Any suggestions?
I'm thrilled with fcp5's support of HDV, but it lacks the responsivness of DV. Obviously, given the format, this makes sense.
Is there anything I can do to speed up the process??
I already have RT playback at LOW.

G5 1.6 / 1.25g RAM

Thanks!

Steven

I haven't used FCP 5 yet, but more RAM is never a bad idea. Of course a faster G5 would help a lot too, but probably not the solution you're looking for :-)

Do you have the single processor G5? Those machines benchmark way below the duals, and are more in the range of the G4 duals. Apple has really been optimizing FCP for dual processors and even though the singles are supported they aren't going to perform nearly as well.

Faster computer is about all you can do - although the datarate of HDV is not very large, the framesize is, so even on our Dual 2.0 G5 with 4GB RAM and Xserve RAID, the timeline is more sluggish than any SD format. However compared to 10 bit uncompressed HD it flies along!

Frederic Haubrich was talking about this before and I tried it and worked.
Turn the HDV to DV hardware conversion on the cam or the deck and capture the hole tape with DV or offline codec, do the rough edit, then use the media manager to convert the project to HDV, then batch capture only needed clips with HDV codec. You will be working really fast on the rough editing process.