Please forgive me, I am not a Mac owner, but am trying to coordinate projects with Mac owners. One in particular at the moment.

Here is what we are trying to do:

1. He owns a Mac with FCE. He owns an FX1.
2. I want him to capture to FCE in the best possible quality
3. I want him to export a file that I can read on my PC
4. I want to do color correction and grading, and send him files back with no loss of quality.

My questions are these:

What is the absolute best format he can use to get data into FCE? I am aware of the AIC codec. Is this as good as it gets for FCE? Is Cineform HDV or Cineform 2k a viable upgrade? I can read Cineform so it's not an issue.

Can he write out a file from FCE that is "lossless" or essentially lossless without purchasing anything. If all he can do is AIC, can he use QTPro to export that file lossless to QT_Uncompressed or QT_PNG?

When I finish my work on the PC can I hand him back a file he can take natively into FCE? Or will he have to do another converstion from a QT format into AIC? I'd prefer not to go through that quality loss twice if I don't have to.


For the purposes of this, disk space is not a problem. I can read Mac drives on my PC, and we have all the disk space required.

What would be your ideal workflow as a Mac/FCE person working with someone on a PC? And please don't say tell him to get a Mac, because that ain't happening! LOL!

Thanks,

-P

I believe the Quicktime Animation codec is lossless, and on the PC side, you could use the Huffman codec for a lossless AVi.

I could be wrong too, so wait for someone else to agree with me. :-)

both will create huge files, and probably slow your computers down!

Well,

Can he open a Huffyuv coded AVI in FCE? If not, that probably won't be the best solution. FCE seems to have a VERY limited list of things it can ingest directly. And none seem lossless.