Print To Video assumes that you are recording to a brand new tape that has not been recorded on. It automatically lays down a control track which is a series of pulses that allow the recorder to record and play back the audio and video correctly. If there is a break in the control track the recording will temporarily be distorted when the control track resumes. There is not signal recorded where there is not control track. Edit To Tape assumes that the tape already has a control track recorded on it and attempts to read it when laying down the new video and audio signals. This is useful if you are updating a section of the tape. Edit To Tape does give you the option of recording a new control track (Assemble Edit) or adding to a prerecorded tape (Insert Edit). Hope this simplification helps. Jim

Where will the slideshow be playing? From a DV tape? A dvd? Website? The intended distribution and exhibition forms will determine the best codec(s).

Keep in mind that DVDs will compress your video and images a lot and you will lose a lot of quality. It's important to start with as high-quality an image as possible so I would recommend that you start out with an uncompressed sequence and keep all the images as they are. Another choice is to import the images into the DVDSP project and create a slideshow there. You can add narration and music, control transitions between the images, control the time each is on screen, and control the display of images with menus and scripts. Much more interactivity than a video clip.

Which version of FC Express?

What format of video are the clips using and what are the sequence settings?

First off, turn off frame blending unless you are making clips slow motion. Frame blending slows rendering W-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-Y down. Second, it is probably working very hard since it has to translate the MPEG-4 compression into something editable. I don't have FC Express, but with FC Pro 6 you can convert to the ProRes 422 codec on import which makes editing much faster. Sequence settings in FCPro are found by selecting a sequence and pressing command-zero. I guess FCE doesn't have the same controls since it doesn't really need them. FC Express is designed for people shooting standard DV or HDV. MPEG-4 is neither.

[quote:70956]about the clips... i have visual hub to convert movie clips... but it only converts to the must normal types, like .AVI, WMV, an so on.... ? any of those who is better to work with than mpeg-4???? [/quote] .avi should work, but .mov is best as FC uses QuickTime files natively. [quote: 70956]i tried to play with the resolution a bit today, and it helped with the speed... of course its never nice to make the quality worse (from 100% to 50%), but it helped from 2min, to allmost 30sec, rendering a 40sec clips. [/quote] 50% resolution means 1/4 the number of pixels (1/2 horizontally and 1/2 vertically) so it should be about 4x faster.

I don't use FCE, but in FCPro in the capture settings you can tell it not to capture audio or video by unchecking the appropriate button.

You have to open a sequence to have a timeline and canvas window open. Double-click a sequence in the Browser window to open them. If the windows are not open, go to the Windows menu and make sure that the appropriate windows have a check mark next to them. If they do, look at the bottom of the menu and see if the Timeline and Canvas windows are listed with a sequence open in them. If so, click on one to bring it forward -- it might be hidden by another window or has been minimized.

FCE is a scaled down version of FCP in that it doesn't have the same range of tools. It was designed for students and advanced amateurs who are using DV or HDV only. In terms of editing, it works just the same as FCP only some of the tools in FCP are not available in FCE so the FCE menus are much simpler. The interfaces are pretty much identical (some small differences) so that you can start off in FCE and then easily move into FCP for more capability (and subsequent complexity and learning curve). You can do color correction in FCE with the 2-way color corrector. FCP also has it and adds the more sophisticated 3-way color corrector.