Hello,

First of all let me say I've been overwhelmed with the amount of information on this forum. Now let me introduce myself a little. I'm from The Netherlands and have been involved with photography for quite some years now. I want to move more into video so I started looking around for info and I landed here quite fast. I've been lurking for quite some time and found an abundance of info but I thought it would be time to ask some questions myself.

I want to buy a camera mainly for filming snowboarding. A lot of people I know have vx's but I really want to get into hd while it's starting off and more and more people getting hdtv's. It just seems like a good way of being ready for the future. There's a couple things I worry about though.

First of all, the long GOP of HDV.
If you're doing fast cuts in your edit will the NLE be able to completely make up for all the frames next to I-frames? Do you need an intermediate codec for this (like apple's prores 422) or can fcp do this natively?

Then my hardware.
I'm thinking about buying a macbook pro 2.2 ghz just for editing. Will I be able to edit HDV projects with this ok? Is it best to edit native HDV or convert to some codec? And would I need an external HD?

I've read some things about the FX7 having smear (what exactly is this?) when doing fast pans? I suppose it looks like pixels smearing or something. This would be bad with snowboarding cause a lot of time there will be fast movement and probably some unstable camerawork when doing followshots. Would this look very bad?

Lenses
I think I would like to get kind of a fisheye for close followshots. I've been looking at the MX3030 from Raynox. Is this lens ok? Would it have vignetting on the fx7? I would not want that cause it looks very bad.

Mic
I've been looking at the Rode Videomic cause it seems like a good mic to pick up sound even from far away of snowboarders hitting jumps or rails. Does this mic pick up sound, from let's say 150 feet away?

Then hardware again.
If I for example had a 3 minute project in 1080i60 with quite a bit of cuts and some titles on my fcp timeline and wanted to export that in the highest quality imaginable what kind of file size will I be looking at? And how long would it take to render this? Would the best option be h.264 for compressing and burning to dvd and how much render time would this need?

Thanks everybody for their time and I'm sure I'll have lots more questions in the future...

Tom

don't worry about the long GOP issue, this is marketing hysteria. If you're using FCP (sounds like that's your choice) then you won't be editing native files anyway, but even if you were, it doesn't matter.
As far as fast cuts...it doesn't get much faster than Tanner Hall, and it's not an issue of any kind.
your Macbook will be able to edit the footage, but it's a better idea to store content on an external drive.
FX7 (and any GOP-based camcorder) may have smear at high framerates coupled wth pans, but you'll likely not be shooting that fast.

Not familiar with the Raynox lens, so can't offer input.

No mic can pick up quality sound 150 feet away. Ain't gonna happen no way, no how. If you want to record a rail or snow being whacked, then put a remote there.

DVD for playback on a set top DVD player is always MPEG 2

I've noticed some artifacts in fast pans, fast shutter, lots of action, but 99% of the time it's perfect... I can see the flaws in HDV but for what it's worth... being able to record onto Mini-DV at very close to HD quality is pretty amazing...

Awesome!

Douglas, thanks for your reply, you kind of seem like the godfather of HDV, haha...
You were talking about Tanner Hall. Do you mean he is in a movie filmed with an fx7? You're also talking about not editing HDV natively. What would be the best choice of codec/format to edit in then? I don't have a macbook at the moment but a sony notebook which is not capable of editing really, especially HDV. It seems to me the mbookpro would be a solid machine to work with and from everything I hear fcp is supernice to work with. Do you suggest something else that would handle HDV better or be less hard on the bank? The mbook does seem kinda pricy.

I meant the Raynox MX-3062PRO 62mm fisheye lens, I made a mistake there. Do you know something about this lens? It seems like a good lens to cover a lot of ground but if it has vignetting I would hesitate about getting it and opt for a .6 instead or something.

And Joe thank you too. You said you notice artifacts with high shutter speed. Wouldn't you use this if you wanted to create smooth slowmotion? Like overcrank, make 60i into 60p and slow it down then. How would this process go exactly? Wouldn't the artifacts be more visible then if you slowed down the footage?

I love this place already...

I have several bits of Tanner; he lives very close to where I'm at. Clips of him skiiing and skydiving.
I edit HDV on both my VAIO and MacBook (most of the time using Sony Vegas) on various applications. The VAIO manages native HDV just fine. On crazy weekends, I'll edit as many as 20 vids in a day, all stemming from either a V1, A1U, or HC5. I have zero issue with either 'puter using an external 1394 HDD.
Again...I don't know this model Raynox. I only have their 5050 and it's on an A1. Low rez, but it looks reasonably good for most small-format aerial work.