Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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I’d be wary of a network expert if he/she has NO experience doing this for shared video editing. Most IT people I deal with have NO idea how to make a NAS or SAN or ISCSI or AoE system work with video editing.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Bob Zelin is probably better suited to answer most of your questions, but I’ll give you the short answer:
This might work…but it probably won’t. The only way it will is if students keep everything at DV quality.
You’ll also likely run into problems sharing Final Cut projects and media, and even with DV footage, you could still have data throughput issues.
What you propose would probably be fine for a fast shared storage system for normal file sharing. But video editing can be a beast.
An HBA is just an acronym for the network cards that you list. It stands for host bus adaptor and it’s a pretty generic term that can be used for just about any device that facilitates communication between two ports…but it’s sort of been adopted by the SAN community to define the fibre channel cards that connect to the SAN. So you already have those in the form of the Gig-E network cards.
The most glaring issue I see is using Linux and the software you list with Mac clients. If you’re not familiar with this stuff, you’re going to pull your hair out trying to get the server/RAID array configured with Openfiler….then pull out more hair trying to get it to communicate properly with the Macs. By the time you’re done, you’ll be a bald high school student.
Bob has a great tutorial on here that details how to do this sort of thing on a budget (and it’s geared toward Macs). Find it and read it.
It’s based on his years of experience and real-world testing in real production environments.One thing I’ll add…you’re to be commended for being forward thinking on this and for seeking help and advice on what you’re doing. That’s a great first step in doing this right.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
We’ve adopted this one as our internal business motto:
“We can do that, We don’t even need a reason!”
Carl Spackler (aka Bill Murray) from Caddy Shack replying when his greenskeeper boss asks him to kill all the gophers on the golf course.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Sounds like your workflow is fine. The only thing I can think of is your DVD burner is either going bad, or you need to reduce the burn speed. It might be that the data throughput from your hard drive to your burner isn’t keeping up with the data rate of the DVD (or vice-versa).
But I’ve never seen a burn complete without error if that’s what’s occurring.
So try burning at a slower speed (if it’s burning at 16x, change it 8x). Other than that I can’t think of any reason why this would occur.
Last thing…are you testing playback on mutliple DVD’s and computer software DVD players to make sure this is a burn issue and not some playback issue on perhaps a failing DVD player or a software setting on a graphics card or software DVD player on a PC??
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
It’s Blackmagic 10bit YUV uncompressed. It reads perfectly on both a software waveform (Adobe On Location) as well as coming out of the Blackmagic’s component output to a hardware based waveform.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
So you’re saying one burn of a project is shaky, then another burn of the same project on the same burner is not?
Usually…if people appear shaky when they move, it’s likely NOT a burning issue, but probably an issue where the field/frame handling is incorrect in the original file…or the original MPEG2 files are not compliant, and DVD architect is recompressing and messing up the field/frame handling.
Do you run the optimize function on projects to make sure your files aren’t getting recompressed?
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I’ll have to check. That system is tied up on a project at the moment. I picked the Blackmagic uncompressed 10bit option but didn’t notice which colorspace it used or even if it specified one. I thought it was YUV but will get back to you.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Interesting because that’s what I read in researching this as well…but what we’re seeing doesn’t support it.
The original file is an uncompressed AVI captured into a Blackmagic Decklink HD Extreme whose color bars and video read perfectly across multiple waveform/vectorscopes (actual hardware devices…not the software kind). But the resulting MPEG2 file from Carbon Coder (without any filters) comes out with black levels near 0 ire, and video levels about 10% higher than they should be. Obviously, the video looks pretty bad that way.
Applying the 601 shrink filter gets the color bars back close to where they should be, but the mid-levels are all a little low (compared to the original), and black levels are a tad high…so adding a slight contrast boost gets everything very close to the original.
We’ve done multiple tests with this too. Outputting an uncompressed AVI via export from our VelocityQ (it too looks perfect on the waveform/vectorscopes) as well playing the timeline out through SDI into the Blackmagic Decklink device in real-time. The two files (software encoded and real-time hardware captured) are virtually identical, so there’s nothing wrong with the source.
We’ve also used mutliple DVD exports out of Carbon Coder. So from what we’re seeing, either something isn’t right with the Main Concept codec, or in how Coder implements it. Again…not a huge deal as we’ve figured out how to get everything looking good, but very frustrating and time-consuming to have to spend all that extra time and energy to “fix” something that’s not supposed to need fixing.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
One of the best uses of video I’ve seen on the web is Cinevate. They make the 35mm Depth of Field convertors for consumer, prosumer and small professional camcorders.
https://www.cinevate.com/website/index.php
They have a video on the index page that’s very well done and is very persuasive…and if you go to their “video university” page there are about 20 videos that explain every facet of their products.
https://www.cinevate.com/website/index.php/cinevatevideouniversity/
Most are very well done, and some are just the founder of the company talking on cam, but are equally effective because he’s very natural and believable.
I was recently researching these products and while most people would rate their product as probably the 2nd or 3rd best option among the major players, if this was the only website I had visited and didn’t do a lot more research, I’d have been convinced their product was the best one for the job.
In my opinion it’s a very effective use of video on the web. Another good one is Benelli, the gun manufacturer. They have a ton of videos on their website. We do the compression for the ad agency that designs and administers their website. There must be over 60 videos on their site and many are extremely well done. Benelli produces their own videos too…which is amazing considering the quality and creativity of some of them.
https://www.benelliusa.com/videos/index.php
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Here’s an app that a lot of people recommend for converting quicktimes to .wmv.
https://www.geekmeetsgirl.net/visualhub_tools.php
It’s called VisualHub and some colleagues of mine who work in Mac based shops love it. Simple to use and stable according to them. The developer closed his doors last fall but has opened up the source code so it will likely continue to be developed. Any updates can be found on SourceForge under a new name (something like FilmRedux).
There’s another app that some users claim will convert .mov to .wmv but their website only mentions AVI. It’s called MPEG Streamclip, it’s free and can be found here:
https://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html
I downloaded the windows version and it’s a nice app considered it costs nothing. The Windows version converts to just about anything from the windows side of things.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com