Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
-
All of ours were in IBM and HP workstations as well as a couple of rack mount waveform/vectorcopes. I believe I got the fans from a place called EndPCNoise.com but just google silent PC fans and you can find a bazillion choices. All you need to know is the mm size of the fans you’re replacing, the thickness of them and roughly the amount of airflow they move. You can typically find all that info right on the fans themselves. You also need to check the number of pins they have (usually 2, 3, or 4). Almost all the fans can be bought with whatever pin connector you need.
Here’s a link:
https://www.endpcnoise.com/cgi-bin/e/std/category=Quiet_Case_Fans.html
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
It could be a product of the media player interpreting two different media files differently. If I’m not mistaken, you’re playing those in Media Player Classic. That’s an ancient player. Try playing the two files in other players like VLC and see what they look like.
Another possible issue could be any direct show plugins you have installed, such as ffmpeg. The filters often order which codec they use to decode a particular format…for instance if you open an MPG2 file, it will use whatever MPEG2 codec ffmpeg has listed first as the one to decode it with, which may work fine, or could produce odd results, two of which are color inconsistencies and pixel aspect problems.
Bottom line, play the resulting file on whatever player it will be played on in it’s final use. Then figure out where the problem is. If it’s in the players and codecs, then all you can do is let the client know. If it’s in the encode, then you know to make some adjustment there.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
We need more information about what you’re using to compress it with, what flavor of MPG you’re exporting to (MPEG2, MP4), and any other settings in your export, especially aspect ratio.
Also…is your original footage 4:3 or 16:9?
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
You’ll also want to definitely check any iPhone versions because many of the presets that come in compression software (even high-end ones) doesn’t work right. For instance, Carbon Coder and ProCoder’s built in iPhone presets in fairly recent versions of their software produce great looking encodes, but they won’t play on iPhone version 3.x and higher. You can even follow an Apple tech writer’s blog instructions (to the letter) for inputting settings in those and other compression apps and the resulting files STILL don’t play on the iPhone without iTunes wanting to convert them.
https://homepage.mac.com/qt4web/compressforiphone.html
Handbrake’s and MPEG Streamclip’s presets do work nicely but if you have a lot of files to encode, you can’t batch load a bunch of sources and walk away and let it do it’s thing. You have to do them one at a time.
Here’s some other helpful info from our blog along with a list of our experiences outputting for the iPhone.
https://www.videomi.com/blog/?p=130
It was written for Windows users but there’s still good information in there that applies to settings as well as good info about Handbrake and MPEG Streamclip, which are cross-platform.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
Can you replace the fan with a low-noise version that moves a similar amount of air? We spent a couple of days replacing all the fans in our edit suite computers and even some dedicated gear, like our waveform/vectorscopes (which are rack-mount devices that use your NTSC monitor instead of having their own dedicated one). It’s amazing how much it reduced room noise. In two suites, we already had the computers in homemade isolation boxes (which also have vents and exhuast fans), so those rooms went from being annoying to almost silent. In the third, there’s no isolation box but the difference in noise is still amazing.
We also have a two year old Apace vStor shared storage system and it’s ONLY downside is how loud it is. It’s in a large closet in our building (that also has sound absoption foam on the walls and door interior) that houses our phone and all networking gear, and I swear when you open the door it sounds like a jet sitting on the tarmac. When I brought this up to the guys at Apace and mentioned we replaced all the oem fans on our HP and IBM workstations with low-noise or silent ones, they asked for more info and that’s one of the improvements they made to the unit.
BUT…heat is the number one enemy of hard drives and computer components, so it’s important to maintain airflow numbers (or at least keep them close) compared to the original fans.
Oh yeah…fans are WAAAY cheaper (about $6-$10) per than buying or building your own sound isolation boxes. The ones I built, while MUCH cheaper than the commercial ones… still cost about $250 when all was said and done…and while they look pretty nice too, they also took me about a day and half to build…far more time than it took to replace the fans in each suite.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
But even if you change your business model and get “leaner and meaner” as you say, we’ve found that the quality of work doesn’t necessarily improve. Why? Because instead of focusing on directing or editing or shooting, people are having to do all three. I remember when post houses actually employed graphic artists and compositors. Now, in most small to mid-size shops, the editor IS the graphic artist and compositor.
