Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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Thanks guys. All the posts mirror what we’ve discussed internally. We just wanted to get some other perspectives. And this isn’t the type of client that brings you a project where you can do estimates and contracts. We have probably a 20 projects going with them all the time, and each one goes through about a dozen revisions (almost all ridiculous in nature). They’re totally schizophrenic in how they approach TV ads and other video projects, so it’s REALLY difficult to track each one.
They never ask for estimates or provide us with budgets…so there are no contracts for most projects. The only thing we get contracts for is large shoots where we incur a lot of expenses. Our invoices are net 30 days so they’re way past due on a large amount of receivables.
Thanks again for the help and suggestions.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I’m late to this discussion…but I enjoyed reading all the posts and lists. Ultimately, I think the reasons clients come back is because they get their problem solved (whatever it might be). And as others have pointed out, that “problem” can vary greatly from client to client.
I think Walter came closest to what my general answer would be: excellence and relationships. We get the jobs from the clients we connect with. It doesn’t seem to matter how fancy our demo reel is, or how “cool” and comfy our facility might be. The bottom line on most projects is, “do we click with the guy or girl making the decisions.” Do we “get” their problem and understand what it is they need to solve it. And finally, can we do it within their budget and time constraints.
I once asked a long-time, very devoted client to rate us. I was shocked at the response. I thought she’d write a glowing review of her experience. Instead, she wrote that early on in the project she was worried, and that she got frustrated at how long the project took to complete (much of which was their fault I might add). She went on to rate our customer service as only average!
Ultimately, she was VERY pleased with the result, but it opened my eyes and made me realize that my perception of our company is far different than that of even one of our best client’s!
I always believed we gave GREAT customer service..and we have many clients that tell us that unsolicited. But that doesn’t mean that EVERY client believes that. So it was a wake-up call to me to do even better…especially with this client, who is a dream to work with and consistently brings us interesting and unique projects.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I’ll back up what Bob says. Is it possible to “build your own affordable SAN?” Yes. Is it quick and easy? Nope. Will the savings from “building it yourself” be worth the time and frustration of installing and configuring it yourself? In my opinion…a BIG NO!
We considered building our own shared video editing setup, but when it comes down to it, what you’re paying for with the people that sell these “ready to use” setups is the small little tweaks in the configuration that ensure the system works, AND…more importantly, you’re paying for the customer service for setting up, installing and troubleshooting the system after the sale.
I could’ve bought the EXACT same hardware that came in our Apace vStor for around $4500. But I opted to buy Apace’s entry level box for around $9000. Why? Because they’ve tweaked the Linux OS, tested the unit extensively, and have several other software modules that allow their box to specifically work with non-linear editing applications, including AVID, Final Cut and many others.
Was it worth the extra $4500. HELL YES. These guys spent hours, yes hours on the phone with us, taking control of each edit PC via the internet, and configured each one for us for us remotely. When we had a few playback problems, they again spent HOURS on the phone tracking down the problem (it ended up being cabling). When we were having capture problems, within hours of my email request, they emailed detailed, step by step instructions on how to adjust the Jumbo Frames settings on each PC and the vStor to improve performance (we went from an average of 75MB/sec write speeds to almost 100MB/sec; and from 45MB/sec read speeds to nearly 70MB/sec).
So the moral. Yes…you can build your own system, but from a financial perspective, it’s only worth it if you have a LOT of time and a LOT of patience, and a lot of KNOWLEDGE about networking (gigabit or fibre channel).
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
We don’t use an EditShare system…but are using a similar system called vStor. We explored EditShare’s products back in January but decided against using them because we couldn’t get anyone to return phone calls, answer basic questions, or provide written quotes.
If you’ve gotten past that hurdle with them and feel comfortable with what you’ve heard…I’d ask them to give you names, email and phone numbers of clients using similar setups. That way you can get real-world answers instead of answers from some marketing guy.
I’d also ask EditShare to recommend a system based on your needs. You’d want to get a system that provides plenty of “headroom” in terms of stream counts just in case you need to grow or move up to higher resolution video.
Our vStor system is capable of serving about 10-12 streams of DVCPro50 SD video simultaneously (that’s roughly 80-100MB/sec throughput using standard GB ethernet), although if all 4 systems are running complicated, layered timelines, we may occasionally experience a flash frame or hiccup. Since all 4 stations are rarely being editing on at the same time…it’s a non-issue. We also occasionally get a clip failure on capture if both our ingest stations are capturing at the same time. But our edit systems automatically retry failed captures until they succeed…so that is more of an annoyance than anyting else.
