OT: Not my best argument for proper workstations…

[Shane Ross]

Is that a 5.25″ FLOPPY drive? Actual floppy, not the smaller ones, but the bigger ones?

Not the ones Matthew Broderick used in Wargames…those were 7.25″ or soemthing.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Herb Sevush]

[Shane Ross] “those were 7.25″ or soemthing.”

8″ – the size of a small pizza.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Timothy Auld]

That’s what the CMX 340 used.

Tim

[Steve Connor]

I have to ask Walter, why?

Steve Connor

There’s nothing we can’t argue about on the FCPX COW Forum

[Aindreas Gallagher]

https://images.wikia.com/xorviel/images/d/d0/Orson_Welles_Citizen_Kane_clapping_.gif

https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Michael Phillips]

Needed to get an EDL off it? 🙂

Michael

[Walter Soyka]

[Shane Ross] “Is that a 5.25″ FLOPPY drive? Actual floppy, not the smaller ones, but the bigger ones?”

Yes, sir, it is!

Turns out that the Z800 (and the current Z620/820 lines) still have perfectly functional on-board floppy controllers.

[Steve Connor] “I have to ask Walter, why?”

Personal project. The disks turned up in a family member’s estate, and they’re labeled “Book.” We’re trying to recover the writings from them.

These are old PC-DOS 1.1 disks, with a capacity of 360 KB. It would take two of them to hold a single frame of 1920×1080 ProRes 422.

Sadly, they are not in good condition: there are too many read errors to even mount the filesystems. The white USB stick you see in the photo has Ubuntu Rescue Remix loaded on it. I’m running an open-source forensic recovery tool called ddrescue to attempt to copy as many blocks from the diskette to an image as possible. After that, I’ll browse the disk image with a hex editor and attempt to figure out where the file boundaries are.

I’ve actually gotten a little bit recovered so far, and I’m cautiously optimistic that I will recover more.

[Aindreas Gallagher] “—Orson Wells clapping—“

*bow*

[Michael Phillips] “Needed to get an EDL off it? :)”

Could have been! If that were the case, I’d be dusting this beast off, too:

I haven’t fired that one up in some time now.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Alex Hawkins]

Cool! Is that a 75? We still have one of those for ingesting archive stuff?

And is that an 1800 above it? We used them to record question time from Parliament House every day for over a decade.

Great stuff Walter, what on earth are you doing with them?

BTW I do remember those old 5 1/4 floppy drives. All my Commodore 64 games were on them. Used to take ages for Jumpman and Manic Miner to read.

Alex Hawkins
Canberra, Australia

[Walter Soyka]

[Alex Hawkins] “Cool! Is that a 75? We still have one of those for ingesting archive stuff? And is that an 1800 above it? We used them to record question time from Parliament House every day for over a decade. Great stuff Walter, what on earth are you doing with them?”

Yes, Alex, that’s a 75 and an 1800. I had a client who still preferred Beta SP delivery through 2009. The last time I used the decks was the summer of 2010 to ingest some archival footage. I have slacked somewhat on maintenance since!

That BVW-75 was a tank. It weighs about 75 pounds, has about a zillion different boards and components inside it (very few ICs), and it’s totally field serviceable — novel concept there.

Now the decks just sit. I haven’t gotten rid of them, just in case, but what can you do with 349,920 pixels in 2013?

Actually, if anyone CAN do anything with 349,920 pixels in 2013, let me know — I have 10 or 15 new BetaSP-30 tapes on a shelf waiting for a good home.

[Alex Hawkins] “BTW I do remember those old 5 1/4 floppy drives. All my Commodore 64 games were on them. Used to take ages for Jumpman and Manic Miner to read.”

The C64 implemented all serial communication to the floppy drive in software instead of hardware. It had to be slowed down dramatically compared to the speed of the disk drive itself in order to remain reliable.

As an update to my little project here, data recovery on the first diskette took some time, but it was a big success! Now I’ve got some more to try.

Thanks to all for indulging my ridiculous thread.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Alex Hawkins]

[Walter Soyka] “Thanks to all for indulging my ridiculous thread”

Not ridiculous at all Walter. Nicely warm and nostalgic in fact.

Many Thanks.

Alex Hawkins
Canberra, Australia