Dylan Reeve
Forum Replies Created
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We tend to provide a H.264 Quicktime movie at PAL Square Pix sizing and let the client’s web people compress it as they wish – it’s a good median between filesize and quality. If they need something else, we do supply these things as FLV sometimes, or a more highly compressed QT (using presets from Compressor or Sorenson Squeeze).
If it’s a while later we normally just do it from our master copy, the only time it’s a real pain is when there is a display aspect change and graphics need to be modified, or when the client wants different graphics. Can also be an issue when small text is involved as it doesn’t survive the compression and needs to be made larger in frame.
We usually have a flat rate for doing it, unless it requires a lot of work or for us to reedit some part of it, in which case it tends to be at studio hourly rate.
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It’s a crawl, so left and right half – that was my first thought, but it is often a pain getting them moving perfectly in sync.
The other thing I’ve thought of but haven’t had a chance to explore yet is moving the Origin of the layer as well (I believe FCP layers have a Center and Origin point, but I’ve been in Color all day, so haven’t had a look yet).
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It looks like cross-platform is pretty good (it’s a shame the MetaLAN server doesn’t run on Linux). I’d say it would be pretty safe as a file server between a couple of FCP boxes and a few PC-based AE workstations or something.
More complex stuff could be challenging, but the fact it offers support for Avid media is an interesting point that could make it quite the multi-tasker (although the Avid ‘virtualisation’ doesn’t work for Apple-based Avid clients it seems, although the Apple-based server should support it for PC clients).
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I looked at this product for Avid (it has an Avid virtualisation option that allows share media access for Avid) a while ago and was impressed, hadn’t cnsidered it for FCP. Now curious if I could get one setup to service FCP and Avid clients (not shared media obviously, but only one media server at least)
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Avid is working with those natively at 720×576 (PAL Anamorphic) – by exporting as Square Pix they have undergone an aspect conversion which is perhaps not ideal.
If you can still get the Avid stuff it would be better to export a QT Animation file at 720×576 (with the correct display ratio selected) – this will avoid any unnecessary rescaling on export from Avid and use in FCP.
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I don’t think I’ve met anyone with the opposite problem. Most Avid users are perfect happy with the stability and usability of their system (assuming it’s a supported configuration etc) – but look to FCP for it’s extra features and lower cost-of-entry for HD work (certainly why we dropped cash on an FCP setup).
If your work doesn’t call for those things, or if that stuff exists further down the production workflow (in an online for example) then Avid tends to be rock solid.
There are always solutions (same is true of Avid problems) but there often comes a point (like Daniel said in his first post) where it no longer seems worth the time and effort to consistently be working around things when another option may offer a more suitable solution.
That said, you don’t have to choose… Avid will run happily on the same system (although Avid does not yet support Leopard) and the cost of entry for Avid has dropped significantly recently, and there’s a pretty good second-hand market for Avid Mojo hardware if you want to go that way.
Right now I am using Avid MC 2.8 on our Mac Pro, later today I’ll be using FCP 6.0.2 on the same system.
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This is something I have considered – the default allocation block in Apple’s HFS+ file system it 4KB, which is good for making sure small files don’t take up lots of space, but not so good for read/write efficiency with large files.
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I guess I will never know.. 🙁
I’m certain that the Blackmagic test isn’t accurate (although perhaps signposts some sort of larger issue). And the Xbench test tells me nothing.
All I have is slightly inconsistent performance and suspicions.
Why can’t everything just work? Ever.
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Here’s what I get from our external Addonics Hardware PM drive:
Results 74.88
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.4.11 (8S2167)
Physical RAM 5120 MB
Model MacPro2,1
Drive Type External Disk 0
Disk Test 74.88
Sequential 77.40
Uncached Write 41.00 25.17 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 86.85 49.14 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 89.87 26.30 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 215.30 108.21 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 72.52
Uncached Write 30.09 3.19 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 216.89 69.43 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 99.29 0.70 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 138.03 25.61 MB/sec [256K blocks] -
An alternative is an SAS controller with SATA fanout cable to multiple SATA drives (which should be more reliable).
Or plain old FW800 (although we it feels like a pretty limiting bus when better ones are available).
For our purposes Fibrechannel will be overkill…
The problem I have with the BM tool is that it’s reporting numbers that are absurd (like 1.9MB/s read speed) which is insane, as if that were the case it would be barely usable for anything. So clearly the drive doesn’t perform very well in that test for some reason (our SMB network drives rate higher in the BM test tool)… But as the result is clearly wrong (we can achieve much better rates, even with BM codecs via the card) I am looking elsewhere for ideas.