Do NOT remind me about that! Sajnos(sp?) , even though I got staff pricing, it was still very expensive! 26 days after I bought the upgrade to 4... they dropped the price. Good thing my credit card covered a little of the difference. Bastards!
Nem besezlik magyarul (sp?). But dating a magyar girl was more expensive than Shake... but she was better value. 
Do you export straight from FCP or use an intermediate codec? Esp for HDV which is lossy. I experimented with DVC Pro HD, which isn't as lossy. My settings for analysis translation smooth is 3.5 for busy scenes and 2.5 for more static scenes. But it still takes a while to render. And you do lose resolution when you enlarge unless you use a more robust codec.
Well, my Shake purchase was just in time. I wanted to buy it earlier, but the money was missing. However, in my Apple-life it was the first time when I was lucky: I bought one of my Display just before a significant price--drop, or my Final Cut Studio, just before they announced a cross-grade, when with a single DVD Studio Pro was enught to buy the whole stuff for less:-(
Yes, a magyar lány could be very expensive as every women in earth. I have 3. Wife and two beautiful daugthers
Back to job: I did not use the "export to shake" menu. I used the in-out point setting on the timeline and exported that part using the Apple intermediate codec. From Shake I exported back to Apple HDV codec (because the sequence was set to that preset.)
Actually I would like to built a RAID 5 or 0 array to use HD uncompressed or at least DVCPRO-HD codec the enhance the post-production quality. For example you can capture from the tape via analog HD out, and digitize with a decklink or AJA kona card to the computer, and you can use any codec you want. It needs time to figure out which solution is the best. (Except to buy an HDCAM-SR:-))
Render time:
I made the turtle sample with my small macbook pro (2ghz core duo). Finishing the whole procedure took about 3 hours. The clip is only 22 seconds!

I could not play the finished Shake footage continously, I had to render it. You can try it, it is on the same directory, 75 megs.
For my last project I used my new Mac Pro Xeon Quad. It was more than 2,2 times faster...
I tried a couple demo plugin ones for Premiere Pro on the PC but you can see the quality drop when you view the full size 1440/1080 back. Maybe not as bad with DV material. I suppose you could just keyframe the shot frame by frame.
I can post a full resolution HD clip and the stabilized one, if you want to evaluate it.
Edited by Jules (Helioxfilm), 28 September 2006 - 05:17 AM.