[Drew Mortensen]

David, Nate, Andrew, Bob, Chris, and Mark,
Thank you all. Being completely new to this whole arena, it is nice to have professionals willing to share their insight. Now that we have a collection of companies that specialize in video storage solutions, we are trying to answer some of the questions that you have laid out. I think that the next step that I am going to have to take is to gain a better understanding of the speed qualifications attributed to the various connection formats.

We are open to any further suggestions. From what it sounds like, there are probably many positive paths to follow.

Again, many thanks.

[Drew Mortensen]

Mark,
I’ll ask both of your questions:

1. Does anyone know of a VAR near Erie, Pennsylvania?
2. Here are my needs, does anyone have a similar setup?
Storage: 100+TB (over the next 18 months)
Reliability: It needs to work consistently. Some measure of redundancy would be nice as we don’t want to lose files.
Bandwidth: On a regular basis we will be doing at least two simultaneous edits of HD footage. This could spike to four. We have had internal conversations of 3/6/10 GB/s, and Fiber.

Again, thank you for your help in pointing us in the right direction.

[Drew Mortensen]

Mark,
Thank you for writing. For me, researching a solution involves asking questions of those with experience- hence, that is why I posted to this forum after reading several months worth of posts. I don’t know anyone in this business, thus I came to where the experts reside. Many of the people that read this forum probably have experience with large systems and can provide testimonials about specific companies and platforms that have worked well for them, or those that haven’t for various reasons. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a repository of user comments for these systems readily accessible – at least that I’ve found.

I’m not looking for anyone to do my homework, nor for any sort of panacea product. Before I start going to vendors and inviting them to sell me their line of goods, I would like to have a good idea of what people with real-world experience think about the system that they know well.

Anyone willing to give a testimonial for a company that they have had positive results utilizing?

[Drew Mortensen]

Bob,
Thank you for your response. I am privileged in the sense that I have an IT Director who not only sets up Cisco switches, but edits video (Premiere), mans the camera (XDcam), produces live events (Tricaster), and has no qualms about running Linux or MacOSX (Server and Client). He does all of this despite having ten other workers in the department. Although I may be generally in “charge” of the video productions, our department shares in all of the work. Every member is cross-trained. We all have our preferences, but we one of our core values is to use the correct tool for the job, regardless of our preferences. That is why we are coming to this community. We know that we aren’t the experts and that we have a lot to learn, and so we are asking to be pointed in the right direction.

As a department we have read through many of the posts from the past six months. It was only after we discussed those posts that we collectively decided to write the question that I posted. There are a lot of vendors throughout this wonderful Cow community, but we have not been able to find a comprehensive list of ones that are geared towards 100+ TB of video management. We also don’t want to miss a great company just because it wasn’t mentioned in a previous thread or our eyes didn’t land on their banner.

We would truly appreciate the benefit of your experience. Which companies do you gravitate towards?

[Drew Mortensen]

Chris,
The honest answer is “I don’t know.” The in-practice answer is that the company spends whatever money is necessary to do it correctly. They understand the value of time and money wasted through time, and my IT Director is fully on board with a video SAN solution, knowing that it could be very very expensive. I am really not worried about the potential costs.

[Drew Mortensen]

I’m open to this idea as a partial solution, but I don’t think that I could get all six of our conference rooms outfitted. Any suggestions as to portable lighting?

[Drew Mortensen]

Jeff, Thank you for your help. I’m only vaguely familiar with Sorensen Squeeze, and even less familiar with HDV footage. Please forgive the ignorance.

1. When you talk about using Squeeze, how should I get the files out of Premiere and into squeeze? What format/settings should I be using? Should I still be going through Adobe Media Encoder to create the file that will be pulled into Squeeze?

2. The final footage is going to be viewed on a TV, not a computer screen, so should I be deinterlacing the footage? Doesn’t deinterlacing create whole frames and get rid of fields? I thought that fields were necessary for playback on a TV.

[Drew Mortensen]

Okay, I will definitely check this out as I always love free solutions. My time frame here is a bit of a tight one though, and so I would appreciate any non-free solutions as well. Does Encore in CS3 or CS4 deal well with HDV footage?

[Drew Mortensen]

Wow, a very big thank you to everyone for your help. My product was just finished and it looks just as I hoped. I couldn’t have done it without your help and the assistance of some of the AE podcast tutorials.

Simply Thrilled,
Drew

[Drew Mortensen]

Okay, I’ve done some reading on interlacing and deinterlacing and consequently made some changes… for the better.

I kept my original key that looked good, but instead of doing Export – AVI, I did Make Movie, and then chose to render the lower fields first and at NTSC DV 48khz. That made a definite improvement. However, I’m still left with a lot of “flashing dots”… I’m not sure if this has to do with aliasing or interlacing, or something else altogether. I tried the reduce interlace flicker effect, but that simply blurs the foreground image (the keyed video).

Any thoughts?