Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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We researched a few of these open-source cluster file system apps while we were looking at build-it-yourself shared storage systems.
But after a couple days of reading and asking questions, I decided I’d have to buy stock in Excedrin if I were to tackle any of them. I’d stick with the pros in this area…Tiger Technology has a great solution that’s specifically for video editing, and there are a number of others out there as well. They’re all fairly pricey, but how many hours would you end up spending figuring out a free, open source, largely untested software app versus paying for one that’s proven and working in broadcast facilities?
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
When I did research for our facility, I did literally scores of searches for shared storage solutions for video editing, and Facilis Terrablock never once came up in the searches. I probably used 25 different search terms and would go 8-10 pages deep within each search. These included using acronyms like SAN, shared storage for video editing and dozens more. I did research on and off for literally a month, usually spending several hours a week looking at web sites, reading brochures, calling companies, requesting demos, specs, price quotes etc.
During all that, I didn’t even know they existed. I also did searches on this list and I only recall one hit that listed their product…and it was when we were deep into the evaluation process.
By that time we had ruled out SAN solutions for a variety of reasons, notably, we’d need to add new fibre channel HBA’s to 5 workstations as well as new cabling, but the biggest one being the way SAN systems work. We wanted true file sharing from a common media pool and there were only a handful of products that met that criteria without requiring constant logging on/off of volumes and assigning read/write priveleges.
In my opinion, Facilis needs to do a better job optimizing their web site search terms…as well as marketing their product. We might have considered them, but we ended up spending under $15,000 for a solution that works great for our needs, including all cabling, a new switch, and installation and configuration. So I doubt they could’ve come close to that price considering we would’ve had to add fibre channel HBA’s and cabling..and that’s only if we had direct connected to the unit and foregone a fibre channel switch, which adds several thousand more to the cost.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Bob,
Interesting to hear you had a similar experience and found similar results from a customer service standpoint. I don’t see how the other companies sell anything to anyone if our experience was indicative of their general customer service practices. The customer service from Tiger Technology and Apace (and their reseller IEEE, inc.) weren’t just good…they were great.
It’s a shame they’ve not cornered a larger market share. If they keep it up…I hope they will.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I recently brought up this very same point in a post about other shared storage companies.
While researching the exact same thing you are…reasonably priced shared storage solutions, just about every company we contacted either didn’t respond to inquiries, took days to do so, or when they did respond, didn’t or couldn’t answer the handful of questions I asked. Sorry…but this is gonna be a long post!
Emails sent requesting information went unanswered…phone calls went unreturned…and promised follow-ups never came.
We contacted all the major players in the under $25,000 arena…and a couple in the $35-$50,000 range.
The only companies that provided good service were Apace systems, Tiger Technologies and Aberdeen Systems. We contacted roughly 20 companies. Most sold complete systems, but a few were software or hardware only, like Tiger, which sells SAN software, and Aberdeen, which sells hardware.
Of the other companies, the ones that did finally respond usually did so with convoluted and confusing product descriptions or pricing lists…or in some cases, with recommendations or technical information that was flat-out wrong. Others made the technology out to be so complicated that it would require a team of IT experts to install and administer the system.
The company we chose (Apace), won not so much for their product’s capabilties or price (which were certainly important), but mostly because they gave us unbelievable service. Their reseller, IEEE, inc. answered emails within hours, and returned phone calls the same day, usually within the hour. They spent hours on the phone with us in conference calls prior to the sale explaining and demoing the product. Their engineers spent literally 3-5 hours setting up our system remotely…taking control of each PC on the network and tweaking settings. They did this two afternoons in a row…acting as if we were the only client they had.
After a power outage…when I couldn’t find the power switch to turn the unit back on (it’s the size of a pin head), I called, got a live-person immediately, and was up and running in seconds. Now granted…I’m pretty much an idiot for not being able to find a power switch…but it’s the only thing I’ve had to call for since the unit was installed 3 months ago. It defragments itself automatically and best of all works as advertised.
Bernard at Tiger Technologies was also very helpful and very responsive…and we seriously considered his product coupled with other hardware.
I just couldn’t imagine buying from some of the other companies. Many didn’t seem to have a clue about how their systems worked…how shared storage systems work in general…or didn’t seem to care about our requirements.
Most ignored my brief, consice list of requirements, which was copied into every email sent and read into each phone message I left. The sales person would ask me questions I had already answered in detail. One company made me fill out a long, poorly laid out PDF form before they’d give me more information. I had literally answered all the questions in my initial email…but that wasn’t good enough…they couldn’t provide a quote or answer my questions until I put that same information into their crappy, confusing form.
