Arnie Schlissel
Forum Replies Created
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Dave was referring to buying CF + AE. That’s an investment of (off the top of my head, so please don’t flame me if I’m off by a few hundred $$) $1200- $2200.
I agree, though that $600 for CF as a plugin for FCP is pretty reasonable.
Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com -
You really need to spend a little time mapping out your immediate needs, & your future needs. Do you need to grow your storage in the near future? Do you need to network your storage? The XRaid allows for both of these options. The MediaVault may be networkable, but that’s not officially supported by Apple right now. Both solutions (& other, similar arrays) offer plenty of bandwidth for HD.
SATA RAIDs can be built very cheaply. Right now, though the main drawback is that there are very few options for RAID levels 3 or 5, which are ‘safer’ than RAID 0, but still offer a most of the speed of RAID 0.
It’s also difficult to get enough drives together on a single SATA controller card to give you the bandwidth you need for uncompressed HD. You need 8 drives striped together as RAID 0, & not too many cards let you plug in to that many drives. All of those cards require using 2 slots or require you to put some of those drives inside the G5, which isn’t really designed to hold that many drives.
Now, there’s a new SATA II standard emerging that resolves some of these issues with faster bandwidth & port multiplication. But there’s at least 3 or 4 different connectors, so you need to match your card to your enclosure very carefully. Also, I don’t know if there’s any support for RAID 3 or RAID 5 yet (but I’d be willing to guess that it’s in the works).
As a compromise, take a look at getting an array from Promise, Arena, StoreCase, etc. You can buy some of these ’empty’ but wired for either fiber channel or U320 SCSI and install your own drives into them. It’s more costly than SATA, but still half the price of an XRaid.
Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com -
Sorry, Mike, but that’s not my experience. When graphics are prepped properly, they look good on my NTSC monitor regardless of how they look on the computer monitor.
Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com -
[Dan Powers] “”Check Again” anyone? Work Around?”
Doesn’t FCP prompt you to reconnect the media files? If not, just select the offline files & choose File>Reconnect Media.
BTW, you shouldn’t be unplugging your media drives while you’ve got FCP open.
Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com -
Dropped frames are always caused by your hard drives being to slow to keep up with your media. Sometimes that’s fixed by mixing down your audio, sometimes it can be solved by deleting unneeded files from your drives. If your media is on firewire drives that are daisy chained together, that could be at the root of your problem. You also don’t say if you’ve rendered everything in your timeline, including clips that FCP says should play in RT. You might want to force those files to render as well, & see if that helps.
Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com -
First off, you should speak with your lab to find out what they recommend in terms of horizontal & vertical resolution and conform your output from Flash to that. 2nd, if you’re not using an ‘easy setup’, well then, yes, it’s a custom setting. What pixel aspect ratio did you use when you rendered out of Flash? You should use the same PAR in your sequence. FCP may be adjusting the ratio to display out to your video monitor, but that may not be effecting the actual output to disk. You can open the files in Quictime to check them. I don’t know why your files are importing as 25fps. If you can’t change that in the attributes, then there may be an issue with how you rendered out of Flash.
Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com -
Look back at Bryce’s first post. He’s pointing out that if you upload the file to your ftp site, the compositor still has to download it. That’s 2 separate transactions for each file, just to get it one way. If you can send the file to him directly, that’s only 1 transaction per file, saving some of the transfer time. And applications like Skype & iChat are certainly not to hard to use.
Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com -
I used to have a Mac Plus that lasted something like 10 years. It finally died sometime in the middle 90s. The 30 MB external drive that we got to run it off lasted a couple of years beyond that.
Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com -
toolfarm.com & pluginz.com are both good sites to browse for plugins for FCP, along with AE, Combustion, Avid etc.
Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com