So I ordered this super new dual-processor Mac G5 on which to edit the movie, and it's supposed to be the top of the line computer that an ordinary joe like myself can buy. I bought it refurbished off the Apple site, which may prove out to be my fatal error. It arrives, I'm all happy, I set the thing up, turn it on, and some Extremely Loud Fans come on. You can feel the breeze coming out the back of the machine from several feet away. This is not what is supposed to happen, all my Mac friends assure me. Shortly after, the the thing crashes while trying to play a DVD. OK, granted, it was a bootleg DVD from Malaysia that confounds most every other DVD player it's put into, but this is supposed to be like the greatest computer on earth. Anyway, it's back at the Apple store now, so we haven't started editing the movie yet.
...There are a million things to worry about as we start the post process. Basically a lot of cost-benefit issues, such as whether or not to invest in the hardware to edit uncompressed footage, which will (in theory) make the final movie look better but greatly complicate the editing process in several different ways. It seems clearer to me now that there's no standard way to proceed, especially using this camera. There are hardly any finished movies right now using this camera, but a whole lot of them are in coming out soon. One of the "problems" is that 'cause the images are generally prettier and filmier than regular DV, one is sort of tempted to invest in all this software and hardware hooha that will make it even prettier and "more like film." But there's no reference for what a movie made on this camera is supposed to look like. There are hardly any references for standard DV movies, even, so it's a little hard to know how high you can shoot for. There are all these different tricks that you can employ to get to that "more like film" place, even though, as the purists repeatedly observe, DV will never be film. But there are certainly many many different ways to spend lots and lots of money trying to get it there, and the choice of which way is the one that I'm pondering until I get the new computer back. So I'm now very interested in meeting any people who have not just talked or thought about but actually made a feature length movie on a Powermac using DV footage, especially a movie that involved a) the Panasonic DVX100 in 24p Advanced mode or b) going to a film print that was actually seen in a movie theater.