[Aaron Neitz]

Ok. duh… don’t know what happened, but it was set to 1 instance for Compressor jobs and 8 for Shake. Putting it back to 4 instance for Compressor and it started working again.

[Aaron Neitz]

DVHD 720p/23.98 to a custom h.264 setting. Basically the Web Download LAN setting, but I had to force the output pixels because it kept making a square frame instead of the 16:9

[Aaron Neitz]

Primary format = 720p, 23.98
Secondary = 1080psf, 23.98
FCP video output settings = 720p, 23.98

That should do it. I had a similar project not too long ago. Don’t have a deck to test it with right now. But it worked fine.

[Aaron Neitz]

Huh. When this computer was brand new, it would take of compressing like a banshee.

I’ll give it a try. The batch I ran last night went from 6pm to 4:15am without clustering.

[Aaron Neitz]

Welcome to the fold. I would suggest keeping an Avid around until you’re REALLY comfortable with Final Cut – especially for those jobs where time is critical and clients are sitting in the room.

Some quick suggestions:

1) get either a bigger Wacom, or a “widescreen” wacom. Two 23″ screens or a 30″ is a lot of real estate

2) get a Kona 3 pci card. It’s pretty much the premier warmachine. It can do everything, all the time, and does it well without any complaints. Track proven. the IO-HD is still a little new…

3) drives. If you’re not doing Uncompressed HD – then buy some G-Raid2 firewire drives. They’ll do uncompressed SD no problem, and ProRes will serve most people HD needs for years to come. A SAN solution is a whole different email. Search around the forums first.

4) Get the 10UK. They’re the newer model. Can’t go wrong with the Panny’s. They do a great job with standard def signals too

[Aaron Neitz]

I imagine while the ports stay the same, you’ll need upgraded busses and higher quality cabling than exists now.

It would be nice to have a fast consumer transport so we can forgo expensive fibre channel interfaces for uncompressed HD. You’ll still need some pretty speedy and robust drive arrays though.

[Aaron Neitz]

I can kinda get Matte Choker to expand it a little, but it gets awfully noisy.

i just rendered it out in Shake and brought it into AE. But there must be a way to do this otherwise.

[Aaron Neitz]

Right on that. But I’m not drawing masks, I’m using a black&white video image as a “track matte: alpha layer”. That’s what I need to grow.

[Aaron Neitz]

Yep, Wacom all the time for every application. A mouse will turn your wrist into ground beef in less than a week.

Something that REALLY helped my neck and shoulders was buying two new 23″ Apple Cinemas for my computer. All of a sudden I could SEE my screens better and wasn’t hunching up over my desk squinting at everything. Didn’t even realize I was doing it. Blaming my problems on my desk height and my Aeron chair. Coming from some old (and in their day very expensive) 18″ Sony LCDs – I think a combo of the much improved contrast ratio and brightness did the trick.

[Aaron Neitz]

yeah, I’m going to distall – no need to have BVM’s on ups. I’m in venice – the power grid is a piece of work. voltage fluctuates up and down all day long like it was going out of style! and as soon as it rains – BAM – power goes to out the hood