Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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You cannot take drives that are lying around and build a network storage device that will work or be reliable for video editing, especially HD (even though it’s compressed) over NAS.
You CAN purchase systems that are made for this purpose and it will work (even for compresed HD over Gig-E ethernet). But I don’t think 3-5K would be anywhere close to enough to build a system that will:
Another issue you might run into is HDV is typically a nightmare to work with in terms of decoding for playback on most NLE systems. Many people transcode to a lighter codec, like Cineform, Matrox I-Frame, Main Concept and others.
A: work
B: be reliable
C: provide backup of your files.We’re a similar size shop (4 edits systems, 3 doing SD, 1 HD), and we spent well over 15k equipping a shared storage system (including backup and a new managed Gig-E switch and a few other things). We opted for the Apace vStor, since it’s affordable, works exactly as advertised, and it requires no third-party SAN/NAS management software. It also works with every NLE systems out there, including yours. They help you with technical configuration, they spent hours installing our system via “Go to Meeting” over the phone, and the darn thing just works. It’s been on now for 2 years and we’ve never had 1 second of down-time, zero crashes/lockups, and not a single instance of playback issues. The only “hint” of a problem we had was we couldn’t capture uncompressed SD in one of the 4 suites. Turns out they didn’t have jumbo frames enabled. Enabling it increases out read/write speeds by 15-20% and we were good to go on that.
You can forego the ethernet switch and hook most NAS based systems up directly to your edit stations ethernet card, but you need to have 2 cards in each workstation. One dedicated to connecting to the shared video storage, and a second that’s dedicated to regular file sharing.
And I cannot emphasize the importance of backups. If you get a 4TB shared storage system (runs between $7500-$8500), you STILL need a high-performance ethernet based backup drive as well. We use the LaCie rack-mount ethernet drives and they too have been rock solid over two years with ZERO downtime or trouble. But a 4TB LaCie ethernet drive still runs at least $1800 or so.
Others on the list here can pipe in, but you do not want to skimp on your storage if video editing is how you make your money. It will burn you…and you’ll spend more time troubleshooting and maintaining something you build than it’s worth in terms of money saved.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Ben,
Don’t forget about backups. You need to have a backup of all this data in case something happens to your primary storage. Depending on what you buy, that can add significantly to either your cost, or your time.
You could buy a large ethernet storage device or a large tape drive (we use LaCie’s rack-mount ethernet disks), and you’ll spend several thousand to protect 10-15TB of files, but you only spend 30 minutes setting up a simple nightly backup utility (we use Second Copy) that runs automatically and all you do it check it occasionally (or you can have it email you results each day which is what ours does).
Or you can spend less and buy individual drives and backup every so often. The downside here is it’ll still cost you a couple grand (at least) for the drives, and you’ll spend more time than you’ll want running and administering backups, plus you’ll end up with duplicates and unnecessary redundancy and restoring is a pain in the backside.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
It shouldn’t be. Main Concept’s codec doesn’t do anything that should cause that. Are you looking at the encoded video using the same media player on the same monitor you’re looking at the Final Cut sequences?
That’s the only way to do a fair comparison…by making sure everything is equal in the playback, meaning the monitor and the media player.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
You should also take a look at Apace and EditShare, as well as CalDigit, Dulce, Maxx Digital and probably others. There are solutions that work virtually “right out of the box” where you can connect directly to workstations with very little else needed, and then there are others that require switches, additional HBA cards for your workstations, servers etc. I wouldn’t just take the first recommendation I got without doing some fact finding on my own.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
David Roth Weiss: And, just because some of us choose not to settle for cheap homemade crap, that doesn’t mean we’re stupid, or that we’re dead meat, or that we’re out of touch, it just means we don’t settle for cheap homemade crap.
I have to agree with David. If it’s crap, people will eventually tune out and it will damage a company’s brand.
And I think Ned’s point is that even if he he went out and got a flip camera today and promoted that he does this type of work…it wouldn’t matter. Because the work is being done in-house with no intent or desire to go out of house. This would be understandable if it were companies with small communications budgets, but companies WITH budgets are doing it (hence his reference to Mayo Clinic).
