[David Bogie]

Sorry to butt in, I may be totally misunderstanding the thread.

Using advice from Brian Maffitt, I have used RGBA files to hold what are essentially four grayscale images for use with compound effects like Card Dance. Each of the four different grayscale movies carried by the file were extracted to control different aspects of the Card Dance (or Shatter) effects system. I do not know why all four channels could not be pulled for separate alphas but you’d simply use two copies of the file in order to have RGB and multiple alphas.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

You want to talk to Boris or visit the Boris effects forum here on the cow.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

viusit the adobe.com after effects forum and search for 3d and anaglyph (that’s the tech term for red/blue glasses effect).

Some interesting work has been posted.

AE can be used as the output engine to create filed-shutter glasses stereo files and polarized files but it will NOT create the footage. However, you can, within AE’s silly 2.5D world, create rooms and environments and fly a pair of inter-occular cameras through the scene. You can only render one camera at a time, though.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Yes. Sorry it can’t get much more clear. Problem is, without a specific trailer to deconstruct, I don’t know what you mean by your descriptions and, worse, all of those folks use dramatically different approaches to achieve the same sort of visual effects. You might be able to research the trailer producers and even find some “how we did it” blogs.

But, besides simply recommending you simply pick one and try to emulate it using only what you know how to do now, I hope you get some more helpful suggestions.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Hard to know where to start but here’s one way, there are dozens of others.

1. Create a comp that is, say, 1000 pixels square.
2. Create a solid that is, say, 1000 by 500 pixels. Make it white.
3. Apply any effect you want to the solid to make the edges wiggle or pixelate or blur or get fuzzy or turn colors.
4. Precompose.
5. Bring the precomp into your pipe comp and use it as a track matte to reveal the pipes. You wanted the matte comp to be so large so you can move it around.

Much easier to show you than to explain it.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

22 lines should be 22 pixels.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

While I hope you find an easy fix, do you mean the Apple XServe RAID? I think the number of xRAID users here on the cow can be counted with one finger. You.

Time to call Apple.

Or drop by apple.com’s support discussions. Tehre is a forum for xRAID that gets one or two posts a month. From the folliwng interchange, it doesn’t look good.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1037965&tstart=0

Hi, we have an XRaid populated with 14 x 250gb disks, each controller has six disks formatted to raid 5 plus a hot spare. The two controllers are then concatenated and the host machine (G5 Mac via dual fibre) sees this as a single 2.3tb volume.
Twice now we have experienced a disk failure (the XRaid is nearly 4 years old) and the Xraid rebuilds itself using the hotspare.
All then looks great from Raid Admin but the volume just won’t mount onto the host, we get an error message ‘unable to read disk, initialise or eject’. We can see the volume in Disk Utilities but requesting a mount from here does not work. We have restarted everything multiple times! We have tried to repair from Disk Utilities.
On both occasions the advice from Apple Support has been to reformat the entire Raid (luckily we have a full backup) but it just seems odd to me that Raid Admin tells me everything is OK. Is this happening because of the concatination? Would we be better off configuring the XRaid differently after this reformat?

hanks
\
> Hi Dan,
is this only happening during the rebuild to HS or also after the rebuild operation has completed? When the hot spare jumps in, have you checked if it belongs to the same controller where the disk failed?

>>I don’t have any experience with this, but when the RAID rebuilds, it’s in degraded mode. That’s normal. With another level of RAID concatenating the degraded RAID with a non-degraded RAID, I can see where problems could develop.
I keep my two RAID5s separate so that if one dies, I can still use the other one, and if the usage of both is less than 40%, I can run the whole thing off of one until I get the other back up.
<< >>>Yes, during a rebuild the LUN would be in degraded mode, but it should still be mounted and accessible by the host, although with a performance impact, at least that’s how it works on most other entry level storage arrays. I don’t think Apple arrays can handle this type of configuration. Either Apple Support provides you with more useful information than completely destroying the RAID Groups and then rebuilding them, or you do what Roger suggests, by having two separate LUNs presented to the host, so you don’t have this issue every time a disk fails. Did you use host software to create the meta LUN? Ultimately it would be useful to get some type of host and array log to see the configuration. Like I said, reading through the data sheet of the XRaid, I don’t think Apple supports high availability and redundancy when the LUNs of both controllers are concatenated. <<< >>>>>i Dan, reading a bit about the architecture of the XRaid I found the following useful information:

