Note for John:

Surf over to Ken Stone's site -- he has a good review of the Panasonic T3040 desktop burner. Sounds like there is a definite niche for this unit. e.g., non-authored, computerless DVDs. I'm about ready to spring for one.

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage...dvdburner.html

Thanks, Ken. And Jeff, the trade would be for Alberta and the oil; a bargain given the collapsed state of the Oregon economy (actually, there was a pretty interesting moment last week where a US official used the term "regime change" in reference to Canada and PM Jean Chetrien's failure to support the war). Vancouver is a pretty interesting city for video, both because it is a "Hollywood north" production center, and because there is a lot of independent DV activity. DV is certainly becoming a mainstream research tool in my area of the university: all kinds of people are shooting interviews, etc., and my students are really keen to do more. I think we can expect some significant expansion in our faculty's labs and support and some truly innovative applications soon (I'm working on a chunky grant today, in fact).

Linc

Well, it seems the FireWire ports on my old B&W G3 400 have gone bad. If anyone has had this problem and managed to get them working again, I would like to know how you did it. Anyway, I've been using Final Cut Pro 2.0, but with 4.0 about to be released that will work only on a newer G4, and my need for a DVD burner, it's probably time to upgrade to a new dual processor G4. My question is this. I want to burn videos i've made with my XL1 onto DVD, but will iDVD do a quality job, providing I stay within the 90 minute range, or should I go with Studio Pro? Will iDVD retain the color quality, sharpness and freedom from artifacts during rapid motion most people have come to expect from DVDs? I know if I go over the 90 minute limit, the lower bit rate encoding will introduce some of those problems. I've never had the opportunity to see what iDVD can do. So, if you can provide some feedback I would be most grateful. Thanks.

Don,
Given the 90 min constraint, I think you'll be very pleasently surprised by iDVD, especially the latest version. It does a good job and offers quite a bit of flexibility with respect to menu layouts, etc. Since it's free you'll have a good chance to test it out before deciding if you need DVD Studio Pro, the new version of which comes along this fall.

Thanks so much, Ken, for your encouraging reply. I'm really looking forward to checking out iDVD. Also, your review of the 16x manual lens (XL1 Watchdog), which I'm planning to get, was helpful.

iDVD is free with any new machine. You can try it and if it doesn't meet your expectations, you'll have to upgrade to DVD SP. The good news is the price for DVD SP 2 is half, yup, $500. Not bad for best in class performance.

You should be aware that new machines will either me announced at WWDC in June or MacWorld in July. I know that's a long way off if your machine just died, but I wanted to point that out.

Thanks Jeff. By the way, what is WWDC? I'm not familiar with that acronym. Since I live in the Washington, DC area, it sounds like something that might be nearby. It might be worth the wait if new PowerMacs will make their appearance.

Oh, I forgot to mention. My Mac did not die. Just the FireWire ports. The rest of the machine works fine. Do you know anyone whose FireWire ports went bad but who corrected the problem? I plan on keeping my old G3 anyway. The new G4 (G5?) will be used almost exclusively for video editing and associated tasks.

Don,
WWDC is Apple's World Wide Developers' Conference that they hold each year.

Sorry, its in San Fransico, June 23 to 27. OS 10.3 will be previewed and there are rumors that new Power Macs will be highlighted.

Don--

I added a PCI Firewire card to the B&W G3 I recently sold. It seemed to work fine. Have you tried one?

Vic, didn't your B&W G3 (you sold) originally come with FireWire capability? Or did your ports go bad, requiring you to add a separate PCI FireWire board? Thanks for the feedback.

Yeah, it came with 2 fw ports, but I found that the video transfer rate was giving me some problems. Adding the card cured it, plus it gave me additional ports.

so if i get dvd studio pro, and want to make a dvd with a video running time of 2 hours, will i be obligated to also have a program like toast, sorensen, cleaner, etc?

Jay,

No. Not obligated. They all have their uses, but DVDSP is quite capable of authoring, encoding, and writing directly to a DVD-R. Usually.

Toast is great for making extra copies once DVDSP has built the image, but it's by no means necessary.

Cleaner provides another MPEG2 encoder - one that I do not like for DVDs, your mileage may vary.