Had we wanted higher stream counts and throughput, we could’ve bought systems with more drives in the array, or their systems can be “stacked” to increase real-time streams. I don’t understand the technical side of it, but you can basically buy two of their entry level systems, cable them a certain way, and you double your real-time streams. It was actually cheaper to do that than buy their their 2nd tier system. So they were recommending setups to me that were several thousand dollars cheaper than what they could’ve recommended. The drawbacks of course are they draw more power, add noise from the fans (a LOT of noise), and cabling them is more complicated.
You also need to consider backup. We bought LaCie 4TB ethernet drive to back up video, audio and shared project files and use Second Copy software to back everything up each night. That way, if the vStor fails we have all our files in their original form (instead of some proprietary compressed backup).
Bottom line…for the coin you’ll spend on an EditShare setup, they should be tripping over themselves to configure a setup and get your a quote based on your needs.
Our experience with them wasn’t very good, but maybe we just hit them on bad days (several of them since I called and emailed multiple times).
Good Luck
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
No help here. We use it with 3 VelocityQ and 1 Blackmagic Decklink system with Premiere and After Effects. However, we talked with people before we bought it that were using it with Final Cut. Ask the guys at Apace or your reseller to give you names of people using it with Final Cut and call them.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I’m late to this thread but have some insight.
We own an Apace vStor, and while we don’t use Avid or Final Cut, it works exactly as advertised. Additionally, their customer support is among the best I’ve ever experienced in the 25 years I’ve worked in video production.
Everything they told us, and every claim they made, was accurate and true. I’d ask Apace to give you the names and emails of a few people that have bought their system and are using it with Avid. Then get direct feedback. But I would bet it works with Avid if they say it will.
As for managing collaborative projects etc. We dreaded the thought of creating a workflow system (directory structures, backups etc.), but in reality, it wasn’t that hard. We capture to our vStor from 2 VelocityQ workstations. 4 total workstations access video/audio files simultaneously, and all can use 3-4 real-time DVCpro50 quality streams (about 8MB/sec) at the same time. That’s 10-12 real-time streams. For projects and graphics, we use a LaCie 2TB rack-mount ethernet drive, and for all backups we use a 4TB LaCie rack-mount ethernet drive. All our workstations have dual ethernet, with one GigE port connected via a managed switch to the vStor, and the other GigE port connected via the managed switch to the rest of the network where the LaCie drives reside. A managed switch allows you to specify bandwith on various ports, so the vStor ports are setup completely separate from the rest of the network and each has 200GB of bandwidth assigned to it. This doesn’t allow the office network to ever interfere with the vStor.
The weakest link in this setup is the LaCie network project drive(s). It’s (they’re) fast enough, allowing us to work almost seamlessly on projects, but we do notice occasionally pauses and delays that didn’t exist when we edited from dedicated, direct attached system and project drives. This occurs mostly in VelocityQ with no noticeable difference in Photoshop, After Effects, Digital Fusion etc. VelocityQ creates a LOT of “temp” files of graphics, audio etc., and saves a bunch of backups of timelines and project settings, so we assume this is what causes the small delays.
The LaCie drives test out at about the same speed as our old direct attached SCSI system drives (25-30MB/sec sustained), which is really good for a NAS based setup with consumer drives, but they don’t support jumbo frames, which according to people I’ve talked to, would probably eliminate the pauses.
When we mentioned these delays to the guys at Apace, they actually recommended we just use the vStore for our projects, saying they have several Avid and Final Cut customers that just do everything on the vStor. They just setup different volumes (which look like connected hard drives to the user) for video, audio, and projects.
But we have so much stuff already on the LaCie drives, we just decided to live with the occasional pauses, which typically occur a few times an hour and result in about a 2 second delay when doing non-critical stuff. It never occurs during playback or export, so all our editors just said, hey, we’ll take that in exchange for the huge amount of time we’re now saving by NOT having to move files and projects and try to figure out where or when somebody is going to edit or capture something.
The most difficult and time-consuming part of the switch was moving the massive amount of data to the new drives and transitioning from the old, direct-attached setup to the shared workflow. This took months, and we still occasionally open an old project and have to do a lot of re-associating and moving of files.
But moving to shared storage is a HUGE boost to productivity, and makes backups soooo much easier to manage. I actually don’t think it’s as hard to setup as Bob makes it out to be, but if you’re not familiar with it, it does make sense to hire someone to do it. We only hired someone to install and setup our new GigE switch and help setup all the various shared drives. We handled the set-up of the vStor and the workflow management ourselves. Once it was setup and working correctly, we pretty much have forgot about it. We’ve had to re-boot the vStore once in 6 months, and that was after a power-surge. Same goes for the LaCie drives. They run 24/7 and we’ve not had a single issue that’s kept us from editing (knock on wood.)