Companies would repeatedly tout how well their system worked with Avid or Final Cut…until I pointed out that we used Harris VelocityQ editing systems…a fact that was explained in detail in all initial emails and phone calls.
Some of these companies are among the biggest names in the shared storage business! How they got there I have no clue. Maybe they’re going through growing pains. All I know is if I don’t respond to our client’s emails within 24 hours, and follow through on what we say we’re going to do for them…they don’t stay our client very long.
I’ll take the small company with a solid product and great customer service over the big Kahuna with the fancy product and indifferent service every day of the week.
It doesn’t do much good to turn out a great product if your sales people can’t sell it and your customer service people can’t fix it.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Dave,
The .dps extension is the VelocityQ’s file format…and this particular system uses the software codec for i/o. The other 3 systems in our building use a hardware codec since they have the hardware and corresponding i/o plug-ins to read/write the files.
Perhaps that’s the issue since the problem occurs almost exclusively on this machine. We’ll try deleting those files from the problem timelines and see what happens. I thought I had our AE artist do this…but maybe not.
Odd that it only happens on CS3 though since we’ve used the .dps software codec on systems without the VelocityQ hardware with AE versions 5, 5.5, 7 and now CS3…and none of the earlier versions exhibited this sort of slowdown.
I’d start with the dps files. If memory serves me well, that’s a file extension for DIVX, and as a former host on this forum used to say, “DIVX is evil.” The reason: they’ve done so darned much tweaking and adjusting to DIVX that it can be hard to keep up with the changes. Besides, DIVX is more of a delivery file than an intermediate file, which is the best thing to use in AE.
If you’ve got those DIVX files in a higher-quality form, you’ll definitely see an improvement in the quality of your AE renders, and it just might solve your slow load times.
But don’t overlook those VelocityQ files, either. If they need hardware (a card) to read them, they may not run on machines without the corresponding software codec.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I believe their systems are LAN based and not true SAN’s. Which isn’t a bad thing by the way. We considered their systems recently but eventually chose the Apace vStor instead.
We couldn’t get EditShare to return emails or phone calls. It would take them a week to call us back after repeated inquiries…and it always sounded like the guy calling us back was a freelance or independent sales guy. He was never in the office, could never answer my technical questions and couldn’t tell me if the system would work with our edit systems (VelocityQ).
Apace guaranteed their system would work and if it didn’t they put in writing that we could return it for a full refund.
EditShare never would give me a written quote. The guy just kept giving me verbal “ballpark” amounts. Apace’s dealer (IEEE, inc.) would get me written quotes within minutes of me requesting it….then follow up to see if I had questions or needed other quotes with different configurations.EditShare wouldn’t or couldn’t tell me how many streams of video I could expect to get, instead saying it depended on this and that etc. etc. Apace guaranteed me 8-10 streams of real-time SD video with the system we were looking at….and it delivers.
There were a host of other reasons we chose vStor and you can read them here:
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/197/855153
Editshare has a great looking website and a lot of “hype” but I was unimpressed by the folks I talked to.
You should definitely explore them as they have a legion of happy users, but I’d give vStor a look too. Don’t let their less than flashy website fool you. They KNOW their stuff and have great pre-sales service.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
401 E. Indiana
Evansville, IN 47711
http://www.videomi.com -
Jeremy,
Thanks for your help and suggestions on this. I’ve read on other forums that some Windows users have gotten QT/Final Cut DVCPro50 files to play by installing just the DVCPro50 codec from the AceMegaCodec Pack. I typically hate installing anything from those big codec packs as the codecs usually cause more problems than they solve…but after getting a rather expensive quote to convert all the files (there are hundreds on the disk)… I’m gonna give it a try.
I’ll let you know what if it works.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
401 E. Indiana
Evansville, IN 47711
http://www.videomi.com -
We tried the Raylight demo. It’s very convoluted. According to the instructions, you have to install an ancient Matrox DVCPro windows codec to be able to work with the QT DVCPro50 footage on the Premiere or AE timelines, and the documentation on the DV Film website is cryptic and confusing. The link to the needed codecs was out of date, and finding them on Matrox’s website took forever.
Even after installing everything, it still wouldn’t work. We confirmed the files are indeed QT DVCPro50 by burning one to CD and taking it to another post house here in town with Final Cut.
It’s baffling to me that a free windows media player programmed by a Korean computer science student (KM Player) can decode and play hese files in real-time…but professional editing and compositing programs cannot.
If we need any of the DVCPro50 QT files we’ll just take them to somebody with Final Cut.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I know when our less experienced editors log stuff they always forget to check the settings in VelocityQ and Premiere.
We constantly preach to double check project management, capture/format settings and directory structures, but we still end up with occasional problems!
