Hello everyone and pardon the new thread if this has been covered. I searched but couldn't quite get my searches to show me info I actually wanted; stuff that was apropos to my own situation. So here goes....

Work has tasked me (because I volunteered and had the most experience with video, albeit DV) with the Sony Z1U tasks. We're shooting run and gun type stuff very soon and I need to whip together a workflow. My question is this...

I want to take each tape after ingestion into Final Cut Express (v4) and quickly create a full tape duplicate in low quality Quicktime so that my boss can review the whole tape and decide what she wants and what she wants to trash. The file would be stuck on our LAN but she doesn't want to sit at the editing station to do it (nor do I want her there either). Thoughts?

I haven't worked with HDV before so you can imagine my surprise an hour ago when I thought I would just render the 1hr long clip to H.264 and our brand new Mac Pro quad Xeon said ~7 hours. OOF!!! That won't work. I understand that I can recapture the video as DV using the in-camera conversion, which would then render considerably quicker after the additional hour of ingest, but is that my only option?

Thanks in advance! Much appreciated.

Sony makes a variety of Direct to DVD burners (starting with the MC3 and now up to the MC10, I think, starting at under $100) that could burn the tape to DVD and downconvert, all in real-time, and the disc could be played anywhere while you do your work.

This way the boss has all the footage after the first hour and you can begin working after the second.

If you shooting in a fixed position you can record to two sources at once. one to tape the other to dvd using as sony direct to dvd recorder.

obviously sd would speed up your current work flow

We use three Z1s and have an MRC1K on each. We use 16Gb Cf cards and a high speed reader. We edit on Liquid which means one more step but getting 12 tapes (or equivalent) into the computer which used to take a day now takes 2.5 hours.