[Adam Smith]

I wouldn’t say ‘nutso’ and lots of people do it, but I went for external primarily for the hardware RAID controller and performance. I’m not producing any uncompressed HD anytime soon, but faster drives helps a lot with realtime effects.

I also figured that less drives inside will help the MacPro stay cooler and last longer, and as well I use this system often without FCP so I don’t have to power up the RAID until I need it.

If you don’t need that 5TB space I’d try to save money on getting a smaller RAID, especially if you’re working in mostly SD.

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Video Photographer / Avid Editor / Final Cut Neophyte

[Adam Smith]

That’s strange… I attach my HPX500 via SDI to my 17″ production monitor regularly and I’ve never hit upon a format or frame rate it couldn’t display (or the camera wouldn’t output).

But you can’t get 720p out even into FCP? If you wanna give me your settings to duplicate I’ll try it at home tonight.

[Adam Smith]

I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone actually using P2CMS to archive… maybe your reason is the reason why?

I’m just starting to use the database feature but I use a separate data backup system for the P2 backups. (One that I just found out yesterday is no longer considered to be compatible with 10.4.10 or 10.4.9… wheee!

Guess I get to hit Leopard sooner than I’d planned…

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Video Photographer / Avid Editor / Final Cut Neophyte

[Adam Smith]

By building my own rig I saved around $4000 with which I was able to get more/better components than compared to the best best dealer’s quote.

Assembly was fairly straightforward, but it helped that I had to wait around 2 months for financing to go through and I had all that time to do research.

[Adam Smith]

ah, good catch!

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Video Photographer / Avid Editor / Final Cut Neophyte

[Adam Smith]

For video I’d set the quality to 100%.

For sound I’d assume your camera records as 48k so I’d output your file at the same sampling rate unless you need 32k for some reason.

Otherwise yeah it looks good.

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Video Photographer / Avid Editor / Final Cut Neophyte

[Adam Smith]

Yup, when rendering out the full movie you’d pick ProRes or 8-bit Uncompressed as your QuickTime format.

[Adam Smith]

That really depends on what equipment you have… if you need to output finished projects to tape for archiving, dubbing or whatever and all you have is a DV camera/deck, then you’ll just have to settle for one more round of DV compression when it’s laid to tape.

If the video is for some sort of digital use or delivery (web, DVD, flash, movie file, etc) then you can output an uncompressed or ProRes master quicktime of your project and use that as the source.

You might want to test to see if you can comfortably play/work in these less compressed (and much larger) video formats before you go too much farther. Perhaps you can copy an old DV project with lots of graphics and re-render to compare? See how well your drives can keep up, see if the performance is still adequate for your realtime effects needs. And see if you (or your clients) can tell the difference between the DV and not-DV.

There’s always going to be better gear out there, the trick is buying only as much as you need to. Or do like I did, run out of money and then tell yourself “That’s good enough!”

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Video Photographer / Avid Editor / Final Cut Neophyte

[Adam Smith]

It wouldn’t improve the footage, as that was decided when the signal was compressed and written to DV tape, but it could very well improve the overall quality of your finished product, depending on how much rendering you do.

What about capturing via Firewire and then setting your project to do all renders in uncompressed or ProRes? You wouldn’t have to add a capture card, and you could still avoid the repeated-compression issues with DV. This is assuming you don’t use Firewire out to master back to DV tape, which in the end would require crunching everything back down to DV…

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Video Photographer / Avid Editor / Final Cut Neophyte

[Adam Smith]

[Bob Woodhead] “Only tried cam -> HDD once, and it made a single 4GB partition on a 200GB drive. If i’d offloaded another card, I assume it would’ve made a 2nd 4GB partition? Inquiring minds want to know (who didn’t have the patience to do it themselves).”

Yup, exactly; an 8GB partition if you were using an 8GB card and so on. The only real sucko part is that every partition is labeled NO_NAME, and with a large number of P2 dumps it can get awful confusing once you mount the drive.

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Video Photographer / Avid Editor / Final Cut Neophyte