Panasonic DVX100A Problems

Oh, everyone kept telling me not to daisy-chain. Geez. I think I'm way over my head here. With my other camera everything was so much easier and I just got to edit which I love doing. I miss that. 😟..LOL Anyway, the thing about what I'm using to make the DVD. Well I'm using TOAST. Is that bad? I'm just converting the footage into some kind of Quicktime file and then I'm just dragging the QT file into Roxio's Toast and just straight burning it. Is that wrong? My only other choice is iDVD. What is Compressor? I don't think I have that. I shoot the footage using Scene File 5 (standard 24p), I capture using the capture "clip" button, I edit it, and I outputted it into a quicktime movie. I then took the QT file and threw it into the 'video' section of Toast interface and wait for it to finish burning. I then watch it on my standard interlaced television. And I'm baffled at how horrifying the movie looks. I've never seen a 42 second movie look so jumpy in my life. What the heck is going on???

Oh, and by stuttering. I don't mean the normal background stuttering that comes along with shooting 24p and panning. I just have the camera set up in the corner shooting me walking around picking stuff up. And it's like..I don't know. Awful! Just as jittery as could be. Nothing at all like the camera straight to the TV. I mean not even close.......

Oh man. I totally got excited for a minute. But thank you very much for trying to help. Am I the only person on the planet that has a DVX100a and uses final cut express?? Totally feels like it. But anyway, Tom I meant to write back this morning but my internet started to fail on me. But yeah, the QuickTime files look amazing. All of them look just like they are supposed too. They look amazing and the motion is smooth and it just looks great. Just what I was told the camera was supposed to do. But when I burn the DVD and watch it it looks, like I said before, just awful. It's honestly driving me crazy. I don't know how much more I can take of this before I blow my lid. I really think its an output setting that can fix it. I think anyway. I really don't know...What do you think Tom?

Absolutely Tom. Definately. Just 2 things I gotta ask. How do I export just a few seconds of the footage to a self-contained QT file? Do I open a 'new' FCE project and import a few seconds of footage into it and do it that way? And do you want the footage with the audio out of sync so you can see that too? Or the new stuff?

And the second thing, is that I don't know how to use .mac or iDisk. If you could give me a quick step-by-step on how to get it to you, that would be great. I'd be honored to send it to you.......

Oh,duh, I knew how to do that. I dont know why I asked that. But, I don't have iDisk. I don't have the Go menu or anything like that. Is there another way? Maybe I should get iDisk. I didn't know you could do cool stuff like that.

What should I do???????

Hey Tom. I'm soo sorry. I got really sick for a couple weeks there AND I couldn't get onto the internet. My airport is broken or something. I'm on a friends internet connection right now. Anyway, I'm soo sorry. You put in all this effort to help me and like a jerk I didn't get back to you ASAP like I should have.

Anyway, I found out about the iDisk thing and the 'Go' in the Finder. I never noticed that was there. I'm new to Apple as well. Everything is new to me. Does that make it so we can share things with each other? Like I'm not exactly sure what .mac or iDisk is. I wish I did, it seems people always have good things to say about it. But I have no idea what it is...But anyway, that's off subject. O.K. while I was sick and I couldn't get to you to talk, I ran out of time and sent my DVX100A back and got a brand new one. I think part of the problem, especially with the capturing (my first problem with it) was internal. Because I got the new camera AND I bought a cheap panasonic mini-dv camera to use as a deck and I'm able to use capture "now" again. Which is such a relief to me. I hated to think I was killing my amazingly expensive camera with all that rewinding and fastforwarding and stopping on a dime and what-not.......And also, after getting the new camera I started using Apple's intermediate codec to compress my 24p movies. Then when I would drop it in Toast's window and burn it to DVD, FINALLY it looked like it looked when I hooked the camera directly up to the TV. I also tried the H.264 codec, which by the way, takes about twice as much time to compress. It looks just as good. But I still feel like I'm using the wrong compressing stuff for 24p. I feel like it still isn't doing what it should be doing. Do you know anything about those compressing choices??? I don't know which one to pick when turning my FCEHD projects into QT files to burn to DVDs. And when I do pick one. Each of them have a bunch of choices or options. And I don't know which ones to pick. Like frame reordering and quality and audio stuff. I don't know anything about that stuff and I still don't know which one to pick and what settings to use. Got any ideas???????

Anyway, Tom, I just wanted to thank you so much. I was thinking about it while I was sick. I felt so bad to leave you hanging like that when you above EVERYBODY else took the time to help me. When nobody else would. Everyone else just gave me one word answers that did nothing. Seriously, I really appreciate it. You've helped me soo much, you have no idea. I wish there was something I could do to repay you or help you in some way. So thank you.......

-Rob (Your biggest fan)