[Bouke Vahl]

[themis] “we’re talking about full production from capturing to mastering a DVD, done by one man alone (me, who else?). In that case I believe software integration is a great tool and I’m sure you’ll agree on that.”

Sure, but i never trust too much integration, and i totally don’t trust moving projects from one machine to another.
(but i’m out of my league here, i did NOT test these workflows myself.

I loved Premiere when i started out my own business, 12 years ago i had a 80 Mhz mac with Premiere 4.1 and was able to outperform really high end studios on heavy fx work.
But now, Premiere still does not has dual mono audio, making it a joke for my work.

integration also implies being tied to specific apps…
Now i’m a real Adobe fan, we have Photoshop, AE, Audition (and a bunch more, but these are our main Adobe apps), and with the correct workflow, all works nice together.
But i need DVD SP for serious authoring work, and i want to use Cinemacraft for our MpegII encoding, so there are no options for me to have integration….

It all comes down to money, speed and quality. All three are related one way or the other.

I’ve made the choice it’s nonsense to spend a few days on a DVD project, have the final product be compromised due to a cheap encoder, as the encoder is (although Cinemacraft is one of the most expensive ones) just a fraction of the total cost.

In my business, i have no alternatives than the ‘relative’ best. But there are a zillion other ways of making money, and that’s what this is still about…

[themis] “You may find this hard to believe, but in my country it’s a rare thing to be able to share knowledge with experienced professionals”

So, where you’re from?

Bouke

http://www.videoToolShed.com
smart tools for video pro’s

[Bouke Vahl]

my reason for having Avid,
All software has bugs, but with Avid, their mostly KNOWN bugs, and there are workarounds.

All fancy bells and whistles in other programs are nice, but fact is, i spent 95% on an average job just on ingesting, cutting, audio levelling and spitting it out to tape/DVD.

So i need something that is strong there, not in integration with a zillion other apps i don’t get time for to use.

Also, we are a small local shop, we do not like to test every upgrade, and we have so many projects going on at the same time that it is impossible for us to upgrade between projects (as is recommended by everyone, including myself…)
For us the extra cost for Avid is reasonable as we have almost no downtime.

YMMV

Bouke

http://www.videoToolShed.com
smart tools for video pro’s

[Bouke Vahl]

although i have not any experience with this recorder, it seems to lack an important feature, TC generation and TC output.
If you have a videoshoot to sync to, you want a recorder that outputs TC to a spare audio channel of the camera, or (if the cam has the capability), its TC input.

Bouke

http://www.videoToolShed.com
smart tools for video pro’s

[Bouke Vahl]

If you have a large amount to do, don’t use FCP to do the translation/transcoding, but use a third party dedicated tool for that.
Subbits (download from my site) is great for that.

Next, if you look down, there are a lot of old threads that cover the ‘looks’

hth

Bouke

http://www.videoToolShed.com
smart tools for video pro’s

[Bouke Vahl]

Bob,
I can’t point you to something on their site.
What i can tell you is the following:
Tech support is good. They have experience with a lot of stuff, and they do not sell you something with false promisses. I got a system to test for a long time before buying, without even paying. Now i don’t know if a reseller tells other things, but my experience with them has been good.

Now i don’t know how MetaSan software works. The way we work is NOT using Metasan, but making ‘virtual’ copies of a drive, fooling Avid in thinking it is writing to the drive (in fact it is, but the drive does not exist).
Thus, you can generate a project, work with existing media, render etc, but only one system is able to digitize. (others are, but as they work on a virtual drive, all media generated is lost after the session)

For Otis, do contact Ardis, they will try to help you. And, use Cat6 instead of Cat5. Also (so i’m told), the quality of attaching the cable to the connectors (difficult job) can make a speed difference, but Bob will know more about this.

Bouke

http://www.videoToolShed.com
smart tools for video pro’s

[Bouke Vahl]

sounds like a field dominance problem… Does not happen here, using all upper field workflow.
Is this a normal ingested clip, or an imported render?
And, are you rendering to the same codec as the master clip?

(mixing DV and other codecs, at least in Pal world, leads to mixed field dominance on output, even if you mixdown. Output to video is always good however)

Bouke

http://www.videoToolShed.com
smart tools for video pro’s

[Bouke Vahl]

Toy with Effects – > time warp and select ‘blended interpolated’

Works like a charm.

Have a look at this short demo:
https://www.editb.nl/serge/speedramp.wmv

After about 30 seconds there are some shots done that way.

Bouke

http://www.videoToolShed.com
smart tools for video pro’s

[Bouke Vahl]

Toy around with 100% speed change, and choose ‘field’
Should do the trick.

[Bouke Vahl]

Otis,
I take it you have created NTFS drives, not Network drives.
If not, you are screwed indeed. This won’t work for media (but just fine for avid projects)

Next,
Do you have SAN software installed?
If not, there is only one way you can have mutliple avids sharing the same media, that is by making a virtual drive.
If you try to connect an already used drive to another machine, you should get a warning that this will be a copy.

You can write to it, but the files you write from second or third machines to the ‘copy’ drives will be thrown away when you exit the session. So no problem for dirty fast preview renders, but DO NOT use this if you want to make mixdowns and re-use them later! They WILL be offline after a session.

So by this, only the first machine will keep track of the media databases and will be able to write files that stay alive.

Bouke

http://www.videoToolShed.com
smart tools for video pro’s

[Bouke Vahl]

Bob,
Do your homework!
He’s got an Ardis Technology RAID system.
That works, when set up properly, with Iscsi and is VERY WELL suited for Avid work. And they are DIRT CHEAP, and use generic parts instead of custom stuff, so you can get your spare parts / newer/bigger drives wherever you want.
And no, they are not SAN systems straight out of the box, but they are shared storage.

Next, I HAVE GOT AN ARDIS RAID TOO! Do you call me stupid, cheap and unexperienced? I certainly don’t feel screwed with Ardis, my RAID has been humming away nicely in the basement.

Next, Ardis Tech support is excellent. If you want to bitch about their stuff, take it up with them directly.
Mail bart@ardistech.com

Mind you, if you want to come over and raise the double barrel, this guy lives in the same city as i do.
He’ll be having more friends than you around here.

Now points about huge partitions are valid NO MATTER the system you use.

Bouke

http://www.videoToolShed.com
smart tools for video pro’s