Brendan Coots
Forum Replies Created
-
I have RAM from Other World Computing (the link you provided) in many of my Mac Pros AND my Macbook, all working just fine. They make good stuff, and the price is right. I recommend it!
About the warranty, I had a sales rep tell me a similar line, so I will confirm that tomorrow.
-
Our Apple Business Sales rep told me something similar a few weeks ago. He didn’t explicitly say that it would void the warranty, but very similar story. I told him (sometimes too honest for my own good) that I didn’t want extra RAM in a Mac Pro I was buying because it was too pricey, we were going to get OWC RAM. He told me that it would cause problems with AppleCare, but that I could just yank the sticks before getting it serviced.
I will follow up with him tomorrow and get the straight answer.
-
http://www.amvona.com also sells fabric greenscreen backdrops, along with stands etc. I purchased one from them a few years ago and, while the fabric wrinkles easily (never could get the wrinkles out) and will almost always need stretching during use, it was a cheap and reasonably decent solution. Any muslin/fabric GS backdrop will suffer from wrinkles, the foam-backed option epontius mentioned is probably a better bet.
-
Some good advice here already, but I will add my 2 cents:
– One thing you said was a bit of a concern: editor/PA/Producer. I don’t know any studio who wants one person that can do all of those things. Hopefully you aren’t out there peddling yourself in this manner, because it really says “jack of a few trades, master of none.” Pick one, focus on it like a laser, and pursue that line of work. Spreading yourself that thin, especially fresh out of school, won’t work.
– If you want to be an editor, your demo reel will speak far more than an interview ever could. On the creative side I tend to hire mostly on reel quality (90% of the decision), then personality comes into play. If your reel isn’t good, I probably won’t be able to make time to chat in person, and I suspect most hiring managers are the same way.
– If you want to be a PA, emphasize your ability to follow direction and your attention to detail. An ability to follow through and do things properly is a major asset with any PA. Aside from that, any curveball question you might get when pursuing a PA job is pure BS. It’s just not that kind of job, so the interviewer is probably just being overly anal retentive. Don’t sweat it. Every question does not have a “right” answer, and you will get more respect being honest and saying you don’t know than trying to BS your way through it.
– If you want to be a producer, you need to really demonstrate that you know the industry, how to manage production etc. and fresh out of school, that’s tough. You can expect to be thrown some tough questions and, to be honest, if you don’t know the answer then you probably aren’t ready to be a producer. But that’s just my opinion, don’t let it stop you from pursuing what you want out of your career, just know that it’s tough to break into, even for people with a lot of experience.
-
Some of the wisest business advice I have heard is “Learn to work ON your business, not IN your business.” When you spend every minute doing creative, you are setting up a feast and famine situation. When there is no work, you are out there drumming up business and struggling to pay the bills. When your efforts land a new job, you are suddenly very busy in production. As soon as the job is done, however, there are no new jobs in the pipeline because you were too busy working on the last one, and now you are back to square one – wondering how to pay the bills and struggling to survive. Given that this industry can have a very LONG sales cycle, this is a quick route to nowhereland.
Your best approach might be to either hire contractors to do ALL of your work while you land the jobs, or hire a producer who focuses on landing work while you do the creative. This second approach is not a good idea, however, because what happens should the producer move on? Not only are you back at square one all over again, but you will have to pour through his records and contacts etc. just to figure out where he left things off.
You own the company, you need to run it. Let others do the work while you man the wheel and guide your ship where YOU want it to go. Right now, your ship is headed into antarctica because the captain is too busy swabbing the deck to steer!
-
On the left-hand side of this forum, an ad for the Norco DS-1220 is running. You may want to click that ad and check the unit out. It is VERY cost effective, supports RAID 5, hosts 12 SATA II drives and connects to your RAID card/s via 4 e-SATA connectors. I like this unit because you add your own drives, which is where most RAID boxes charge their markup. If you check out Newegg, there are some really nice Enterprise-class SATA II drives that are designed specifically for RAID use and are reasonably cheap. Using the Norco box and these drives, you could have a 4TB array for under $2,500.
The nice thing about this setup is that you can split the unit in half (six drives to one machine, six to the other) by running 2 e-SATA connectors to each machine’s RAID card. You could also run all 4 e-SATA cables to 2 cards in the same machine, which would act as a file server to your two machines. Either way, you should consider the HighPoint RocketRAID 2322 RAID controller card, most reviews of the Norco unit use this card and quite successfully.
As for how to actually set everything up, it totally depends on your needs, such as the types of files you use regularly. If you need to do full 1080i 4:4:4 HD, this setup may not work for two workstations. If, however, most of your work is DVCPRO HD or lower, you have a lot of options in how to set up your system.
For example, you could get a third machine, run all 4 ports of the RAID box to it and use this machine as a central file server. For connecting your workstations, you could either buy a fibre channel switch/host cards (would cost around $5,000) which would give you 4Gbps (around 4GB a second throughput) OR get a good gigabit switch that supports port trunking, make sure your workstations and file server have dual-gigabit cards (Mac Pros do by default), trunk the ports on each card and you have a 2Gbps connection for about 1/10th the cost of fibre. If your file server has two dual-gigabit cards, and both are trunked, each workstation would theoretically have a 2Gbps connection to the server which equals about 160MB per second. This is more than enough for DVCPRO HD or below, which has a datarate of around 17MB or less.
-
Funny timing, I just watched that show 2-3 hours ago. It was very well laid out, interesting to watch and looked great.
Could you tell us more (if you know) about the actual process of selling your project to NatGeo? Creating spec, original content is very compelling, but there is very little info out there on how to sell the project.
-
I agree, in fact VMware seems to be a much better option than Bootcamp or Parallels (which is terribly limited). Ultimately, I prefer to run apps in their native host just to make sure I am not sacrificing RAM/system resources to some middle-man application, but we do own some PC-only apps so I’m happy to use VMware where needed.
-
Your best option is to do the full composite in After Effects and export the finished, ready-to-use clip in either its native codec (DVCPRO HD 1080i60 24fps) or 8 bit/10 bit uncompressed.
If it were me, I would opt for the 10-bit uncompressed option. The files are much larger and more processor-intensive, but it insures that you don’t incur a generation of quality loss. DVCPRO HD is only around 14MBps (aka 100 megabit), and, while it can reasonably handle one level of export (from FCP to AE) without too much quality loss, it WILL lose quality on a second pass (when exporting from AE).
-
I was also going to suggest the Andrew Kramer tutorial, it is a very effective way of using high res photos without incurring the processing hit. It does require a few extra steps, but the time savings in rendering/interactivity is worth it.