[Aristides Tiropolis]

Some comments,

While Mac OSX is a much more superior operating system, there is a way to properly code stuff on Windows and respectively screw stuff up on Mac OSX. A good example of that is a better coded Maya 2008 on windows compared to the Mac OSX variant which crashes constantly…and there are other similar examples.

To the original poster: You should check the event viewer. You don’t specify what is the exact nature of the crash and what exactly happens…Do you get a blue screen? AME crash? Windows error report window? What kind of RAID controller are you using? Maybe there is a driver problem.
That said Adobe Premiere CS4 has been very badly coded…and the simple export feature omission from the latest version has been a major mistake, good job Adobe…

[Aristides Tiropolis]

Hi Brett,

I recently switched to CS4 and I’ve had my fair share of problems already, namely not actually being able to export a proper .Η264 file. Especially if I want it with aac audio and I’ve been getting sync errors. I’m absolutely certain that these errors are AME’s as these were non existent in CS3.

So in my quest for an .Η264 file Ι decided to export in ΒΜ Codecs in 8bit and 10bit for testing and using my trusty Canopus Procoder for converting to .H264 quicktime.

Both ΒΜ Codecs seem (I’ll come back to this) to work fine and I actually have already saved the presets for my custom resolutions.

However something smells a little fishy here, something doesn’t feel right. Aside from not being able to do a simple export in Premiere anymore, I noticed that the BM File rendered in AME (avi, in 8bit or 10bit) could not convert in Procoder to a .H264 quicktime file with AAC audio without crackles or other issues and could only accept some specific audio types which generally take more space and that is a problem for me, since I have to send quicktimes over the internet in good quality for team discussion over the material.

Brett, what kind of problems are you facing?

To the BM Team: I speculate, that AME is doing something during the encoding and the final rendered file is somehow different than it used to be. What’s your take on this?

[Aristides Tiropolis]

Jeff, I would strongly recommend to use an external or internal audio interface (audio card) to do that.

[Aristides Tiropolis]

This has already been discussed in a way here and I have tried this myself.

The analogue input of the Decklink (as opposed to the output) isn’t live.
You could try capturing blank video from i.e FCP and test/record from the audio input, but that is the most functionality you can get.

[Aristides Tiropolis]

There should be a fundamental difference in performance when using an eSATA disk versus a usb disk. You should have approx. the same performance (on eSATA) like when using an internal regular SATA desktop/laptop disk, you cannot get more than 18-20 mb/s read/write on usb and its not recommended for doing any editing, it just doesn’t cut it.

However, my experience using eSATA has been less than satisfactory. Although I have achieved the same speeds as single desktop drives, the implementation lacks. The cables are flimsy and not made for people on the move. The connector is unreliable, drivers (windows) are most of the time horrible and most of the hardware vendors making eSATA chips have bad (although I’m not sure about G-Tech’s eSATA card) implementations, eSATA disks don’t like it when machines go to sleep and all hell breaks loose when you wake the computer. Oh! and you cannot “safely remove” the device, you have to close the computer or risk data by closing the disk.

Bottom line is eSATA is not made for anything external and is especially not made for people who want a reliable connection and their data to be safe in any way, or want to be on the move. I’ve stick to FW800 for external disks and never had any problems. It’s no wonder that Apple never implemented this connection natively in its machines.

If you are experiencing low performance when using eSATA, you may want to check on your disk. Is it full? Have you ran a disk speed test?

[Aristides Tiropolis]

[Joe Daniels] “and play an occasional game here and there”

I do not think this requirement goes along with building an editing system.

The answer to your main question relies mostly on what your budget is and on what kind of footage you plan on editing.
There are also other parameters like what kind of deliverables will you need on your final footage.

[Aristides Tiropolis]

Hi Matt,

Unfortunately the (C:)drive path is in some cases a problem and in others a necessity. This is an old thing actually inherited from the first days of Windows and many applications tend to look for a hard coded path in the form of i.e “C:\Program Files\Common files” or other similar ones.
Some applications or installations use relative paths or look at the system environment variables, but 90% of applications don’t and developers don’t take the time to test other drive letter system installations.

I cannot however see, why would you use such a configuration especially in a production environment. My spontaneous advice to you would be to use the standard windows installation type on the (C:) drive letter. The bad thing is that you cannot even take an image to do that, you must start with a clean format.
I can understand that you may have your reasons for having such a config, I don’t know, maybe a dual boot configuration. But still, whatever the benefits are, they are outweighed by the potential risks/issues/incompatibilities and there are ways to have C: drive installations in dual boot configurations if that’s the case.

[Aristides Tiropolis]

I was into buying seagate mostly myself, but lately I’ve been using the WD green model, which seems to perform better than the seagates and more silently, I actually get about 83 mb/sec read/write from a single 1Tb drive. I’ve read, that the blue series perform even better, so it looks like WD have stepped up their game, after years of trailing Seagate.

What number of disks are you interested on getting? Do you have a backup plan? What is your storage amount need? You may want to consider a different raid option if you can get more than 3 disks for redundancy. Raid-0 isn’t going to offer any other benefit besides performance.

[Aristides Tiropolis]

I find that the biggest misconception lies in the fact that firewire is somehow “connected” to a video codec like DV, when it clearly is just a reliable external computer bus which can carry anything (within limits) we tell it to.

So the question is not if firewire is good enough in a generic term but what exactly are one’s requirements in a specific time in quality/workflow/portability/budget/ease of use and many other parameters.
Perhaps an extreme example but, Danny boyle and his DP found that the best solution for shooting in India’s slums was to (partially) use the SI 2k camera, a laptop and the Cineform codec. They would get definitely better image quality from 35mm film or an ARRI D21 and log files, but their requirements were different in this project.

[Aristides Tiropolis]

This is interesting. I like impossible projects.

Some questions/comments:

By looking at the product pictures, the intensity and studio card have a different slot gap than the bigger models. This gap is in my eyes absolutely compatible with PCIe x1 slots in desktop motherboards. To my knowledge 98% of x1 slots can be found only on desktop mainboards and not on workstation/server class ones and absolutely not on Mac Pro’s.
The biggest concentration on x1 slots I have ever seen on desktop mainboards has never exceeded the number of 2. How would you physically install the rest of them? The x4,x8,x16 PCIe slot has different slot gaps…unless I’m missing something and maybe I am since Blackmagic states x4,x8,x16 slot support in their website. How is this possible?

As for crossfire getting in the way. I don’t know about that. My mainboard has a second PCIe, that is supposedly there for a second VGA in crossfire mode, but my Decklink sits happily there fully supported on Vista x64. Crossfire is disabled in bios.

I hope this helps.