[Alan Okey]

I have to admit, it’s pretty sweet that SAS and SATA share the same interface. You can mix and match SAS and SATA drives on the same cotroller, which is a great feature.

[Alan Okey]

Would you care to provide a link to a company producing an SAS adapter that is compatible with Macs? I thought not.

SAS appears great on paper, but it’s off to a very slow start. I’m hearing from a lot of industry people that it’s a shrinking market. Even at the enterprise level, IT people are favoring SATA for nearline storage due to its price-per-GB ratio.

In RAID situations, it’s becoming even more of a wash. SATA drives are so cheap that it’s affordable to have plenty of hot spares lying around to offset the lower MTBF ratings. All of the big storage vendors are now offering SATA-to-Fibre RAIDs to meet customer demand. I just spoke with a rep from Rorke Data the other day and he said that the majority of their business is now SATA-to-Fibre. He said that just a few years ago it was mostly SCSI and Fibre Channel, but now it’s cost, not ultimate performance, that is the driving factor for the majority of their customers.

I personally would prefer a Fibre RAID with Fibre drives for my editing system, but considering the vast disparity in storage capacity at the same price point between Fibre and SATA, it just doesn’t make sense from a business perspective. I could buy a SATA-to-Fibre RAID and an entire replacement set of hot spares for much less than the cost of a similarly sized Fibre-to-Fibre array.

There are certainly applications for which SCSI, Fibre Channel or SAS are the most appropriate choice. Online storage for servers is a good example, where the drives get hammered with multiple I/O requests simultaneously. The SCSI protocol handles multiple I/O requests much better than SATA, and the availability of 15K rpm drives helps further by cutting seek times and increasing throughput speed. I think video editing, however, is no longer one of those applications that requires SCSI. For many people, the slightly slower performance of SATA in video applications is offset by the huge difference in the price of storage capacity. And while the MTBF ratings are still lower for SATA drives, some manufacturers are now offering a 5-year warranty for SATA drives, the same as their SCSI drives.

What it really comes down to is how much money you have to spend, and how important overall storage capacity is to your work. If you’re editing HD, you’ll need a lot of fast space. If you’re editing DV, you’ll just need space, with speed not being as critical. If you’re primarily doing HD compositing or short-form HD editing, then speed is more important than capacity.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

Is having SCSI or Fibre Channel drives in your RAID worth paying double, triple or even 12x the cost of using SATA drives? Will you feel more secure about your data? Are bragging rights worth the extra cash?

Here’s a little eye opener… (prices from Provantage.com)

ST3160812AS Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160GB 8MB SATA II/3Gb: $65.79

ST3146707LC Seagate Cheetah 10K.7 146GB 8MB U320 SCSI 80Pin: $379.97

ST3146854LC Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 146GB 8MB U320 SCSI 80-Pin: $765.18

ST3146854SS Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 146GB 8MB SAS 3Gb/s: $832.79

In summary, for similar capacity, you could buy 5, 11 or 12 Barracuda SATA drives for the cost of one Cheetah 10K SCSI, 15K SCSI or 15K SAS drive, respectively.

Let’s extrapolate that. Let’s say you want to build a 10-drive RAID. For the drives alone, the prices would be:

1.60TB SATA… $658
1.46TB 10K SCSI… $3780
1.46TB 15K SCSI… $7650
1.46TB 15K SAS… $8330

Cha-ching!

Good luck in your quest.

[Alan Okey]

[JeremyG] “the monitor was discontinued for being too much of a good thing”

Actually, I believe the monitor was discontinued (along with the entire PVM CRT line) because Sony is trying to conform to Kyoto Protocol. By way of this, I’ve read that European countries are no longer permitted to import CRTs due to the fact that they contain heavy metals. With a big chunk of their CRT market effectively removed, and with the increasing popularity of LCDs, Sony probably figured that critical mass had been reached and opted to stop producing the PVM series. Now you have to spend big bucks for a BVM series if you want a good CRT.

At first I thought Sony was just trying to force their new Luma LCDs down our collective throats, but after reading about Kyoto and the European CRT rules, I think it’s not just a case of Sony being greedy.

It seems that there is no good moderately priced solution for SD/HD monitoring aside from the PVM-14L5 & 20L5 and the JVC DTV 17″ & 19″ models, all of which have been discontinued. As the remaining new stock is depleted, the bigger models are pretty much impossible to find and the smaller models are going fast.

Unfortunately this leaves us without a good affordable solution for HD monitoring. While LCDs can display the full 1920×1080 signal pixel-for-pixel, their color reproduction and interlaced display capabilities leave a lot to be desired. And while offering the best image quality, sub $10,000 CRTs can’t reproduce the full resolution of 1080i signals. JVC makes a high-end LCOS display that offers full pixel-for-pixel display and color characteristics matching that of the best CRTs, but it’s $45K. SED displays show great promise, but they’re several years away from being a viable option.

