Dad needs help saving his little girls HD Videos - Please Help!

Question

I am new to Mac. I have always been a PC guy. I am pretty good with computers/ learning Imac. I shoot video and pictures all the time and I have been waiting forever for the ability to edit and author in Blue Ray, I embraced Blue Ray and HD early on before the Blue Ray/HD Dvd war had been won. THe only software out there that was ready for what I wanted to do was more like Pro software $1000 + and nothing great Consumer level. I was using Roxio DVDit HD. Doesn't work with APple. I have been shooting HD video on my Sony HDR-HC3 for 3 years. It captures on Mini DV HD tapes(1 hour HD Content). I have about 35 tapes filled that I want to start editing. I have been holding off for the past 2 years due to the emergence of Blue Ray. I do have a Blue Ray Burner on my Sony Vaio but it is s l o w . These are videos of my little girls and I want the footage in the best quality possible. I am learning my way around Final Cut Express but it has been slow. I figured since I have no Blue Ray Drive on the Imac whats the rush. 35 Tapes later and I am starting to have an anxiety attack! Plus I am ready to start watching/editing what I have taped so far. Here is what I want to do. I want to import my tapes to Final Cut Express. Then save the whole tape unedited in digital format so that I may go and access it at any time as I decide how I want to compile the films down the road. Perhaps I will do a Christmas Movie or Birthdays. I don't know how many I will do but I don't want to have to import from 6 or more tapes each time I start a new project. I want to then never use the tape again and save it for back up. The more I research the more confused I get. I want to ultimately burn Blue Ray discs but that is not an issue yet. For now just getting a high quality digital /editable back-up would be great. I started exporting to the Hard Drive and about 4, 1 hour movies, took up my entire computer!! About 361 Gig!!! how is that even possible. Will I really need 20 1 Terabyte hard drives to do this? I used to just use Window Movie Maker to output avi files but that was before the HD Camera. I also don't want to save as 720 resolution to save space. I want a great quality master copy. Ultimately this will be played on Blue Ray on 55" LED Samsung with razor sharp picture. Please help me.

Answer 1

Hi(Bonjour)!
Welcome to the forum.
HDV cannot be captured natively in FCE. It is transcoded to Apple Intermediate Codec. 1 hour of HDV 1080i60 transcoded to AIC take around 49 gig/hour. period.
Native HDV take around same hard drive space than DV. BUT you need Final Cut Pro (bundled with Final Cut Studio) to capture it as HDV.
I'm pretty sure that your can edit one tape and just keep the "crème de la crème" ( http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cr%C3%A8mede_lacr%C3%A8me )of your precious footage.
Save the final edit as a self contained movie and store it on external hard drive for future use. This process is very long but it can solve your problem. Capture one tape per week if you can.
There are other option to distribute HD content than Blu-ray. You can search this forum with +Apple TV, HD monitoring from mac+, keywords. Also see:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2219493&tstart=0
Michel Boissonneault