Re: Pinnacle CineWave and Commotion in conjunction with FCP

Hi Eric,

We exchanged a toot or two on Twitter and I just found your post here. Indeed, focusing on learning FCP now is the thing to do, because the Cinewave integrates pretty seamlessly and you don't need to worry *too* much about the hardware itself, and because the FCP knowledge and skills are what you're going to carry forward to any new hardware that comes along. In short, it always comes down to the craft, not the tools :-)

I'm assuming your system is already integrated -- i.e. the Cinewave hardware is installed and the licensing info is entered in the control panel in System Preferences. If it has been in use as-is, it's probably well-tuned already, but the manual has a useful checklist of things to do in the Mac OS to reduce nuisances that will interfere with FCP performance in general. Beyond that, you can mostly just get to editing. Effects and transitions that show up in bold in FCP should be realtime, and a lot more of them should be bold thanks to the Cinewave than what you'd normally see. The Cinewave installs some of its own as well as accelerating some of the built-ins.

All the acceleration is based on using the Cinewave codec -- basically, using one of the Cinewave Easy Setups for your projects. At this point though, you'll probably hear a lot of advice against using the codec. Since it's a dead product, the codec isn't future-proof, has not been updated in awhile and it might not work in recent versions of QuickTime. Your software should include a copy of the codec to install on other machines so you can view footage you've stored in the Cinewave format, but if it doesn't work in new QT versions, you're basically stuck viewing your media only on your Cinewave system. So that's your big dilemma -- work in the Cinewave codec so that you get acceleration while you're working, but then spend time later converting your work to a safer format for archiving, or, use the Cinewave only as an I/O and monitoring device and keep your footage in a format native to FCP. To do this, you'd customize the settings instead of using an Easy Setup, so you're capturing through the hardware but not using a Cinewave format. That's not a terrible way to go on a dual G5, but on a G4 you really may feel the hurt with no acceleration.

So, you should play around with it and think about what approach will work best for you, your project needs and your horsepower. Good luck!

Regards,
Ches