and about 12 hours of archival / historic b-roll on MiniDV.... as well as hundreds of photos...

My plan was to capture everything via firewire - the HDV stuff into a HDV project, and the DV into a DV project. Edit in HDV add the b-roll, pan/scan on pix, disolves and so on as needed, then when finished media manage to DVCPro100 for color correct and re-render all the FX's...

now the problems...

When I add a MiniDV shot to the HDV timeline I enlarge it and put a photoshop file of curtains on the left & right (sort of gives it a movie theater look). This obviously causes a orange render bar that even with Dynamic RT I get a few frames per sec... not really a workable solution... I can leave out the curtain (even try to talk them out of the idea... does anyone have a better thought - we do not want just black bars....), but even without the curtain it is painful and too slow...

So, what to do? Media Manage all the MiniDV footage to HDV codec (but then it will get changed again to DVCPro100)? Will it still be painfully slow? Will the double codec convert hurt? Recapture the HDV & MiniDV to DVCPro100 right from the start? Just grin and take it?

Thanks...

If you don't want to waste time with renders, then Media Manage everything to DVCPROHD (I assume that's what you mean by DVCPRO100) and cut in that codec.