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Small Music Station Set-Up
Hi. I have been asked to advise a small station on their fcp set-up. I wanted to make sure that I am on the right track before I wade in. They currently have one fcp7 on a mac pro, a blackmagic decklink studio 2 card and various hard drives connected via Firewire 800 and USB. Material comes in either from tape or downloaded as xdcam or mpeg files. At the moment mostly SD some anamorphic some not. Mostly the output is music videos and vintage programmes with more complex interstitiary menu items and idents in between. They deliver mpeg files but also need to archive. They currently have one, very busy full-time editor and various freelancers. They also say they have a very low budget.
The issues they are facing are:
1. Chaotic media organisation, multiple drives, drive failures and slow performance.
2. No clear worklfow with regard to sequence set ups etc.
3. Bottlenecks getting material transcoded.1. What would people suggest for a reliable and expandable storage solution? I am going to suggest to them that they sort out some archiving solution but they are going to need to have available at least a couple of months’ worth of material. I don’t yet know how much this is but will find out. Assume quite a lot!
2. At the moment I have found sequences with many different codecs. The majority seem to be 8 bit uncompressed. I was going to suggest Pro-res 422 but I cannot find a blackmagic capture preset for Pro-res 422 (only Pro-res 422 HQ which is not necessary I think). What do people suggest and what is the best way to get everybody to use the right set-up?
3. They have a real bottleneck encoding to mpeg. They have been either sending to compressor or exporting a quicktime (or quicktime reference) and then encoding in compressor. Would they be better off using share? Does this slow down performance in fcp? I don’t know anything about clusters etc. but would it be reasonably easy to buy another mac and have this do the grunt work?
Many thanks in advance to anybody who has any suggestions.
Regards, Matt. -
2 Replies
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I can’t answer about the blackmagic issue, but do what you can to get on a ProRes format…and yea, HQ is overkill, especially for the file sizes that you end up with.
The hard drive situation sounds much like what I stepped into at the job that I have. Failures, multiple drives, bottlenecks, and expandability can all be answered with a RAID of some sort. I’ve gotten our syndication system setup with a Caldigit VR set up as RAID 1. Great support, reliable, and expandable (hot swappable drives), affordable and FAST.
If/when you get a Caldigit VR, you can take care of the organization issues when you transfer files off the old drives onto the new one. You’ll have to deal with reconnecting media to old projects, but that shouldn’t be a big deal.
Bottlenecks from the hard drives will also be eliminated since USB will be removed from the equation (and make sure there’s no media on the system disk!). If the computer indicates more than one internal drive, be sure that one of those drives is not a partition of the system drive that they are storing media on.
Creating a cluster for compressor is easy. From a post earlier this week by Rafael Amador and S. Sheriff:
In the System Preferences, open the QMaster Preferences.
Set “Quickcluster with services”, and in the “Options for selected service”, set “8 instances”.
Then “Start Sharing”.
And when you submit the job in Compressor you have to select the virtual cluster, instead of ‘this computer’ from the drop down list. This should be available once you ‘start sharing’.Last, but not least….ensure they’ve got at least 8GB of RAM installed. It really does make a difference.
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Many thanks!
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