I recently shot a feature film in 1080 at 24p with the Sony F-900, but I'm having a terrible time getting it out of the can. We started out downconverting to SD, but when I saw the footage on an HD TV screen, there were really bad artifacts.

I want to make a DVD where I can use it to secure more funding for color correction and publicity. It looked like an SD-based DVD will not work, so I decided to try to edit in HD. My thought was to convert the 1080p footage into 720p to save some space.

So what I did was have my assist. ed set up my own server-type PC with an external SATA based 5.5 TB drive (of 8 hard drives). We were about to get going when I realized that our capture card, the Xena LH could not cross convert the footage into 720. I was about to upgrade to the Xena 2k, which can cross-convert. Preparing to do so, I found out that our motherboard doesn't have the right PCI-X slots. We have 66Mhz slots, but the capture cards need 133Mhz slots. It seems my assist ed. did not realize this when he was putting things together. I now will need a new motherboard. (Any suggestions here would also be appreciated.)

My biggest questions now are, "Should I still go the 720p route and get the 2k?" ($3,000) or "Should I try to edit in 1080p instead?" The latter means I would not have to get the 2k card, but would need to invest in another 5.5 TB external drive ($4,000). Or "Should I consider a different strategy altogether?"

Thanks for chiming in.