Brendan Coots
Forum Replies Created
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FCP can play your timeline full screen, provided you will be playing this ON the edit rig.
If that doesn’t work for you, you can consider buying or downloading the trial of the Sheer Video Codec. This is a lossless codec (not uncompressed) and the file size is typically much smaller than uncompressed with no visual degradation. The datarate is also much lower than uncompressed, which means less strain on your throughput.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
The G5 only has two spare drive bays, so “filling them up” won’t be too tough. The only way to meet your space needs (2-3TB) is to use the largest drives you can get these days, 1TB. As a result, you can have a maximum of 2TB space which falls at the low end of your space needs.
As for working with 1920×1080 uncompressed 8-bit HD, the datarate for a single layer of this footage is 120MBps (that’s megabytes). Two drives striped together in RAID 0 might get you 80MBps on a good day, but that speed will drop quickly as the drives fill up with footage. This 2-drive setup falls far short of your speed requirements, and that’s only for one layer. If you expect to have several layers of HD footage in Final Cut Pro, the requirements go up.
This setup WILL “handle” uncompressed HD footage in FCP, but it will be slow and certainly won’t play back full quality in real-time. This is why people buy those expensive RAID boxes you mentioned. On that note, OSX only does RAID 0 and 1, you can’t do RAID 5 without a controller card which starts at around $400. RAID 5 also requires a minimum of three drives, which is out of your capacity range without a separate drive enclosure. I should add that RAID 0 is highly risky unless you plan to do daily backups of your project and source materials, which will require you to have another 1-2TB worth of external drives handy.
With After Effects, the hard drive speed plays a smaller role since so much of your work in AE involves RAM previews, not real-time disk previews. If you plan to do 1920×1080 uncompressed HD work in AE, it’s RAM that you will need, and a lot of it (think 6-8GB).
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
My studio recently took on a job for a fairly well known brand, and it being a reasonably complex motion graphics job we boarded it out. Here’s what happened:
– We ended up doing 12 revisions to these boards because, no matter what we said, the client couldn’t grasp that they were not meant to be exact to the letter, including the exact wording of on-screen marketing text, etc..
– They eventually asked that we modify the contract to guarantee the final product would match the boards, which we agreed to thinking it would benefit us by keep this rather flighty, disorganized client on track.
– Actual production begins. Client receives the first major draft, but there’s a problem – our point of contact never showed their internal creative director any of the 12 board revisions, and he hates it (naturally)
– In the end, the client ends up forcing us to deviate so dramatically from the boards that the final product took a major hit in terms of message, cohesion etc. despite our warnings to the client.
– Once the job is wrapped, we are informed that they still need to show the execs (?!?!), and needless to say there is a 4-page list of changes that require retooling the entire project to accommodate.
The lesson? Boards are great, but it all comes down to your client and whether or not they are used to boards. They can end up introducing deep misunderstanding, get clients focused on the wrong things etc. as the many stories in this thread show.
If you’re going to do boards, I would just be careful to inform your clients what the boards are and are not meant to be.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
I have the Areca 1220ML in a Leopard-based Xserve, connected to a NORCO DS1240 12 drive enclosure. When using 6 (mostly empty) drives in RAID 5, I am seeing speeds of 650MBps in Aja disc test.
I am, however, having occasional stability issues with file transfers hanging, forcing us to reboot the Xserve, at which point we lose the RAID volume. Bad news. Anyone seeing this type of behavior in Leopard?
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
AE never handled MP3s well, just like it tends to hate on MPEG-4/MPEG-2 files. The MPEG format is based on interframe compression, meaning you can’t stop on a single frame and get info on that frame, frames are treated in groups. Since AE works on a frame-by-frame basis, it has a hard time with these formats so you shouldn’t use them regardless of whether or not you can get AE to import them.
Anyway, on to your issue. Make sure that the audio settings in your render module match the audio settings of the file you imported. For example, make sure both are 44.1khz (or whatever), same bit rate etc.
If this doesn’t solve your issue, please tell us what format you are exporting to, along with all of your settings. It is clear that there is something in your render settings causing the issue.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
I agree with Jason, and would go further by cautioning you to be very careful here.
From what you’ve described, they want YOU to take on all of the risk (i.e. the time investment of design/filming) and IF they sell the project (is this a spec project then? if so, RUN FOREST RUN) they will share the “profits” with you. Right off the bat, the magic question is “what profits?” They could come back and tell you that after expenses, overhead, limos/cocaine/pimpsuits and that trip to Vegas to “sell” the job the profit was $1.50. Without a firm agreement that spells out the costs of the job, the anticipated sale price and your cut of resulting profit, you are risking an awful lot.
Even without the risks above, this sounds like a spec project trying to get free/cheap services out of you. Bear in mind that spec projects very rarely get picked up, and even then they aren’t going to pay what they would have to an agency to produce a real spot for them.
Worry less about answering THEIR questions right, and start asking some of your own, that’s my advice.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
I think it is every artist/studio’s responsibility to have examples of their work available in every format that a client might request. This isn’t an either/or, it’s D: All Of The Above.
Some prospects want DVDs, some want a web-based preview of your capabilities. It would be a wild (and likely incorrect) guess for anyone to say which is more likely to lead to a sale. The only real indicator of motive is that DVDs are more of a long-term, “keeping you in mind” kind of thing whereas online samples are more immediate.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
You will actually LOSE performance going with this or any other Geforce-based card over your Quadro. Quadro cards have features favorable to content creation that the consumer-focused Geforce cards do not, including superior OpenGL functionality.
I would not recommend switching cards unless you play games more than you use AE or other DCC apps.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
You can use Flash to write values to a database (or even a txt document) and set up the Flash interface to pull those entries back out of the database, but I don’t know how much luck you’ll have trying to get the functionality you are looking for with PDFs. Getting Flash to access other files on the user’s system (especially functionality like opening, modifying and saving files) is trickier than you might think.
Flash content on a CDROM can access the hard drive/file system and even open files, but saving them and recalling them etc. is quite a challenge. There is a program called Zinc that enables many more file system features within Flash, but it’s pricey and has a learning curve.
Your best bet might be looking into FlashPaper, which was essentially Macromedia’s answer to PDFs before the Adobe acquisition. FlashPaper integrates much more seamlessly into Flash, although you may still have issues calling up docs, saving them and recalling them. For security reasons Flash doesn’t do this type of thing super easily, without the aforementioned Zinc app.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
I agree with Joey regarding the .dv/quicktime issues, as well as keeping your composite in AE rather than FCP. That should solve most of your issues.
Outside of those things, I would suggest that you continue to read up on the various tutorials out there if you want to improve your keys and the final result. Some information that doesn’t make sense or seem relevant when you are starting out suddenly seems so sensible and brilliant once you’ve stumbled through a few keys the hard way.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com