[Bob Bonniol]

Had them in the wrong folder. Duh.

Thanks for the PORT !!!

MODE Studios
http://www.modestudios.com
Contributing Editor, Entertainment Design Magazine
Art of the Edit Forum Leader
Live & Stage Event Forum Leader
HD Forum Leader

[Bob Bonniol]

Not only are you responsible if you use it and your client doesn’t sign a waiver, you are equally responsible even with a signed waiver, if you KNOWINGLY use the music without rights.

Besides, lets say that a signed waiver made you hypothetically safe in the eyes of some judge… Do you have more money than the RIAA lawyers who you will have to face in court to ‘prove’ that ? Wouldn’t you rather take a nice vacation with the family, and maybe put some money in the bank, rather than paying a lawyer to get you out of a tough situation ?

Be cordial, polite, and firm: You can’t do it. Thats just the law. The penalties are too severe. Don’t think for a second that you are somehow too small to be noticed, or are off the radar. The RIAA is suing TEENAGERS for downloading. They’ll gleefully march you into court. I don’t want to hatch conspiracy theories or anything, but c’mon, look at your thread subject: The internet is full of ‘bots, harvesting subjects, topics, posts, whatever, that interest certain people. Google uses them to rate pages… You don’t think the RIAA might use them to find pirates ? You might want to explain to your client the kind of liability they are opening their company to. The penalties for corporations are much more severe than for private individuals when it comes to IP infringement.

There are alot of open source music options, there is GarageBand or Acid… You could whip up your own. There are also good options for getting rights to something economically. Check out http://www.clearance.com or http://www.bzrights.com, or just google ‘rights clearances’ for page after page of resources to do it legally… Which goes to the heart of the matter: My number one commandment in life: Just do the right thing.

Don’t do it… It’s not worth it.

Best,

MODE Studios
http://www.modestudios.com
Contributing Editor, Entertainment Design Magazine
Art of the Edit Forum Leader
Live & Stage Event Forum Leader
HD Forum Leader

[Bob Bonniol]

Bravo ‘dude’ !!!! Great response ! I am DIEING !!!! LOL LOL LOL….

You are welcome around any Cow forum, any time Beelaster.

Regarding the importance of video cards, it’s my experience that Motion has some rigorous requirements to run at it’s best. You’ve got your bases covered with lots of ram and good processing, but a high end video card is key here. After upgrading the card on our dual 2Ghz with 8 gigs ram to the aforementioned Nvidia6800, we saw Motion performance take an enormous step forward.

2.0 also seems to run faster and smoother, but thats purely subjective, we haven’t benchmarked or anything.

Thanks for hanging in with a good sense of humor Beelaster !

Cheers,
Bob Bonniol

MODE Studios
http://www.modestudios.com
Contributing Editor, Entertainment Design Magazine
Art of the Edit Forum Leader
Live & Stage Event Forum Leader
HD Forum Leader

[Bob Bonniol]

Thanks for the info on the master/slave combo Thomas… I had forgotten that WIngs could do that.

In speaking with Frederik from Stumpfl several weeks ago, he did acknowledge that it was possible to have mismatched slave nodes (in terms of config) and as you say, the system does adjust for this, but that less than optimum playback (depending on the media) might result, so his recommendation was to make sure that the system components were more or less consistent.

I can tell you that in troubleshooting big blended systems, it makes it so much easier to know that the nodes are all the same. It eliminates whole sets of considerations (oh my, does this mobo have the same bandwidth to the display bus… you know I seem to remember that THIS node has slower memory do you suppose that has anything to do with it… Ooops the Ghost backup for the slave node that I have with me is for the Dell type slave, not the HP type… This ethernet card seems to have different drivers, damn)… You get the picture.

George, in terms of pricing models, all the multi display systems seem to price out per display node. The exception is with some of the more lighting based media servers (Hippotizer, Catalyst, etc) that can run up to two outputs per unit. I’ve heard tell that the Hippotizer may roll out a 4 output (based around the new Nvidia quad card/mobo) sometime later this summer. Market price on a single Hippo or Catalyst still ranges between 15k and 30k so that is a costly option as well when you get right down to it…

Cheers,

BB

MODE Studios
http://www.modestudios.com
Contributing Editor, Entertainment Design Magazine
Art of the Edit Forum Leader
Live & Stage Event Forum Leader
HD Forum Leader

[Bob Bonniol]

To start with, Wings is highly reliable, and proven in production environments. It does high quality blending, as good as Watchout, or any other blending solution out there. It is with this latest software version, possibly the highest quality, best multi screen software out there.

You are very much lowballing cost however. 349 Euros will barely buy even one license, and if you are serious about wanting to do 3 processors, you’ll need three display licenses and one control license. That is probably around 3200 Euros right there. Wings (like watchout) requires robust platforms to work on, with high end graphics cards. You can’t just load it on any old PC and get reliable results. So figure another 1000 (and I’m lowballing here) per platform: 3 display nodes, and a control node = another 4000 Euros. Total cost for a reasonable 3 screen system: About 7500 Euros when you’re all done with cables, monitors, remote monitoring solutions (KVM), networking components, etc. Thats not including projectors, VDA units for feeds to projectors, screens, etc.

Not trying to be discouraging, but you really have to understand what this costs to do reliably and right.

