[Andrew Rendell]

I guess no one’s replied in 2 days as no one really knows. Regular tv screens can sometimes work on set, but they need adjusting for brightness/contrast and color temperature to work with the lights/cameras. You need to get an engineer to check the screens you have in mind to see if they can be set up suitably.

[Andrew Rendell]

FW800 should be fast enough to cope, but there might be an issue with the speed of the drive itself (it doesn’t matter how fast the connection is if you can’t read/write fast enough on the disc itself). I’m not sure about that particular model but the GoFlex range appear to all be 5400rpm, so I’d be doubtful about it being a good buy for video editing. I expect it would work, but not “well”.

The external drives that I use with my MBP are raid/esata and work out around twice (one of them nearly three times TBH) the price per amount of storage than what you’re looking at, but I consider the extra performance worth every penny. Just my opinion.

[Andrew Rendell]

AFAIK Apple still don’t provide a prores encoding codec for windows, only a playback one, so you still can’t add it in to your regular software (such as QT Pro or MPEG Streamclip). However, I understand that there are a couple of systems that can do it now, e.g., Telestream or DVS Clipster, but I don’t have any experience of them.

[Andrew Rendell]

Have you considered Magic Lantern? I have it on my 550D (T2i) and not only are there a few things that improve the camera for video, it can also turn off the AGC and give you manual audio level control plus it also has the option to use both sides of the stereo input mini jack for balanced audio (although only one track, obviously).

YMMV – Magic Lantern does a few things differently on the different models of DSLR, so have a look on their website.

Incidentally, I’ve got a Fiio E5 and it’s great as a headphone buffer (which is what it’s designed for) but I hadn’t thought of using it for a microphone feed.

[Andrew Rendell]

Delivery specs vary from place to place, so you need to get the full requirements from wherever you’re delivering to. “1.77 or 1.66 protection” is a bit vague to be sure what’s meant, do you mean as title or action safe area?

I’d normally expect VFX shots to be delivered in the final output format, whatever that happens to be.

[Andrew Rendell]

IMO the computer’s speaker is useless for proper sound monitoring so that’s pretty much normal. USB connected speakers can be ok if they’re high quality ones, but the usual little desktop speakers are pretty useless. IMO it’s easier to find workable speakers at low(ish) cost by getting a basic USB to audio adapter and some low end monitor speakers. I picked up a discounted pair of Behringer MS16 speakers a couple of years ago and connect them via a Griffin imic – I wouldn’t like to mix anything on them (when I mix I usually listen through LS3/5a or Genelecs, but more often I’ll be exporting an omfi for a pro to do it) but they’re fine for just hearing what’s on the track.

[Andrew Rendell]

I’m thinking about a similar thing (I’ve got FCS and Avid currently working on a thunderbolt enabled MBP but limited external monitoring). So I don’t know the answer yet but I’ll share some observations:

I also have an older AJA IO, and it does work down a 9pin-6pin FW cable but it’s a bit flaky and I have had to reinstall the driver software a few times to keep it going, plus it’s SD only and I’m now mainly doing HD so I’ve put that aside for the moment.

I agree that the AJA IO Express looks great but I’m a bit reticent about committing my Expresscard slot to it as my external Raid is better when connected by esata than by FW800.

I have noticed that Sonnet have announced a Thunderbolt to Expresscard34 adapter that should begin shipping “during October” (but I haven’t actually seen one yet). That might just solve the conundrum of needing two expresscard slots…

I also see that Aja have announced a thunderbolt connected IO XT which might be a better way forward. https://www.aja.com/news/index_article.php?id=159

[Andrew Rendell]

I don’t have any formal education that applies to this industry, but I got into our most significant broadcaster (I’m in the UK) as a technical trainee, so I got a mixture of structured and informal training. That included learning technical stuff in a classroom, practicing techniques in a facility complex that was given over to training and working through training notes on the job, plus spending a lot of time as an assistant working with several editors in the online suites before getting to edit things for broadcast myself (which in my first years was mostly fast turnaround sports).

I remember when Avid came in; the engineers set up the system on a tuesday, a group of us (I think it was 3 or 4) went for a day’s introductory course on the wednesday, thursday morning I exported an edl from the umatic/shotlister offline that I was working on at the time and loaded it into the Avid and started cutting. (I never touched the Umatic offline editing kit again, but I did keep up tape online for a few years as well as non-linear).

What I’ve found is that having had a very thorough grounding in the technicalities of tape online, I’ve been able to “ride the wave” of technical development without any difficulty. Sometimes I have to sit and learn some new stuff, but I’ve never felt that I was learning something completely new – it’s usually a step forward (or more frequently sideways) from what I already know.

The thing I’d say is that the technical stuff isn’t the craft of editing, but it’s the necessary evil that you must know well enough to not have to think about in order to do the editing.

[Andrew Rendell]

Maybe the projects are getting too big – try making a new project and just copying the working sequence into it and see if that helps (having one very big project with loads of saved sequences in it can slow things down).

Chronology does seem to put the new tower into suspicion, but correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation. Have you copied anything between systems/drives in the process of switching towers?

This might be a bit of a long shot, but one time I had a drive suddenly go slow and cause crashes it turned out to be because of a corrupted media file. Found that by unlinking the media and relinking a section at a time, so it worked and worked again then suddenly ground to a halt when the next bunch of files to be reconnected included the corrupted one. You could also try deleting render files (if it is corrupted files, and I’m not saying it is, just that it might possibly be that, it’s as likely to be render files as source media).

[Andrew Rendell]

There’s a bunch of issues you need to go through in order to make the best choice for your particular situation.

Shane Ross’ tutorial here is a good place to start, it’s FCP specific but the principles apply to other NLEs https://library.creativecow.net/ross_shane/tapeless-workflow_fcp-7/1

I’ve done file based in some different ways: footage from an EX3 copied onto an external raid and imported into Avid via AMA; Canon XF305 files on a TerraBlock inported into Avid by AMA; everything converted to DNxHD on an Isis system; FCP with XDCamHD and ProRes files on a G-Tech drive; FCP with shared media on an XSan system. It depends upon what you need (TBH the FCP with shared XSan was a bit flaky, but it’s all worked). I think the OP implies that a large(ish) installation might be the order of the day, which puts me in mind of Avid/Isis system and I’d suggest talking to an official reseller for that kind of thing.

I can’t emphasise too strongly how important it is to keep an archive copy of all the media on your camera cards separately from the working media; I’ve had one external drive go down losing he media but we could rebuild it as we had a saved copy of everything somewhere else.

You also need to think about what kind of media you need to originate, I have the specifications for 2 different broadcasters over here for whom 35Mbps 4:2:0 VBR isn’t good enough, they’re demanding 50Mbps 4:2:2 as the minimum acceptable for general use (Nanoflash recorders and the Canon XF305 seem to be getting popular on this side of the pond). They don’t necessarily rule out lower bit rate stuff but you have to have a good reason to include it, like you can get shots with a GoPro that you couldn’t get any other way so those shots would be ok. Just something to be aware of.