[Dan Riley]

Sorry, I wasn’t very specific. My bad.
We are upgrading both the FCP system (currently G5) and the very old
AVID Meridian system (currently Windows 2000, not sure workstation).
Both are going to be Mac Pro 8 cores, one with FCP and one with AVID MC AD HD.
I was originally only thinking about local storage for both units.
This would have been maybe CalDigit or even MacGurus Burly box and 8 drives each
and a CalDigit or Sonnet card. I’ve got a Burly box unit on my FCP setup
that’s run 24/7 for three years and never had a hickup, and it’s cheap.

But now, after reading more about the Facilis system, I’m thinking
this might be a good posibility. You say you know of it?

Dan

[Dan Riley]

Thanks Bob.
Basically you answered my question which was, do people on the AVID
side of things use SATA storage like we do with FCP. The reason for the question is
the shop I work for is a mixed workstation situation, one AVID MC (meridian) and one FCP.
Both are SD today and will be HD within a few weeks with all new Mac Pros for both
systems and storage and monitoring. I’m helping decide what
storage to buy on the AVID side as well as for my FCP system. But right now
they are being advised to purchase a Facilis fiber system for the AVID and it’s very expensive, not only for the drive system but we’ll have to run fiber all over the place.
So I wanted to know if people using AVID HD (doing the DNX is fine)
can use maybe the Sonnet D800 8 bay (6 TB) or the CalDigit HD Pro 8 bay.
Sounds like you are saying sure thing, which is good news.

As far as protected RAID goes, the way I do it on FCP right now is RAID 0 and
back up all my projects individually to 800 firewire drives. This works well because
something I worked on a year ago I just hook up to the G5 and off I go.
If I need to work extensively with the project, I dump all the files back in the RAID
otherwise I get one stream of SD and multiple streams of DV from the backup drive.
So I’m thinking NOT to run RAID 5. Thoughts Bob?

Dan

[Dan Riley]

Glad to help.
You do the same for someone else next time, ok?
That’s the spirit of the Cow 🙂

Dan

[Dan Riley]

You are incorrect about how multiclips work.
They work similar to clips. If you double click on a multiclip
in the browser, it will load in the viewer. You can mark in and out points
on the multiclip just like you do on any clip. But the way most people
edit with multiclips is you drag the multiclip to your sequence
and edit it down to what you need. After a multiclip is in your sequence, then you enable
the multiple screens in the viewer by using the playhead sync box in the top
middle of the canvas, selecting ‘open’.

Under your RT setting (top left of timeline) make sure you enable multiclip playback.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

If you render a timeline sequence that had multiclips in it,
you will no longer see the multiclips when playing. If you stop
the playback, you will then see the multiclips in the viewer.
Just remove your render of the timeline and you will see all your
multiclip angles again in the viewer. Click the green button on the
left of your multiclip track (visable), then click again. This removes
the render. You could also do this for just one area of your timeline
by highlighting the clip or clips, then control click the clip and
un select clip enable. This will remove the render ONLY on the highlighted clips.
Then do again and select clip enable to get your clip back.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

When reading the info on the Flix Pro link above, it talks about the flash video
needing to go through a special flash server to be streamable. This I also
don’t know anything about. With my h.264 files, I just hit the “fast start”
for streaming, and when clicking on it on a web page, it streams without
doing anything extra. Do you know if Flash is the same way, with options
for making it streamable or not?

Thanks for all the input above too.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

The problem is FCP 5.1 and above uses a different plug in structure
than previous versions and Ultimatte isn’t updating their software
to make it work (at least that’s what they told me at NAB, after I bought
their software and sent it back in March because of this).
So it may work in Adobe products, even on an Intel machine
(even though the Ultimatte software is not universal) but it probably
won’t work within FCP 5.1 and above. But like I said, an email
or phone call to Ultimatte will tell you exactly what you need to know.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

Anything you do with the motion tab, especially rotation, will require rendering,
even with the fastest Mac. It will playback (RT function will show green line) but will require
rendering for output to tape or seeing it full resolution. You want a blue line up there.
If you are looking at it on an NTSC monitor through an AJA or BM card, after rendering, and it’s still blurry, I’d check my RT settings to see if you have it set for full resolution
when outputting tape. I just did some some rotation stuff in 5.1.4 last week,
turning DVD artwork to look like a DVD moving, and it looked fine. But I was using
artwork that had twice the video resolution available to work with. It wasn’t just
720 by 480 video. Maybe video won’t look as good when rotated. Never tried
rotating regular video, only artwork or graphic elements.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

First off, it’s not a universal app, and they are not planning on making it one.
Are you running it on a Mac Pro Intel machine?
Or when you say a Mac Quad Pro, do you mean a PowerMac Quad?
It will run on that machine.

Adobe what? The new Universal versions or the old one CS2 or before?

Dan

[Dan Riley]

Are people like yourselves reporting this to Apple?
I haven’t upgraded to FCP6 yet (in the middle of a project on FCP 5.1.4)
but it’s a multicam project like many I do. I hope Apple gets enough
info from you guys to fix this.

Thanks,
Dan