At this point, it seems that the only solution is to use both an LCD for pixel detail and a high quality CRT for color reference.

[Alan Okey]

Well, I’ll try that and hope for the best. I guess I learned my lesson – don’t mess around in the service menu if I don’t know exactly what I’m doing!

Is anyone aware of how to purchase a service manual for a PVM-14L5, or whether there is an online forum or document repository where these types of questions can be addressed?

Thanks in advance.

[Alan Okey]

Anyone know how to get a 14L5 out of Aging Mode? I’m stuck…

[Alan Okey]

Just to add, the AJA BCN-450SCLP makes some mean bacon-wrapped scallops, and you can upgrade it to make other hors d’oeuvres with the X999hd attachment.

[Alan Okey]

Export as QT movie: exports a Quicktime movie with the same dimensions and codec that your FCP timeline uses. If your timeline is 720×480 DV, it will save a 720×480 DV movie file. If your timeline is 720×486 10-bit uncompressed, it will save a 720×486 10-bit uncompressed movie file.

Export using Quicktime conversion: gives you the opportunity to change the dimensions, file type, and audio/video codecs of the file you want to create. For example, you may want to save a 320×240 H.264 version of your video for Web delivery.

Export as MPEG-2: Saves an MPEG-2 compressed movie file.

Assuming the source material of a project is DV format: “Export as QT movie” will produce the highest quality output file, because no additional compression is being added to the footage except for rendered transitions and filters/effects. “Export using QT conversion” will recompress all of the material, even if the movie export properties match those of your FCP project. An MPEG-2 export of a DV project will be of lower quality and smaller file size than the original.

What is the destination of your exported movie? I.e. will it be used for a master tape, web video, DVD, etc.?

[Alan Okey]

Here are two that you should definitely check out:

BitVice
(https://www.innobits.se)

MainConcept MPEG Encoder Mac
(https://www.mainconcept.com)

Both have trial versions you can download.

Also check out the Compression Techniques forum on the Cow for more opinions.

[Alan Okey]

If you’re looking at AE, don’t forget to check out Autodesk Combustion. Combustion has better roto tools than AE, so when you come across a tough problem that keying alone won’t handle, Combustion’s roto tools will really help. Combustion comes with two keyers, the Diamond Keyer and the Discreet Keyer. The Diamond Keyer is a quick and powerful keyer with knife-edge precision. The Discreet Keyer, while not necessarily a one-click solution like some other keyers, gives you a comprehensive set of tools to work with for pulling very difficult keys. You are also free to use plugin keyers as well, similar to AE.

The tutorial videos on the Combustion site offer a quick look at Combustion’s many great features. I find Combustion to be much more versatile than Shake in a video environment, and I find its user interface to be far ahead of AE’s.

[Alan Okey]

You don’t have to make a 16:9 Quicktime file to make an anamorphic DVD. Follow this workflow:

Open your anamorphic project in Final Cut Pro. From the file menu, choose “export using Compressor.” Once Compressor has opened, click on the pop-up menu button under “setting” in the batch window. Choose the encoding setting that is appropriate for the length of the video you are submitting, and make sure that the description of whichever option you choose ends in “16:9” or “Widescreen.” This will encode your anamorphic video as an anamorphic MPEG-2 video file.

When you import the MPEG-2 file into DVD Studio Pro, once you create a track for the video, in the track inspector palette you can specify how a DVD player will play back the anamorphic video track. Your video will automatically play back in 16:9 on a 16:9 television, but you can control how it will play back on a 4:3 television. You can force the player to letterbox the video on the 4:3 screen, force the player to crop the sides (pan & scan) or force the player to play back the file as a 4:3 image, in which case it will appear vertically squeezed. DVD players are able to detect anamorphic encoded video and display it properly depending on how you specify the disc and/or the player to handle anamorphic material.

Quicktime player is not savvy to anamorphic-flagged video files unless they are MPEG-2 encoded anamorphic video and you have purchased the Quicktime MPEG-2 playback component. Therefore, to have the video play back properly in Quicktime player, you need to manually resize the image when exporting it from Final Cut Pro using Quicktime conversion. As long as the ratio of horizontal to vertical pixels is at a 16:9 ratio (or 1.78:1) then your video will be properly displayed in its original widescreen aspect ratio.

Note: Using the “export using Quicktime conversion” option in Final Cut Pro does not automatically create a 16:9 video, even if your FCP sequence is anamorphic. Unless you manually resize the frame, you will end up with a 4:3 file that looks vertically stretched.

Hope this helps.