After I posted earlier we found a partial short-term solution. Premiere CS3 will load all the files, but the problem files show up without audio and Premiere thinks they’re single frame graphic files. So we can easily sort the “good” ones from the “bad” in a Premiere/Decklink timeline. We can then quickly render the files into Blackmagic uncompressed AVIs and play the timeline out over our SDI matrix switcher and capture into the VelocityQ. Not an elegant solution, but we won’t have to pay another facility to transfer them and we can get by the with files that are readable for this project.
The problem files show as DVCPro50 format in Premiere. I wasn’t aware Windows couldn’t play Quicktimes using the DVCPro50 codec. Is there a codec pack or trancoding software for windows that will?
Thanks….and you’re right…I am still nuts…but it’s our clients’ fault…oh and and my crazy Uncle Earl.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com[Chris Blair] “They literally used the phrase “we’re trashing all the assets and dumping the footage onto a drive” when they sent us the footage. The company that shot the footage was also unceremoniously “dumped” by the client and refuses to release the raw footage tapes without the client paying a rather large fee, which the client isn’t willing to do. ”
Mmm. That sounds like loads of fun.
[Chris Blair] “I also suspect that they were captured to a different codec than Kona.”
The Kona can capture to a multitude of codecs and very rarely (or only with certain workflows) do you capture to the AJA titled codec.
[Chris Blair] “Seems crazy you could do a batch capture from 8am to 8:15, then do another one from 8:25 to 8:45am (using the same tape) and the format and codec get changed. ”
Not to knock the editor, but if they don’t know what they’re doing, it’s really really easy. Click of a button is all, or perhaps the tapes were logged wrong in the first place, and even though they were captured 10 minutes apart, at the time the footage was actually logged (which could have been days or weeks before the footage was captured), the settings could have been set wrong. FCP’s format conundrum is endless. There’s so many it is totally easy to screw up if you’re not looking for it.
[Chris Blair] “And we’ve already contacted a couple of local colleagues that use Final Cut”
Perfect, but 300MBs is nothing. If you can post it, I will download it if your colleagues shrug their shoulders.
[Chris Blair] “Thanks for confirming I’m not crazy though!”
Oh no, you’re still nuts.
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Jeremy,
I also suspect that they were captured to a different codec than Kona. Not having worked in Final Cut, Seems crazy you could do a batch capture from 8am to 8:15, then do another one from 8:25 to 8:45am (using the same tape) and the format and codec get changed.
KMPlayer is a universal media player made by a Korean software engineer. It’s free and is quite an amazing program. It will play almost any file format known to man. I don’t know if it’s doing what you say to play the file, but you’re probably right as it shows the QT codec as being Apple Native MPEG 4, which I know for a fact it isn’t.
KM Player is just a player so exporting from it isn’t an option.
Recapturing isn’t an option either. The footage came from an ad agency in NY that essentially “washed” their hands of this particular client. They literally used the phrase “we’re trashing all the assets and dumping the footage onto a drive” when they sent us the footage. The company that shot the footage was also unceremoniously “dumped” by the client and refuses to release the raw footage tapes without the client paying a rather large fee, which the client isn’t willing to do.
The files are huge, too big to post. Most are at least 300MB, and some are over a gig. The average is in the 500MB range for each file.
And we’ve already contacted a couple of local colleagues that use Final Cut, so we’re probably going to just take the drive to them and let them output to DVCPro50 tape or transcode to Quicktime Component format, which we know we can transcode in large batches to our .dps format.
Thanks for confirming I’m not crazy though! I wasted hours today trying to convert a bunch of files that SHOULD have taken me about a half-hour to transcode.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com[Chris Blair] “The files that will open show that the codec is Kona V2.10 or something like that.”
Yep, that makes sense.
It would seem to me that some of those files were captured to codecs that quicktime does not support in windows namely dv50 or DVCPro HD.
[Chris Blair] “Even MORE bizarre is a generic media player called KM Player”
WIthout knowing what that is or what is does, I bet it’s some sort of real time decoder that is smart enough to know what to do with the files are at least smart enough to transcode them in to something watchable.
[Chris Blair] “The editor swore he captured all the files using the same codec, project dimensions, capture rates etc.”
Yeah, I’d hook them straight up to the polygraph…or actually they could have easily made an honest mistake. It’s easy to screw that up if you don’t know what’s going on in FCP and especially if you are bouncing around to different formats in between captures.
Any chance you can export from the Km player thing?
Any chance you can recapture the offending tapes?
Do you have a Mac with FCP on it for a bit of a diagnostic or in an even further reach can you post one of the problem files to look at?
Jeremy