Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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So I’m the only person this has ever happened to? It happened on not just one… but TWO separate projects originally created in Premiere Pro 1.0 about 3 years ago. All files where in the exact same folder structures. Our editor did correct me in saying the files were on different drive letters than the original, but it that still doesn’t explain why some files loaded into the timeline, and others did not.
Thanks…
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
We’ve participated in some mentoring programs through our city school system. Are they a pain in the butt? Sometimes. It really depends on the kid they send our way. These are high school seniors doing what amounts to an internship to see how the business world works. They spend 6 or 8 weeks working with us for a half day 2 or 3 times a week. Some of the kids were great…jumping right into helping on shoots, learning to edit radio spots, learning to log and capture footage, archive tapes etc. Others…well…the best that can be said is they showed up. They had NO enthusiasm, couldn’t communicate with anyone, had no initiative, and were pretty much useless. They would end up sitting at a desk for 3 hours reading a book or doing their homework most of the time.
We’ve had the same experience using college age interns. Some are great (we’ve ended up hiring a couple); others are awful…becoming more of a burden on our time than a help to it.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I’m 47 and have worked in this business for 25 years, and I think that practice has become outdated in a lot of places around the country. I think most company owners, HR managers or anyone that hires people realizes that letters of recommendation are going to say wonderful things about the prospective employee. They don’t usually hold much weight with me.
I don’t even look that closely at resumes and cover letters (unless of course they’re poorly written with the typos others have mentioned). I rely much more on checking to make sure an applicant actually did the things he/she says they did. Graduated from XYZ college; actually shot the video that’s on their demo; actually designed the graphics etc. And I rely on asking potential employees how they would go about accomplishing a project (usually a real project that we’ve already completed or something that’s coming up). And I’ve even given prospective employees a small project to complete (with PLENTY of time to do it), with access to equipment, computers, software etc.
That process alone tells me if the person understands how to look at a problem, work through a solution, and deliver a solid piece of work without needing constant attention from others. A letter of recommendation, sealed or not, doesn’t tell me any of that.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I’ll second Bob’s post. Unless you’re very saavy with computer hardware and configuration, I wouldn’t even attempt to build my own SAN or NAS shared storage system for video editing. It’s worth the money to buy a system designed to do what you’re looking for.
There are systems coming to market that are using 10gig-E solutions that are nearly as fast as SAN solutions. You don’t mention if you’re doing HD or standard definition. That too is a consideration, as many systems available allow you to start with a solution that will work with SD, but have upgrade paths to move to HD when you need it.
We use a system built upon our existing ethernet in our office using Gig-E. The only additional things we had to invest in were a larger, better quality switch, a couple hundred dollars in cabling, and a large network drive for backup. Yes…even if you use RAID 6, you should STILL backup to another drive. If you had a drive failure on your NAS/SAN, it could take as long as a day to rebuild the data depending on how large your storage capacity is. So having that footage backed up will get you back up and editing much quicker than doing a drive rebuild, especially if you work on deadline oriented projects.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
If I buy an artist for a block of time and the job is cancelled, the artist would be reimbursed. I just don’t have to worry about it because my client contract covers such contingencies. PROTECT YOURSELF.
Unfortunately, contracts don’t always insure you’ll get paid. We’re dealing with a large company that owes us a significant amount of money who’s owner is a well-known multi-millionaire. We have a contract, written by our corporate attorney stipulating project and payment terms. The company in question is in the process of likely closing their doors. When we called this week to arrange payment on what’s due, the multimillionaire owner’s VP of operations actually said: “if you demand full payment all at once, it’s just going to piss him off and he just won’t pay you.”
This guy’s been sued by the State Attorney General in 2 states for deceptive advertising and business practices (we didn’t do those ads by the way)…and he refuses to pay either. It’s been 5 years in one state, 2 in the other. Nothing has happened to the guy because he can afford attorneys who wrangle things and keep him out of reach.
So contracts are great, but they don’t guarantee everything will go your way.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Bob Zelin can probably answer all of your questions better than me. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to take external Firewire 800 drives and try to configure them in a RAID for your network storage. I’m not even sure it’s possible to set up a RAID using 4 separate external devices. Nor is it a good idea to take a “PC you have lying around” and configure it as your server, especially since it’s the computer that will be directing traffic and managing data. You can get high-end HP and IBM workstations, still under warranty off Ebay for $500-$800.
As for the Intellistations on the client side, we’re running an Apace vStor using 3 Intellistation Z Pro’s (anywhere from 6-4 years old) and they work fine. We use $29 Intel PCI Gig-E cards in each PC, connected to a 48 port managed switch (recommended by Apace), and that connects to the vStor’s 4 Gig-E ports. So each PC has it’s own connection and IP address to the storage server (vStor). We don’t do any link aggregation or anything fancy like that. The only tweak is using jumbo frames set at 9014 on the Intel ethernet cards and the vStor. But…that’s not even necessary. We only set it that way because one of the Intellistation’s has a single processor, and it would drop frames occasionally on capture. The other 2 are dual processor and they never had a problem capturing. All have 2 GB RAM in them.
So I think your server/raid hardware and configuration is more important the the client PC. An Intellistation (unless it’s pre-2003 or so) should be plenty of PC to setup a shared editing enivronment. If they’re really old with slow processors, it could be an issue.
On our setup, each intellistation uses it’s on-board ethernet for connection to the rest of our network, so the only traffic that flows thru the Intel cards is the video and audio moving from the vStor. Using this model, you’d be better off getting a new or off-lease workstation to use as your server, put mutlipe ethernet cards in it (or a dual or quad port card), and get real RAID storage capable of very high sustained data rates. Remember, if you have multiple clients wanting to move data back and forth during an edit session, your server and it’s RAID storage better be able to handle 300-600MB sec transfer rates to keep up. Your server PC also better be able to keep up with all the demands that places on the CPU, RAM and operating system.