I think a lot of this is reaction to hype. The camera has gotten alot of publicity, it’s dirt cheap and it’s easy to operate. That doesn’t magically make the people operating it good communicators.
It’s no differnt than the perception that creating videos that had a “youtube” look would draw attention. We lost some jobs over the last couple years to clients wanting that look. We even went so far as to create samples with no lighting and shaky handheld camera work…and the clients commented it still looked “too professional.” They actually WANTED the video to look amateurish. In one case, they produced it using students (it was a college recruiting video), and later, when they asked a group of incoming students to evaluate it, they all hated it and said it looked “amateurish.” So much for the “youtube” look.
In that case, I think it was a case of 40 and 50 year old marketing people creating what they THOUGHT young kids wanted to see…and it fell flat on it’s face. I think viewers are more saavy than people give them credit for. If it’s crap, people will tune out.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Thanks for all the replies guys. we’re not “losing” $25-40k per year as someone mentioned…that’s the total amount we’re billing clients for duplication per year.
You still have to figure in discs, ink, prep-time, cases, shipping, placing the disc in cases etc. So instead of only keeping a quarter per disc by sending the jobs out, we’d like to keep a dollar or more per disc by doing them in-house. We’ve also started losing duplication jobs on projects we produce because the clients are wanting to save that measly quarter we mark it up.
Again…thanks for the input and positive feedback on the printers and burning methods.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Rhozet, Telestream and Sorenson all have good white papers and tutorials on their sites as well…some are very comprehensive.
Telestream:
https://www.telestream.net/pdfs/user-guides/Simple-Encoding-Recipes.pdfSorenson:
https://forum.sorensonmedia.com/f/sfaq.phphttps://forum.sorensonmedia.com/f/viewforum.php?f=12&sid=764b73f8a716292978255b16b67cc758
Rhozet:
https://www.rhozet.com/support_whitepapers.htmlChris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
It might be a Blackmagic codec. Do a search for blackmagic codecs on google…or go to Blackmagic’s site and download any of their driver packs. Their site will ask for a serial number but just leave it blank and you can still download. Then install the drivers (it won’t install the drivers if you don’t have hardware), and it will install the codecs. Then see if you can play or work with the file.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
While Retrospect seems very popular, I’ll second that it “sucks!” We’ve used it for nearly a decade and I’ve tested probably 25 other backup programs during that time trying to replace it….but alas, few were any better.
A couple that we have moved to and completely ditched Retrospect are Second Copy, which isn’t a true back up program in that it’s designed to copy your files to a backup location (hence the name). Although it does offer compression, incremental backup and lots of other features similar to regular backup programs. It has NEVER failed and we’ve never had it corrupt a backed up file in over 4 years of use. Best of all it’s like $39 per license.
Another one we recently found is from a well respected IT company that a lot of IT pros use called GFI. They have a backup program that does traditional backup, it’s incredibly easy to use and in our testing seems reliable. And get this…it’s FREE. There are a couple small bugs in it’s interface, such as clicking on a restore icon will gray it out as if it’s not working. All you do is arrow off it from the keyboard then back onto it and it restores the functionality.
We’ve moved to using these two programs not because they’re cheap but because they work and they’re simple for non IT people to setup and use. As for back-up hardware, Apace makes near-line storage are pretty affordable prices, although I don’t think you’ll get 16TB for $7000. I agree with Bob, get SATA drives. You could even build a raid 5 or 6 with SATAs and get added speed and redudancy if one or two of them fail. But I bet you’d spend at least $5000 building a 16TB SATA backup in a simple RAID case.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I believe MediaCoder uses MEncoder to control how codecs encode/decode video. Have you messed around with any of the video filters either in Mplayer’s interface or within MediaCoder? If so, turn them off. About the only one that we’ve found worth using is the denoise filter (unless your source video is poor to begin with).
We use MediaCoder’s iPhone edition to encode videos for the iPhone and haven’t seen any color issues going to H264. Also, are you using the latest version of the software?
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com