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TRANSFERRING, VIEWING, TRANSCODING How can I prepare my footage for editing?
First things first: if your computer has a firewire port, buy a firewire CF reader (assuming your camera shoots on CF cards). Firewire-based readers are far faster than their USB counterparts, and this simple purchase will save you a lot of time in offloading the sizable movie files. Once you’ve copied the files over to your external drive, you might discover that your computer can’t play back the files smoothly. These are high-resolution, highly compressed files — and while the compression does a good job of keeping file size down, it also means you need a sizable computer to decode them. While you may be able to playback the native files without any stuttering if you have a recent and/or expensive desktop — or if your camera uses an inferior MotionJPEG codec (as do all Nikon DSLRs to date) — if the files play more smoothly nofilmschool.com/dslr/transferring-viewing-transcoding