I’m fairly accomplished in both After Effects and Digital Fusion, but it’s hard to become REALLY good when you only work in each application a few times a month. I find that each time I sit down to composite, even if I have detailed sketches, photoshop keyframes or storyboards, it still takes me twice as long as it should to complete the project because I can’t remember how to do a certain effect or where to find a particular dialogue box or filter. Same goes with designing graphics. I’m also pretty good at that, but I don’t work doing design everyday so there’s no way I can be as fast or resourceful as a full-time designer.
I believe this new way of working handcuffs a lot of companies and makes it extremely difficult to improve the quality of their work. I find myself constantly going back to existing designs and layouts because the project I’m working on has an extremely tight deadline or a modest budget. Projects, effects, graphics all tend to start looking similar.
They’re all still highly professional, but they often don’t “rise above the crowd” so to speak. And this isn’t for lack of trying on our part…we’re constantly trying to get clients to try new ideas and new techniques, but there’s resistance there as well because many producers and marketing managers are people reassigned from other positions like Human Resources, Customer Service, Training etc. They’re not comfortable taking chances because they’re not even comfortable managing advertising and marketing projects, especially video projects.
Anyway…I agree that to survive and thrive you must adapt, but I also believe there’s a price to that, and in our neck of the woods, it comes at the hands of creativity and innovation.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
We’re a similar sized company to the original poster and we’ve tried sales people on three occasions. Two of them were account reps who handled an already established group of car dealers. The other was a part-time salesman who actually worked selling other stuff (marketing related), but thought our services would be a good fit to increase his income. In short, none of the three has ever brought in a single new client or new project through several years of being associated with them.
We’re a pretty well-established company in our area, have a very good reputation and are respected by people in the industry (at least I think we are). So it seems that by accident you could make at least ONE sale IF you were out there prospecting and making sales calls. The bottom line is that I don’t believe any of these folks actually did much prospecting or much in the way of systematic sales. The best salespeople I know are relentless and they’re incredibly organized and structured in how they prospect. They keep great records and know how to use CRM sofware. They know that the more people they get their name to, the more contacts they make, the more sales they’re going to generate. They also know and understand when and how to contact people and realize that it might take 8, 10, heck 25 sales calls to actually get a nibble from a prospective customer.
Anyway…we’ve found it to be an incredible waste of time and energy and resources to hire a sales person…UNLESS they are a true sales professional and can demonstrate a track record of generating sales in the past.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
I think most good business owners understand that paying people for the work they do, and especially compensating them (with pay or time off) when they go above and beyond their normal work hours, is the way to run your business. It’s how we’ve done it for 14 years.
Certainly there are scads of dickweeds out there that will take advantage of every loophole and every opportunity available (especially the ones veiled in legalese) to AVOID paying people. Some of those dickweeds actually end up running extremely profitable businesses. I’ve worked for some of these people and companies and can say first-hand they are usually downright toxic environments…with most people continually plotting their get-a-way or their payback to the boss or company. It often catches up with the business or owner (although some people run businesses like that their entire lives!).
In my book, success in business is more than just stuffing your pockets with as much cash as you can and taking advantage of the people who help you. But that’s just me.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
I’ll second that on double checking the deinterlacing. That’s why I asked about it in my first reply. WMV isn’t as good or as efficient a codec as H264, but there shouldn’t be that big a difference, especially at data rates above say 1200-1500Kb/sec.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
Are you using the same data rates? What version of WMV are you using? Version 8.0 used to do that but version 9 is a pretty good codec. It’s just a variant of the VC-1 codec that’s used for a lot of Blu-Ray DVD compression.
If you use WMV 9 advanced profile, you should be able to get output that compares favorably to H264. If not, try upping the data rate 20% or so on the WMV.
Some other questions:
1. Are all your encoding parameters the same, meaning are you deinterlacing, filtering, frame rates the same etc.
2. What are you using to encode your WMV…what application?
3. What are you playing them back on? Some media players aren’t real fond of certain formats/codecs. For instance, a media file will often look completely different in VLC than it does in Quicktime or Windows Media Player or RealPlayer.
Let us know.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog