[Alan Okey]

Qmaster is your friend.

Set up the Mac Pro as a managed cluster controller, and don’t include any of the laptops as cluster nodes. Make sure you set up 8 instances of the Compressor service in the Qmaster preference pane. Also set up shared cluster storage on the Mac Pro.

You can then submit job batches to the Mac Pro cluster in Compressor from the laptops, choosing the Mac Pro cluster.

Alternately, export finished media to a shared drive/folder on the Mac Pro and then submit job batches in Compressor on the Mac Pro and choose the Mac Pro Cluster when you submit the batch.

[Alan Okey]

Oops, sorry, I misread the OP. The project is a film OUT, not shot on film. My bad.

[Alan Okey]

Wouldn’t 2K or 4K Cineon/DPX log scans from a datacine offer much greater latitude for CC in a DaVinci than using 10-bit HD video codecs?

What’s the highest quality internal processing that DaVinci systems utilize (RGB 32-bit float, etc.)?

[Alan Okey]

Be careful about black level – only the DSR-1500A is switchable between 0 IRE and 7.5 IRE black levels on its analog outputs. If you’re using the DSR-1500 (no “A”), you’ll be getting a black level of 0 IRE on the analog outputs. This means that your footage will appear too dark if you’re using a North American NTSC broadcast monitor.

If you’re using the broadcast monitor for color correction or judging image tonality, this is critical.

Details here:

https://www.signvideo.com/dv-black-level-dvd-7.5-ire-0-ntsc-part-2.htm

[Alan Okey]

Good riddance.

The Xserve RAID was inflexible, overpriced and underpowered when compared to just about any other reputable RAID vendor.

[Alan Okey]

Approximately $1500 gets you HD and SD capture and monitoring (both digital and analog), realtime hardware downconversion and DVCPRO HD and HDV hardware acceleration. Without the Kona, you have no way of monitoring HD on a preview monitor other than using FCP’s Digital Cinema Desktop preview, which is not color-accurate and which does not properly display interlaced content (should you be working with 1080i). The Kona can also convert HD to SD on the fly for viewing on an external SD monitor.

If $1500 is a lot of money to you for that functionality, then you don’t need the card.

The Kona LHe page on AJA’s website has a pretty comprehensive explanation of the Kona’s hardware acceleration.

[Alan Okey]

The Kona LHe is a fantastic product, and a steal for the price. About the only things it doesn’t give you is hardware upconversion and dual-link HD-SDI. I bought my LHe around a year ago and never looked back. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

You are correct – it will give you balanced XLR analog audio out.

[Alan Okey]

[Bob Zelin] “when you do a dub from one SDI VTR to another, you are sending a digital signal from one VTR to the other – this is commonly called “making a clone” – because you are transfering the digital data.”

Bob, I used to think this was the case, but I was shocked to learn that it’s not. Check out this link:

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/beyond_dv_nattress.html

Graeme Nattress certainly knows what he’s talking about. Here’s the relevant excerpt:

“Clone Dubbing

Some video recorders, such as Digital Betacam do not give the outside world access to the uncompressed data on the tape, so cannot be edited natively. This also means that you cannot do a perfect clone dub of a Digital Betacam tape.

The compressed output, which we use to edit a video format natively, can also allow a perfect clone of a digital tape to be made. You can easily make a perfect (within the bounds of dropout and data related errors which might, theoretically, over many repeated such dubs reduce the picture quality) dub by connecting a firewire cable from one DV deck to another, pressing play on the first and record on the second. Some DVCAM decks will also copy the timecode from the original over to the new copy too.

When tape-to-tape dubbing via an uncompressed SDI output you cannot make a clone copy. This is because the video must be uncompressed on the play-out machine, and then re-compressed on the recorder, which will theoretically reduce the picture quality (perhaps only slightly in the case of formats like Digital Betacam) and not be a perfect clone. In practice, dubbing from Digital Betacam to Digital Betacam over SDI is visually lossless over hundreds of generations, and indeed, the error correction used in Digital Betacam is so good that tapes with errors on them can often be improved through a Digital Betacam to Digital Betacam over SDI dub.”

[Alan Okey]

The cheapest option is to use Firewire out to a DV camcorder connected to a TV via composite or S-video. This will allow you to check field issues, but don’t rely on it for color correction. Most consumer and prosumer DV gear outputs 0 IRE black level instead of NTSC’s 7.5 IRE, so your footage will appear darker than it really is. For a quick check for field rendering issues however, it should be adequate.

You could also pick up a used Canopus ADVC-100 on eBay for not too much. These have the added advantage of having DIP switches to set black level, so you can actually output the proper 7.5 IRE to an NTSC monitor.

[Alan Okey]

[David Cooke] “Just installed it last week between projects and got NOTHING on the monitors and no “mac boot up” sound.”

Sorry for asking the obvious, but did you plug the card’s power connector into the power jack on the motherboard?