Upgrading our suites, seriously need some advice…

[Todd Terry]

Just an update…

After just the briefest research… thanks to the recommendations in here from you guys it looks like one of the BlackMagic cards will work nicely. They seem to be able to do all we need, and more.

Another upside, is price. The Matrox MX02 cards we have in these computers were not cheap. If I recall they were in the $4,000-$5,000 neighborhood… times three computers. The BlackMagic cards are a tiny fraction of that. Bonus!

Of course the BM cards only do a fraction of what the Matrox cards can do, too…but they will do all I need them to do. And that’s the important part.

When buying anything new in the electronic realm, that always gives me an opportunity to get on my “Worthless?? But it’s practically new!” soapbox like the cranky old man I’m quickly becoming. It just chaps me a bit that I have what were pretty darn expensive computers that now probably are barely worth carting to the curb after only four years. Ah, electronics. Conversely, when I stopped shooting film a few years ago and got rid of my film cameras, I sold every one of them for more than I originally paid for them.

Hey at least my lenses are still appreciating.

Thanks again to all for the wisdom….

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Mark Suszko]

Meh, put the old computers to work mining bitcoins; everybody’s doin’ it 🙂

[Todd Terry]

Despite Mark’s excellent suggestion, that does beg the question… what do you guys do with old editing systems, or computers in general? How do you dispose of, liquidate, or find new lives for them?

I’m almost embarrassed to admit this, but this is our 21st year and we have never gotten rid of an editing system here. In the studio behind the cyc are bunches of deep shelves (I call them the bunk beds), and there are all the old editing computers… lined up in a sad lifeless row.

I even have the very first system that I started with. It was the size of a small refrigerator, cost four times as much as my first car, and had a whopping 15 gig hard drive that even high-end computer geeks would come in and literally marvel at, slack-jawed and eyes agog at trying to conceive of something so huge… like it was a Cray Supercomputer or something. Times have changed. Actually, I’ve hung on to that computer for forever because it was a DPS Perception-based system which used a really crazy setup (it renders AVIs that actually only contain audio and pointers to the actual video frames which live on a separate RAID in a very proprietary format), and I would need that if we ever needed to restore any projects from “back in the day.” So far, of course, we haven’t.

But it could happen… a couple of weeks ago I got a call from an old client that I literally do not remember. At all. None. I didn’t recognize their name in even the faintest way. They were wanting to update a commercial spot we did for them with a new logo. They sent me a low-res version of what we had produced for them. I do not remember it at all. I have no memory of producing it, directing it, or being on location when it was shot. We looked it up, and it was from almost 10 years ago. So old stuff does come back around again.

This is why our props and costume rooms look like an episode of Hoarders. But with less organization.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Mark Suszko]

We have a local charity called Computer Banc: they accept old computer hardware, clean and fix/restore it, and give it to schools, churches, the poor, and charitable institutions that can’t afford computers… even nursing homes, where the oldsters can use it for web surfing, video conferencing with remote family members, games, etc. What the Computer Banc can’t use, they responsibly recycle. I’m sure you have something similar near you somewhere and can possibly get a tax credit for it.

It has become harder to donate to such outfits as they tend to like and need stuff that’s windows-compatible and relatively new. They can’t do much with an old VAX or your IMSAI from high school. And donating to schools directly is problematic, as their struggling IT departments really want stuff that’s closely compatible and standardized, not a mish-mash of incompatible hardware and operating systems that are obsolete and which their students do not wish to learn on.

There’s always ebay I guess. Somebody may want it for the cost of shipping, for the nostalgia lulz, as the kids say.

[Tom Sefton]

A late weigh-in but another plus 1 for black magic ultrastudio 4K systems. One of the cards they make is even future proofed for 8K work too. Resolve works perfectly with them, but if you do plan on getting into resolve, Aja cards don’t play so nice with it…

The only thing to be careful with is to use the blackmagic output to route your audio as you can run into latency issues when your audio is either run from computer output or a separate usb audio card.

Most of the blackmagic units connect via thunderbolt 2 or 3, or you can get an internal PCIE card – it’s whatever floats your boat and sits best with your editing needs.

It’s also worth looking at some nice jellyfish or qNap raids for your suites which I’m sure Mr Zelin would be able to help with.

Co-owner at Pollen Studio
http://www.pollenstudio.co.uk

[Bill Davis]

Hi Todd,

This is just a generalized comment.

The last 4 years I’ve been associated with first the FCPWorks and then the Lumaforge Team at NAB – and as you might know, they happen to be based around FCP X. (No, this post is NOT about that, at all.) It’s a post about what I’ve seen in the rapidly changing topology of facility video distribution, in general.

I’ve had to make a HUGE change in my thinking about wiring systems. Virtually all of the editing systems for live content creation and manipulation has rapidly evolved AWAY from baseband video running on Coax or XLR sources – and now the lions share of the workflow systems I’ve used for capture, editing, and mastering is all digital signals over IP, now.

It’s been a HUGE perspective change from what I”ve been doing for the past 30 years. Very little of this gear even “speaks” baseband video anymore.

These are typically BlackMagic hardware instillations. But I think AJA is playing a similar game.

This REALLY seems to be increasingly the way all video will be handled in the future. Everything a network mounted computer peripheral – with the key connective skill managing machine IP addresses.

You may already be totally there in your thinking, but the last 4 years of transition have been so stark to me that I thought it was worth a mention.

If I was wiring ANYTHING today. The central thought of mine would be that if I was doing ANYTHING like I would have done it 4 or 5 years ago – that ALONE would cause me to be concerned that I was designing something for the past – and not for the future.

Just my my 2 cents. YMMV.

Good luck on your journey.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Ralph Hajik]

Hi Guys

I know what you mean about old stuff. I gave my old Dell computer to Good Will and let them worry about who gets what and where should it go.

Happy Travels
Ralph Hajik
RJTravelMedia
https://www.RJTravelMedia.com

[Ron Lindeboom]

Todd,

Reading your post makes me want to throw out the suggestion that due to the length of time in which you use and amortize your gear, I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss looking hard at the 4K/HDR gear as that is coming far faster than many may wish to admit. It may not be here today but it is definitely on its way and HDR is going to soon be the measure on whether something is truly broadcast worthy or not. It’s a ways off, for sure, but in the case of a system like yours that is an investment that will be around for quite a while, if it were me, I’d sure think long and hard before I’d let go of HDR and 4K capability. You may not use it right away but I’d sure like the feeling that it’s there when I need it.

A friend here in the COW had a production a couple years ago in which he was trying to get some mileage out of a successful show he had done a while back and I wrote him privately and told him to get it upconverted and uprezzed into 4K as quickly as he could and offer it to Netflix and a few of the 4K rental services on smart TVs because they were needing content. He did it and sure as eggs is eggs, he got new life out of the old show.

Many will argue that it’s going to be a long and fitful transition and they would be right but for the extra cost, I am not sure I’d want to close my door to seizing opportunities that might otherwise arrive.

Just a thought…

Best regards,

Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC

Creativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.

[Bob Zelin]

Bill is completely correct. I have not read thru the entire post and all the threads, but the game has totally changed. Everything is based on IP today. Believe me, for someone who comes from a background of broadcast monitors, scopes, patch bays, routing switchers, etc. and to see all of this “out the window” is hard for me to take, but it’s the reality of what is going on. When you see demos from Adobe and Blackmagic for Resolve and Premiere and After Effects, they are not outputting to Sony and FSI broadcast monitors. I recently did an install for a company with all new iMac Pro’s, and they had to get new thunderbolt 3 Blackmagic products, because they “had to ” feed their antique Sony LMD 20″ 1080i monitors that look like a joke compared to anything you get at WalMart or Best Buy. “But how are we going to see an interlaced signal”. Hey – they paid me. But this is 2018. The world has changed, but some people don’t want to change.

Today a modern facility is your computers (Mac’s or Win PC’s) and a big shared storage system, all interconnected with a network. While you can get out to your monitors with AJA and Blackmagic products, you can feed the 4K signals today via HDMI or Display Port to monitors from HP, Eizo, Dell, as well as consumer LG and Samsung products. WHAT ! you say ? I am in the same boat you are in. I don’t come from that background, but that’s how it goes. The reality of plugging in a thunderbolt to HDMI dock from OWC, Promise, Sonnet or CalDigit to feed an HDMI monitor, instead of dealing with the more established AJA, Blackmagic, Matrox, etc. is a common reality. Scopes ? What’s a scope ! And of course, everything ties back (usually with 10G ethernet, and occationally with fiber channel) back to a shared storage system. That’s a modern post production facility.

Just keep your mind open, and accept the fact that its nothing like the way it used to be.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com