Hope all that helps
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I’m not Bob…but Rorke Data is pretty well-known in the non-linear world. Most of their arrays used to be part of OEM turn-key systems. We have a VelocityQ turnkey we bought in 2003 that uses a Rorke Data SCSI Array with Seagate drives in it. I believe they use Seagate drives exclusively in all their systems.
From my experience they’ve not done a very good job of marketing their products to small to mid-size shops, and they’ve often priced their stuff out of those companies budgets.
I find their web-site and product descriptions to be really confusing, but I know they have a pretty solid reputation overall. They’re actually part of a larger company called Bell Micro that has several storage divisions, so they’ve been in the game for quite a long time.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.comChris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I’d have to agree with Bob’s assessment here. The setup sounds unnecessarily complicated. I think the first question that needs to be answered is if this is a setup someone is recommending? If so..who?
Or…is this a setup you’ve configured? I know 2 Degrees Frost has pre-configured, turn-key solutions for video editing so I’d be curious as to why you’d need a custom configuration like this.
We spent 2 months researching low-cost shared video storage systems, and there’s an incredible amount of confusion out there…with a lot of it being created by the manufacturers themselves. Most of them throw around terms like block level, volume-locking, file-level, stacks, and layers…which means absoutely nothing to most facility owners or production managers tasked with buying and implementing these systems.
Another important distinction is SAN vs. LAN. The lines are blurring between these two transport methods, especially with 10 gigabit ethernet becoming affordable. That said, there are still advantages and disadvantages to the various transport protocols (LAN, iSCSI, Fibre Channel, and AoE which is Sata over Ethernet). One of the most popular low-cost shared video editing solutions is EditShare, a gigabit, LAN based system. And we use a 4TB, LAN based Apace vStor system. So before you go with a certain transport method, it would be good to figure out if it’s the best method for your facility.
We do virtually no HD…so our needs were for a system that could support 4 edit stations using multiple channels of DVCPro50 SD video.
A lot of the systems out there were serious overkill, and we couldn’t afford them anyway. The only ones that worked the way we wanted and that we could afford were EditShare and Apace’s vStor. Apace guaranteed it would work with our edit system (VelocityQ), and EditShare wouldn’t. We bought a vStor.
Using multiple disk-speed and data rate software utilities…the vStor tests at roughly 50-60MB/second sequential write speeds and about 60-70MB sequential read speads. Random access speeds are through the roof. But those speeds don’t tell the whole story. We consistently get 4 channels of real-time SD video across 3 edit systems with video at DVCPro50 and higher resolutions. We can capture uncompressed all day long, and also play back 2 channels of uncompressed in real-time across 2 workstations simultaneously. Some of this performance defies explanation, since 10-12 channels of DVCPro50 video SHOULD require at least 75-90MB/sec data rates, which the vStor has never shown in tests. And that’s not taking into account some of the overhead needed for the OS (Linux) and TCP/IP. So performance is about more than just raw data rates when it comes to video editing.
The best thing about it is that it’s simple to install and cable, and relatively simple to setup and configure via software. They help you every step of the way, and once it’s setup, it’s pretty much transparent.
The bottom line is the setup you describe sounds really complex. From our experience…it doesn’t have to be that way.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Walter,
You wrote:We work very hard to produce a great build-to-order solution to our customers for a very good reason – we believe a happy customer is a customer who may refer us to their friends/colleagues which could result in more sales. That’s happening right now and is very important to our bottom line.
I welcome your questions and I won’t talk down to you. My aim will be clarity.
Chris writes:
That was a much better explanation of what you guys offer. But even some of that explanation was a little over my head. I understand it, but it’s still pretty technical. My point is that every facility ownwer I know is NOT a computer expert. They’re most certainly not an expert on shared storage and the various architectures that make them work. When you guys start talking about “clusters” and “layers” and “software stacks,” it doesn’t mean anything to us.
It reminds me when we first opened our company 13 years ago. We’d bring ad agency producers and account executives in for meetings and we’d go on for 20 minutes about our great editing system and how it was capable of 2:1 video compression…the best in the world at the time, and how we were using cameras and formats that gave them the highest quality…etc. etc. The ad agency folks’ eyes would start to glass over and they’d lose interest. What we learned is: “they didn’t care about the hardware and compression and formats.” They just wanted us to solve their problem. They didn’t care how. As long as it communicated their message and looked good. We could’ve shot with a Fischer Price camera and if we made it look good and came in on budget…we were hired.
