maybe i'm offering redundant info but here's how mine is set up:

dv -> ( firewire ) -> macintosh
dv -> ( composite ) -> monitor

seems to work for me.

Need Mac hard drive help.
 

Not sure which forum this question goes in so I threw it here for now:

OK - I'm finding that my 240gig machine isn't big enough. What's the deal with adding new internal hard drives? I've been building PCs for a number of years but this is my first Mac and I'm not reallly sure what's what. Any hard drive will do or are there specific Mac drives? Do I need to worry about partitioning and formating? Any help?

Mark what Mac are you using and what OS version? Depending on the Mac you can have 3, 4 or 5 internal drives. Newer macs use IDE/ATA drives. Generally speaking, 7200RPM drives are preferred. The maximum size depends on the OS version your using. Older OS's don't recognize drives larger than 137GB. They can be used, but the OS only sees 137GB. The rest is wasted.

It's a PowerMac dual 1.25 running OSX (not sure what version though)

Mark,

You can find out the version of your OS by clicking on the Apple in the upper left and selecting About this Mac. The window that pops up will display the version.

You can probably use any size drive, including the newer 180Gb and 200Gb size drives. Why are you getting larger drives? Are they for media with FCP or iMovie? Are they for MP3's? If they are for media, I don't partition them and I only put media on the the drive. The drive fragments less and I see fewer problems with dropped frames etc.

If the new drive is going to be the system drive I definitely do partition. I use a small partition (2GB) for OS 9xx, a large partition for OS 10.x.x and it's applications (depending on drive size 30GB to 100GB) and the remainder for MP3's, digital image files, etc.

I'll check my version tonite, I'm at the 'day job' right now.

Yup this will be a FCP media drive. I was hoping to head to CompUSA or something at lunch to pick up a drive. Is this just a plug and play kind of thing?

It is pretty much plug and play, except be sure to have the drive set to "cable select". After that you can boot back up and use the Apple Drive Utility to get the drive ready, which takes all of 5 seconds if you are slow (maybe not that quick, but it SEEMS quick if you are used to building Windows PCs). It doesn't have to comb the entire drive surface like it does when you add a drive to a Windows PC.

In FCP, what would happen if...
 

... I wanted to replace a current 2 second audio file that's looped repeatedly in a sequence with a new audio file of exactly the same duration?

The original covers a couple of minutes total in a sequence by placing the same 2 second file end to end on one audio track repeatedly. I'd like to use a different audio file and have ensured that the duration of the new file is exactly the same as the original. So, if I simply delete the original file and replace it with the new file...and name it exactly the same name as the original...will everything be kosher? Or will that gum up the works?

We have 3 internal 120 gig drives on one dual gig processor G4, plus the 120 gig system drive, and then some 120 gig external firewire drives. You want to get 7200's. I was told there is no need to partition with OSX, but you can if you want to.

I'll send one to you as soon as I get it.

It can be done but you will need to delete the file (or move it) and fire up the program, it will ask you to reconnect the media. Then you can navigate to the new file, and you will probably need to rerender the whole sequence.

p.s. make sure the new file is EXACTLY the same duration as the original.

Or you can just close FCP and overwrite the current file it uses
with a new one with the exact same lenght? FCP should never know
you replaced it with another.

When he opens the FCP project it will reference the OLD render files and display those instead. I have done this before and it seemed like Voodoo to make it dump the old shot, but rerendering the file "forces" FCP to replace the render file so you can see it properly.

Radeon 9000
 

I have a 867QS single G4/1.25 GB ram/10.2.3/FCP3.0.4/Geforce2 MX and was wondering if it is possible for me to replace the Geforce with a Radeon 9000 for the S-video connection etc that it provides.Would i be able to utilize the s-video for an external NTSC tv while using FCP?
Would there be any compatibility issues with my G4 and this current video card?
Thanks for any info.
Matt

The version that has S-Video out is a PCI card so you could use it AND your Gforce (as far as I know the AGP version only has DVI and VGA), you could also buy the less expensive Radeon 8500 instead if you so desire, or for that matter any ATI Radeon PCI that has S-Video out. The problem with using the Primary card for video out is that it mirrors your desktop so the desktop resolution would have to be set at 720x480 60Hz (not very nice looking).