Good Luck,

Bob Bonniol

MODE Studios
http://www.modestudios.com
Contributing Editor, Entertainment Design Magazine
Art of the Edit Forum Leader
Live & Stage Event Forum Leader
HD Forum Leader

[Bob Bonniol]

Colourblind, I understand right where you’re at on this… and no worries. With the Forum Leaders, we’ve all been around for years worth of hot flaming threads, so we’ve all got pretty thick skins when it comes to frustrated venting.

I do know this about PPro: There are hardware configs that seem to work really well, and there are some that don’t. Actually I guess thats more of an OS/Platform thing, because it’s certainly true of Avid as well. So some of your issues (in the crashing sense) may have to do with this. I’d absolutley check in on the PPro forum on that, those folks will have hardware/software conflict experience.

Workflow is such an investment. It took me a couple of years until I felt as confortable and speedy on FCP as I did on Avid. And along the way I certainly hit my head against the wall in frustration alot. But now, I can’t imagine going back or using anything else (until something better comes along I guess). It just took me sniffing my way into every little corner of FCP until I was back to being an edit jedi on the platform. The end message: Keep on keeping on…

Best,
Bob

MODE Studios
http://www.modestudios.com
Contributing Editor, Entertainment Design Magazine
Art of the Edit Forum Leader
Live & Stage Event Forum Leader
HD Forum Leader

[Bob Bonniol]

Yup, I am in complete agreement with Tim. Even though we are an FCP shop, primarily, we still have PPro installed on our windows boxes for quick or incidental cutting, and we find it to be pretty much equal to FCP (or Avid, which we have as well). The days of Premiere being a kludgy tool (back in the 5.x days) are over. PPro is powerful, elegant, intuitive, (pile on your favorite NLE adjective here). There are things about it that puzzle me (I work on the FCP setups), but I watch people who KNOW the program fly on it.

So my .02 ? Take the time to work through the tutorials, maybe invest in some training tapes or other training books, and figure out whether the program is REALLY not doing what you need it to do, or whether you just haven’t figured it out yet. If PPro, FCP, Avid, Liquid, et al all looked and behaved exactly alike, there’d be very little reason for them to exist. Different workflows yield different strengths.

Good luck, and crack that manual open friend !

Best,
Bob Bonniol

MODE Studios
http://www.modestudios.com
Contributing Editor, Entertainment Design Magazine
Art of the Edit Forum Leader
Live & Stage Event Forum Leader
HD Forum Leader

[Bob Bonniol]

Hey Thomas,

I met Frederik from AVStumpfl last week at Infocomm. Also met the North American guy Franklin. I think we are going to be picking up a Wings Platinum system. Some really impressive advantages over Watchout (I was blown away by the mesh warping ability… Not to mention the full rez preview and the ability to render the preview for client approval. Yum)

Anyway, I was hoping you might also send me info/invite to your Yahoo multi screen group. Possible ?

Cheers,

Bob Bonniol

MODE Studios
http://www.modestudios.com
Contributing Editor, Entertainment Design Magazine
Art of the Edit Forum Leader
Live & Stage Event Forum Leader
HD Forum Leader

[Bob Bonniol]

You might check out the Vista Systems Spyder, it’s a multi display controller with alot of flexibility for playback formats. I think they come base level with 4 inputs and 4 discreet outputs. It’s big brother, the Vista Montage, is the cadillac of high end multi screen control. The SPyder is supposed to be pretty economically priced. I’d look first at rental. I bet you’d find them at Scharff Weisberg in NYC, as well as at XL Video (NY,Atlanta,London,LA).

Wings Platinum and Watchout are very flexible, and relatively cheap, but as Thomas mentoned they are timeline based, so that can be a little kinky if you are doing live, extremely variable playback scenarios (although I have made them work in the past).

You could also consider certain of the new media servers that are sweeping the lighting world. The Hippotizer supports up to 3 discreet outputs (maybe 4 now with the new NVidia quad output cards), and High End Catalyst does up to 2 per unit I believe. You can run multiple’s of either platform for more. They also have the benefit of being controllable by the lighting console, making flexibility and timing a real snap.

Good luck,
Bob Bonniol

MODE Studios
http://www.modestudios.com
Contributing Editor, Entertainment Design Magazine
Art of the Edit Forum Leader
Live & Stage Event Forum Leader
HD Forum Leader

[Bob Bonniol]

Mark,

Pick up Final Cut Pro Express, and use that to edit your DVD. If your machine doesn’t already have iDVD, you should get it. I know exactly what YOU want to make, which has pretty simple necessities, and will be well served by that app.

There are any number of USB and Firewire based external audio breakout boxes out there that give you good I/O for plugging in things like tape decks. We have one from MOTU kicking around. You can then use Final Cut, or probably even Quicktime Pro to record your audio tapes and do basic editing and fixing.

The single easiest way to get video into your I-Book is using the Firewire 400 port on it with a DV camera. There are endless discussions on that here, but basically if you plug ANY DV based camera into your I-Book, Final Cut should see it and have you up and gvoing on capture and edit pretty quick.

Good to see you round this joint. How was the Olympics ?

Cheers,
Bob Bonniol

MODE Studios
http://www.modestudios.com
Contributing Editor, Entertainment Design Magazine
Art of the Edit Forum Leader
Live & Stage Event Forum Leader
HD Forum Leader