The lesson is that all the technical stuff ultimately doesn’t matter. It just needs to work and solve the clients problem with the least amount of pain and suffering! I think the biggest point to remember is that a shared storage system never made a company money. It’s the benefits of what the shared storage system is able to do that helps a company make money. So all these companies out there selling these systems tout the hardware and technical specs…when what facility owners want is solutions to their editing problems. Namely…having to constantly transfer footage; having to move project files from station to station; the complication of backups when files reside on multiple workstations and hard drive arrays; the issue of constant file duplication on those backups, which wastes hard drive space and further complicates administration of backups; the ability of multiple editors and effects artists to work on the same project from the same media pool simultaneously. I could go on for another paragraph.
Anyway…I would’ve loved to evaluate your products when we were doing our research and I can’t explain why our emails didn’t get through …but they didn’t. One was sent from my home computer and emailed directly from our web-server email page. The other was sent from my work computer via Outlook. Neither bounced back so I can only assume they went somewhere.
Several other emails sent during the same email sessions got to their destinations so it doesn’t seem like there was a problem on our end. We’ve had a couple of experiences where our URL was mistakenly blacklisted by internet providers and all our email ended up in our spam folders, but it was pretty obvious because the entire office stopped receiving email and it only took a few hours to realize something wasn’t working. One look in our spam folder on CleanMail.com and there were all our legitimate emails. We simply mark the legitimate ones and they all pass through to Outlook…and the blacklisting is fixed with one phone call.
Anyway…I appreciate your response and I appreciate the complexity of your industry. But as a 25 year production veteran and facility owner, what we all want when it comes to products and vendors is: clarity, simplicity, and products that solve our problems. All the other technical mumbo/jumbo is just hype. Maybe there are IT guys out there that like all the stuff, but there are thousands of production facilities worldwide that don’t employ IT people. And many of those folks will be looking for shared storage solutions in the near future.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
In regard to Robin’s note about priding themselves on quick response. When we were researaching shared storage solutions back in the early part of this year, we submitted a detailed information request on the website contact form and never received a reply.
After that I submitted a detailed direct email to sales@2degreesfrost.com and also never received a reply. Had we gotten a reply I would’ve almost certainly followed up with phone calls.
We check our spam filters daily (through Clean Mail), and I’m especially diligent at checking when I’m waiting for a reply from a company I’ve emailed for the first time.
It doesn’t do much good to have a website, contact form and direct email contacts if they can’t get through to people or if they go unanswered. I can only assume they were filtered or simply went unread.
Many facility owners on the Cow are like me. Just about every workday is spent editing, shooting or meeting with clients. I do all my equipment and facility research in the evenings online. Then do phone inquiries, conference calls etc. in one big batch on a slow day.
We researched probably 20 different solutions when we were looking at shared storage. I simply didn’t have the time to call each and every one of them, explain in detail our needs, and then listen to the answers
Anyway…we were intrigued by your products, but ultimately spent our time evaluating the products from people that seemed to want our business. As noted in earlier posts, that included barely a handful of companies.
As an aside, we also contacted Coraid. They took over a week to respond to an initial email…and the response we got was so vague…so cryptic in it’s product explanation, that I immediately crossed them off the list.
I think what everybody on these groups is trying to tell companies is this:
We need easy to understand, clear product descriptions and we want products that solve our problems. I’ll give you an example directly from your website of something that confused me during my research.
Your section on AoE says:
With 2ºFrost proprietary SAN-Adapt™ software, SATA-SAN supports cross-platform SAN shared filesystems FibreJet™ and MetaSAN™ which provide complementary high-performance approaches to SAN file sharing for content creation, video and audio editing SAN workgroups and Servers/Clusters.
What does that mean? The top of your AoE web page says it’s a turn-key solution. Then this paragraph suggests I would need either FibreJet or MetaSAN software to get file-sharing for video editing. FibreJet is something like $1500 per editing seat, and MetaSAN is roughly $1000 per seat. I don’t call that “turn-key” when I have to pay anywhere from $4000-$6000 to get file-sharing with a system. If FibreJet or MetaSAN are included in the turn-key price…that should be made clear.
Anyway…I’ve discussed the shared storage issue with dozens of facility owners over the last year, and they all agree that the industry makes it:
-Overly complicated
-They talk “down” to facility owners when it comes to how the various systems work, especially when it comes to discussing block-level and file-level issues.
-Many of the storage companies can’t accurately explain the difference between SAN, LAN, ISCSI, and AoE.
-Most of the companies making products don’t seem to understand what small to medium sized post facilities need….which is a simple to administer, transparent storage system that allows multiple editors to edit from the same storage pool simultaneously.
Anyway…I’m certainly not trying to slam 2 Degrees Frost, as their products and track record seem to indicate they’re a very progressive company. But at the same time, none of that matters if no one follows up when a customer requests information.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com