Again…I’m no expert, but I doubt the setup you describe will work. You’ll end up with a big headache. Don’t scrounge up old equipment and expect it to all work together and pump out the data rates and stability you need for video editing.
Hope that helps.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Without a written agreement, you don’t really have a leg to stand on when it comes to getting paid for the cancelled days.
But, I see both sides of this. I freelanced for a number of years in the early 90s, and have been a facility owner for the last 12. We use a couple of freelancers extensively, and when we have project cancellations, even if they’ve been booked for weeks for the project, they don’t expect us to pay them for the days they don’t work. They’d rather stay in good graces and get booked for the other 50 days this year we’ll end up using them.
However, we also occasionally use 3D animators and designers, typically booking them on a per project basis. To avoid just this scenario, we typically ask them to work for a certain number of days or hours to provide us with preliminary sketches, layouts, keyframes, designs…you get the idea. That way, we can see the direction of their work, don’t get committed too deep financially….and…if the project changes or is cancelled, we’re not out for the entire amount.
In your situation, I would weight the prospect of future work with this client against the fallout if you demand payment for the days you didn’t end up working. If there’s a good chance of future work, let it go. If they already are pissed at you and wouldn’t use you again…perhaps it’s worth pursuing. But you can bet they’ll tell every colleague about this at industry conventions, conferences and the Kiwanis Golf Scramble. So if it were me…I’d let it go.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I updated this thread exactly two weeks ago with seemingly good news. Unfortunately, I was premature! Today we learned that the client in question is shutting down the franchise corporation and all corporate stores. All but a handful of 70 or so corporate employees were unceremoniously let go today, including the VP of Advertising, who we worked with.
None of our contacts knew what was going to happen to the remaining franchise stores, but it’s unlikely they could continue without the support of the Franchise Corporation, which supplies them products, marketing materials and placed their media.
While we’ve received significant payments each of the last three weeks, we still have a sizable sum in current billing. Our corporate contacts told us, quote” “not to expect payment for those invocies.”
So while we collected on all overdue invoices, we still had current billing from the end of September totaling quite a large sum.
One of our contacts at corporate said they were told the recent financial meltdown, along with the stock market nose-dive, prompted the sole owner and CEO of the company to “cut his losses” and shut down. As an aside, their CEO is a well-known financial figure in the Northeast who owned a prominent NBA sports franchise from 1982 to 1986. He’s worth an estimated $50-100 million. So while he could easily afford to shut down this corporation and do it in an ethical and financially responible way. He’s chosen not to.
Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside!
The good part of this story is we were able to collect roughly 85% or all the money owed for work we did over the last 10 months, and it was a sizable sum that overall made it worthwhile to take on the account.
We’ve also been through the loss of a large client before…back in 2004 when we lost a large retailer who, at the time accounted for about half our revenue. So we know how to survive the loss of a high-dollar client. Unfortunately, that always means reducing staff and possibly selling equipment. But you do what you have to do to survive.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I’ve only tested it for a couple hour-long sessions. Our setup is on an HPxw6200 with 4GB RAM, WinXP, using Apace vStor NAS shared storage.
It played 2 to 3 channels of Blackmagic MPJG clips in real-time at full resolution (depending on how many effects you had on it).
The HPxw6200 has 2 older dual-core processors (4 processing cores), so it’s not the fastest PC around and that could contribute to it not handling more streams and effects in real-time.
It’s able to bring in just about any format at any resolution. Playback and real-time performance with non-Blackmagic codecs appears decent. I’ve stacked 3 or 4 layers of video with effects and it played back at reduced resolution to our NTSC monitor (but still good enough to see what you’re doing). That included AVI’s using our DPS codec, HD Quicktimes from Istock, and SD Quicktimes.
We did get a couple of crashes while testing. In each case we were trying to bring in a “non-supported” clip from our VelocityQ system. They’re .dps files and we just wanted to see if it would load them. Our VelocityQ can import a few files that aren’t documented, so we just thought we’d give it a try. So we were doing something we shouldn’t have…but not sure why it caused the software to shut down.
But we really haven’t tested it enough to give any sort of “thumbs up” with the Decklink HD Extreme. I think there are others out there using it successfully with Vegas, so you might ask on the Vegas forum too if you haven’t already. Plus, we have so much video in other formats that it’s hard for us to test a timeline using just the Blackmagic real-time codecs.
I do like the ability to build effect heavy sequences directly in the timeline…things like glows, light effects, complicated blurs etc. have to be done outside of out VelocityQ system so you have to plan how you’re going to build stuff. With Vegas, you can build just about anything directly in the timeline. But…there is a pretty steep learning curve. They use language and terms I’m not familiar with and I’ve been editing for 25 years. But I think if I spent a month editing real projects on it I’d probably like it very much.
When I have more time to test it I’ll report back.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
ninetto makavejev: This was certainly one of the most difficult pieces of hardware I have ever had to install.
Glad to hear it worked and that my suggestions helped. I agree with you that the Decklink HD Extreme is a very finicky piece of hardware….or at the very least, the drivers are quirky.
The card has some amazing capabilities, but getting it configured properly with various NLE software is a chore. The manuals devote more time to cabling than anything else, which is certainly important and very well done, but it doesn’t do much good to cable it right if a user can’t get it to “talk” to their NLE software.
But as I’ve said a few times on here, their cards, bridges and hubs are nearly half their competitors, so guess that’s the price we pay after the sale for saving some money up front.
If they could find a way to simplify driver installation and improve the stability and performance of those drivers, they’d blow away the competition.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com