[Cdagvid]

Thanks for the insight and wisdom guys– it’s much appreciated.

We shoot a lot of action, fake war type stuff- with explosions, lots of pyro, kicking in doors, helicopters, etc.; so I always have wonderful footage to work with. I do find myself cutting not only on the beats, but, for instance, on a rack focus and other natural transitions to subtle nuances in the music. But I do love to sync a good explosion or apex of a good action shot with a big beat or change in the music, like when the chorus kicks in. I also have my guys (we have 22 shooters in our dept) get a lot of close ups and face shots of the soldiers- those always play well to the slower sections of the pieces we edit to. There’s nothing like a good close up face shot of a worn out looking soldier, holding– then turning toward the camera, pouring rain shot with high shutter speed dripping off his face and about a 75% motion effect used on the shot…those types of shots are great to edit with and really help establish the feel I look for most of the time in the videos we edit.

Anyway, thanks again for the advice. You guys really gave me some things to think about that I can also pass along to my asst. editor to keep us out of the “cutting to the beat” rut. We usually have about a week to compile footage as in comes in from the field during the training cycles, then only a day or two to edit around a dozen 3-5 min. music videos. After doing this for almost three years, recently things have started to feel cookie cutter-ish…if that makes any sense.

[Cdagvid]

OK guys, thanks for the input…I figured it out. And as suspected, it was something simple.

I’m glad I stepped in before my tech guy and all his infinite wisdom striped the drives- which he wouldn’t have been able to do anyway, since Window didn’t even see the drives. After re-installing the OS, he didn’t install the SCSI controller drivers. I went to the ctrl panel and opened the device manager, and when I saw a bunch of question marks and exclamation points beside the SCSI adapters, I realized that he had only installed the OS and no drivers. I found them on the HP site, installed them and now the media drives are back online and all my media is still intact and healthy. Now I just have to find the rest of the drivers for the system since he apparently misplaced the HP restoration disc for the system that had all of the drivers on it. Anyway, thanks for all your advice. I’ll sleep a little easier tonight. 🙂

[Cdagvid]

A little more info on my previous post-

I posted a thread about a week ago about having really messed something up with Avid, I couldn’t even get the software to open. I talked to a few people and the consensus was, that I needed to back up my project files and reformat the system drive and reinstall Windows. I thought I’d be able to do this, and the media on my Avid drives would be OK. We’d just reformat, after which the media drives would just show up again as additional drives, reinstall Avid, and drop the project files back in the MCA projects folder…and voila- everything would relink, Avid would rebuild the database files, and things would be back to normal.

Apparently though, it’s not that easy. After reinstalling windows the system isn’t seeing my Avid drives and according to my tech, who knows computers- but not much about Avid- we have to reformat the external Avid drives in order for windows to recognize them. Is this the case? Or is there some other way I can get the system to recognize those drives without wiping them and losing almost a TB and 4 projects worth of OMF media files. As I said in the previous post, the external Avid drives I have are a stack of about 8 ultra 320 LVD SCSI drives. I believe they’re set up as raid 0 and show up in Windows as two seperate drives.

I know I should have backed up my media, but I had no way of backing up almost a TB of data. After this though, you can bet I’ll be getting a couple of external HDD’s. Sorry for the length of this post…I wanted to try to give the best explanation I could. I know I’ve probably been a little redundant, but I’m kinda freaking out here. What I thought would be a relatively painless process is looking like it’s going to cost me a lot of work. Thanks much for any advice.

[Cdagvid]

Thanks man, I appreciate the input….now begins the fun. The biggest pain is re-installing all of the third party apps like cleaner, sorenson, AE, Nero, etc.– and finding all of those 45 digit alpha-numeric authorization codes and CD keys. 🙂

But you’re right, it’s good to start with a clean slate every so often, it’ll be like getting a new Avid. Now I just have to finish my projects I’m working on and stripe my media drives. Anyway, thanks again.

-Travis

[Cdagvid]

Yeah, I’ve talked to a couple of people wiping the system is the general consensus. I really juked something up.

Question: If I back up the project files and leave the media files on the media drive alone, when I wipe the system drive and re-install Avid, and drop the project files back in the Avid Project folder, it should re-link to the media on my media drives and in theory, my projects should be intact….correct?

[Cdagvid]

Tim,

Off topic, but does NASA have more than one “video/ prodoction” section at JSS? I have a couple of buddies that work out there…Derek Sollossi and Steven Torres. I was wondering if you know them. Just curious.

[Cdagvid]

You’re probably talking about, “The Cutting Edge – The Magic of Movie Editing”
There’re quite a few scenes of Murch editing “Cold Mountain” on FCP while standing up (I found it interesting that he edits while standing). It’s a pretty interesting documentary. You can rent it off of Netflix if you’re a member…that’s where I found it. Amazon also carries it if you want to buy it.

[Cdagvid]

Thanks for the responses guys, I appreciate it. I’m a defense contractor, and we have some fiscal year end money to buy some high-end production toys with…

With that being said, I checked into Digital Rapids, and spoke with one of their sales reps. The solutions they offer are exactly what I was looking for. Not cheap mind you ($14k), but exactly what I was looking for. So thanks for the input. I knew a turnkey solution had to exist out there somewhere.