Hot Sparing
For each RAID controller, any drives not assigned to an array are automatically used as global hot spares. If a drive fails, the RAID controller can automatically rebuild its data on the spare drive without requiring intervention by the administrator. The rebuild operation occurs in the background while the controller processes normal host reads and writes, so that service continues uninterrupted. This gives the administrator ample time to replace the failed drive. Xserve RAID automatically configures the drive as a new hot spare for the array.
As I mentioned before, typically the rebuild occurs in the background without much impact to the host. If you cannot mount your file system when a rebuild occurs, then there is something quirky about your configuration. I also found the following info:
Critical Path Eliminated
The Xserve RAID architecture is designed to reduce vulnerability to a component failure. With this in mind, Apple built Xserve RAID around a midplane with a passive data path, a feature not commonly found in other storage systems of its kind. The midplane is the central connector between the drives, RAID controllers, power supplies and cooling modules. Most RAID systems depend on the midplane to relay data and instruction sets between drives, and a failure in the midplane can impair data availability. In Xserve RAID, all data passes through the independent drive channels, which are simply held in place by the midplane.

As I understand it, each controller should have access to every single disk in the array. I’m not sure if meta LUNs are supported on this type of array, but if you can create a RAID-5 with all disks, but one, which is then your hot spare, you would then have one large LUN presented to the host, through one controller. If the controller fails, the other should take over. That makes the most sense, because that’s how it typically works with other storage arrays. The only problem with RAID-5 is that only one disk can fail. If two fail you will have a double faulted RAID group. Then the data cannot be rebuilt from the data and parity on the other disks.
I hope to have pointed you in the right direction.
Cy
<<<<< Hi, thanks for the responses. To answer a couple of the questions, we actually lost the mount at the point the faulty drive changed to 'amber' (failing drive). Apple Support then advised us to remove the failing drive to kick-start the rebuild process which is exactly what happened. We did not try to mount during the rebuild, just left it overnight and all looked fine in Raid Admin the next morning except that we still could not mount. The indication from support seems to be that the Concatenation is the problem, causing the combined published volume to be unreadable on the host. As far as I can remember we just used Disk Utilities to concatenate together the two arrays to mount as a single 2.3tb drive. We've restored our data now to a big Lacie drive and are about the reformat the XRaid and I think we will publish each array as a separate volume this time - it just seems to defeat the purpose of raid to have to reformat after a drive failure! Thanks >>You have two different types of RAID that you’ve been using. Two RAID5s which are the two sides of the XRAID, and a sotware RAID1 that DiskUtility created from the two RAID5 volumes. The software RAID is the one caausing the problems. Even though I’m sick of Apple at this point, I would bet that the two RAID5s are actually fine.
Software RAIDs have never really been considered robust, and hardware RAID is preferred because of that.
Roger << Roger Thanks for this - I'm sure I know the answer to this but can you just 'turn off' the RAID 1 and publish the two existing RAID 5 volumes without a reformat? Thanks Dan bogiesan This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

“Re-compress”? That term is mostly used incorrectly around here. You will need to tell us what you are really doing.

If you are changing the format of the LT movies by recompressing them, you are losing the alpha channel so, yes, they must re-render.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

The composite coming out of the 1800 should be stable. If it isn’t. you ahve an issue with the Sony, not with blackburst or the monitor.

Hooking your rig up is easy. Composite out to monitor in. Loop out to your convertor box to the Mac.

However, there are about fifteen differnet and unrelated reasons why your video monitor might be rolling. Wait, you didn’t say it was rolling, you say it out of sync. What does that mean to you?

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Easy using expressions and a slider control.

You must spend a few hours exploring expressions in the manual.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”