is the canopus really that easy?

it looks like from all the posts i've read that its a breeze. get yourself a dv encoded quick time, and it works! we're looking to buy one soon so i'd appreciate any tips or hints or info from folks using one. currently on a single proc 867, 9.2.2, 5.3.1, but will be on a dual 1g, 10.2.3, 6.0 in a month or so. thanks! -adam-

Yes, indeed it is that easy! In fact, last night I got out my canon DV ZR45, captured some home movies into VVTR via Firewire, then imported that file into PT 6.0 on OS 10.2.3......played it out the firewire to my ZR45 which in turn passed it on to the Ext. Vid Monitor. Easy as pie! In this case, no extra drivers...just 10.2.3...and PT6. Rob

that's what someone was asking me - can we use a camera or other dv deck we have laying around as a bridge - and it seems like you found that you can! of course its not "supported," which sometimes doesn't matter at all and sometimes causes huge performance hits... thanks rob. -a-

You cannot use VVTR or Imovie since they cannot make files bigger than 2GB, so no movies longer then 9 minutes (PAL). Use FCP or Adobe Premiere 6 for capture. Maybe Imovie in OSX can make longer captures.

Adam, Yes, it is unsupported...but has been flawless so far. (When in session, I always stick to digi's compat. docs) But....Can't see any performance differences with this and Canopus. I am still enjoying the speed increase in 6.0 LE on my dual 533! With DV firewire, this is awesome. One reason I bought the ZR45 (over a year ago) was for its ability to be a firewire bridge. Seems to work well so far! Now if only I could control the compression on DV!! Rob

Hey Adam...how are you? Barden from Sound Dogs here. One thing that you might want to note is the lack of extensive experimenting with DV and pulled down sample rates. If anyone as done any work in this domain, please let us know...but in speaking to a Digi product specialist last week, it seemed that affecting the pull down setting of a PT session would NOT affect the actual frame rate of the video playback referenced against the timeline of your session. Anyone have experiences otherwise? Please let us know. Adam...hope all is well with you and everyone in the shop. Best sB

hey barden - things are good - hello to all your peeps as well! in 5.3.1 HD, there are two seperate pulldown pulldown-menus, one for video, one for audio. i've used them only briefly, since most of our QT we get are 24fps, but in my limited experience, it seems that if you tell PT the right thing (29.97 video, pull down my audio, too) everything seemed a-ok. not sure how this works in pre-HD systems... anyone else's advice / experience from either side of the HD line appreciated! -a-

For Mix systems, I think that you need to use PT 5.1.3 and the menu is there. We also had to get the full version of Quick Time for conversion as we are total picture newbies. One caution is for those who use FW for audio and video. The Canopus is quite possessive of the Mac FW buss (two connectors, but only one buss). We found that the Canopus had to be in a chain with only one or two drives max. Also, no hub worked for us; it actually caused SCSI ?! errors. Took a while to find that one. . . Mike