[Brian Hughes]

While a four year degree is useful if you want to be a professional engineer (CPBE) you can become a working broadcast engineer with only a 2 year degree. The Society of Broadcast Engineers (SBE) maintains a list of certified schools. A degree from one of these will usually get you the Certified Broadcast Technologist (CBT) that is very helpful in getting hired.

I must plug my own school here: Napa Valley College (Napa, CA) has an A.S. degree program that has been in operation for 35 years. We have nearly 100% placement rate and usually have to turn employers away as we can’t supply enough students. You might also want to visit our student/alumni SMPTE chapter, SMPTE Chapter 11. The alumni directory can give you an idea of the types of employers that have hired our graduates.

Brian Hughes
Broadcast Engineer
Napa Valley College

[Brian Hughes]

Followup:

I found that if a deck is connected to the RS-422 port, is on and in remote mode, WME will work properly. The problem seems to be Windows Media Encoder, it just hangs waiting for a response from the RS-422 port. There also doesn’t seem to be any way to force WME to ignore the port.

If WME was smart it would sense that the deck was in local mode (if connected to a powered deck) or timeout (if the deck was off or not connected) and indicate that no control was possible. The BlackMagic Design deck control & capture application works fine in this regard.

Maybe I’ll try to get my boss to switch to Darwin (QuickTime) Streaming server for Windows.

Brian Hughes

[Brian Hughes]

We’ve also had an issue with the BM drivers, a Kona SD card and Final Cut Studio on Mac OS X 10.4.8. This is on a 2001 model QuickSilver Mac. I tried the latest drivers (5.9) but they didn’t work, in fact the card wasn’t visible in the System Profiler. I downgraded until I found one that worked but I don’t recall the version number and I’m not at work. I’ll follow-up when I am.

Looking at the installer package and the System Profiler it appears there is something missing, a driver dependency if I recall, that isn’t missing on the older driver install. I’ll know more tomorrow.

Brian Hughes
Napa Valley College
Broadcast Engineering Program

[Brian Hughes]

Graffiti doesn’t ship with FCP 5, Boris Calligraphy 2.0 does. As far as I know Calligraphy 2.0 can’t be purchased from Boris, only as part of FCP 5. Boris Calligraphy 2.0 includes 4 plugins; new versions of Title Crawl and Title 3D, and the new plugins Vector Shape and Text Scrambler.

These plugins are still pretty limited compared to the full Graffiti package, which is up to v4.0 now. You can get Graffiti 4.0 for about $200 under the try and buy plan they offer. I once considered purchasing v4.0 but the interface is too weird, I have Motion and After Effects, and LiveType now supports vector LiveFonts. With all that, Graffiti isn’t all that appealing.

[Brian Hughes]

This developer article would seem to indicate otherwise: 64-bit Porting
Read the section entitled “Who should read this document” in the intro, especially the 64-bit myths.

Since few applications will benefit from being fully 64-bit, and as the 32-bit GUI can handle the 64 bit data, it’s unlikely that Apple will make major changes to the GUI any time soon. Reading that developer guide, it’s pretty obvious that the Cinema 4D could be ported to 64 bit. Cinema 4D is exactly the kind of application that would work well under the 32-bit GUI/64-bit processing model. The 32-bit GUI and underlying 32-bit libraries can already work within the 64-bit codespace, they just can’t access more than 4 GB of RAM.

Even if Apple creates an entirely 64-bit OS, Maxon would have to maintain 2 codebases, I seriously doubt they want to stop creating applications for Tiger and older versions of Mac OS X. Also unless Maxon creates the ability of it’s 64-bit apps to work with 32-bit plugins, plugin developers will have to create both a 32-bit and a 64-bit version.

[Brian Hughes]

Maxon is being a little bit disingenuous here, a background process is not the same as a command line application. Since the GUI of Cinema 4D doesn’t need to be 64 bit and since most of the processing is done by modules (and plugins), there isn’t any technical reason that Cinema 4D on the Mac can’t be made 64 bit.

It would require taking all those modules and plugins and sending them off into a background process. The GUI would stay 32 bit and all the ‘heavy lifting’ would be done in 64 bit. This is also a great way to go if you want to use XGrid and distribute the rendering. I suspect that Maxon just doesn’t want to redesign Cinema 4D to work this way.