Ed Dooley
Forum Replies Created
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One approach that works is to put 2 drives on the ATA100 buss and 2 on the ATA66 buss, and use a FW external boot drive. It gives you a 4 drive RAID, plenty fast enough for uncompressed SD work. Another approach would be to install 4 SATA drives and buy a SATA PCI card to drive them. That would give you even better performance.
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Actually, Decklink say that since Beta is analog, they feel that 8bit is enough to handle the information….BUT… they also say they use 9bit in their SP card, which they say is more than enough. I guess you can set up a 10bit sequence if you’re going to do a lot of graphics etc. Oh wait, 3rd party plug-ins for FCP (and I think some FCP native plug-ins) process in 8bit only, hmmmm. Or has that changed recently? Isn’t HDCam 8bit too?
Ed (who doesn’t see any banding in his 8bit IO Beta footage)[uncompressed] “you absolutely should consider 8bit versus 10bit. whoever tells you analog beta SP brought in or out digitally in 8 bit makes not difference clearly does not know what banding is. beta SP has far more information to offer than 8 bit crimping will allow you to communicate digitally. this is a major shortcoming of some of the SD cards. simply put, if you ingest or layoff in 8 bit, you are asking for banding. if you don’t know about it or don’t care-those are other matters!
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The anamorphic adapter seems to be *the* choice for quality.
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And…. dare I say…. the FCP for Dummies book does a good job. I don’t have a lot of FCP books, but the Peachpit Press book (Visual Quick Pro Guide) and the Dummies book make a good duo.
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Check the archives in this and the Blackmagic forum for the (very old) 8bit vs 10bit argument. Analogue Beta-SP doesn’t benefit from 10bit, but adding lots of graphics does look better in 10bit. Basically you shouldn’t let that one factor make or break your decision.
Ed[mark berbek] “‘cept i think the decklink’s are 8bit and the io’s are 10-bit. maybe you want to double check that before you buy, if u care .”
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Some more thoughts:
The difference between what you want to do and what Walter did, is that he striped 2 BDX’s striped together (4 drives) and split them up onto 2 channels. With a PowerBook, you can use the internal FW800 and a FW800 cardbus card to achieve that, but be aware of the other devices you might want to use on the other internal FW port (which shares the same buss as the FW800 port). He got the high performance *because* he had 4 drives striped across *2* channels. Check out barefeats.com for their tests of various FW configurations, including the LaCie and G-RAID. Their tests show that there’s a real difference with that 2nd channel.
Ed[nbrazzi] “1) He had two D2 units striped together. This is great if they sit on the same desk and never move. If the storage unit has to move between computers, it has to be one unit that simply plugs in throught the FW800 port. Is there a unit (internal RAID striping) that will do that and still run uncompressed video.
2) Has anybody done this successfully on a powerbook? Will this work on a powerbook? Is a 1ghz G4 with 1GB memory sufficient?
3) I’m pretty sure there’s a firewire based AJA card or something similar, so that I can output a monitor signal for color correction while editing, right?
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I’m guessing yes, but since we have the AJA I haven’t had to try that. I wasn’t sure about the DV50 codec for broadcast either. The projects we use it for have gone to regional network affiliates, and they look fine, but unless we need to use the PB for some editing while away from the office, we use UC8bit. I really wish there weren’t technical limitations to having a SATA cardbus, that would solve a lot of problems.
Ed[nbrazzi] “Regarding the DV50 solution, would that mean I could monitor the video using a DV device over firewire to feed my monitor for Color Correction. That would mean I (the editor) would not need the AJA.
Also, I have to wonder if working with DV50 is acceptable for broadcast. Seems like it would hurt the video quality.”
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A number of people (including me) have been shooting Beta and digitizing to an external FW 2-drive array using the DV50 codec. We have the AJA IOLA, which is the unit you alluded to (connected by FW to your PowerBook). The DV50 codec is just about indistinguishable from uncompressed 8bit Beta and uses far less space and bandwidth. It’s important to have a FW cardbus card for your PB, though. The AJA uses up a lot of the PB built in bandwidth, and the PB FW400 and 800 use the same buss, so the extra FW card is necessary. I haven’t even bothered trying UC 8bit with my 2-drive FW array.
Ed -
As in “Which came first, the handshake, or the stab in the back?” 🙂 An homage to one of my favorite Hollywood books, ‘Hello, He Lied’
Ed[Noah Kadner] ” Now is this a response to Hollywood or an imitation?”
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I use my 17″ on location alll the time, but what a pain! A 2nd monitor is very helpful. The best thing IMHO, is to carry along an LCD monitor. Our NTSC/PAL, *and* SVGA monitor does triple duty, and fits right in the laptop case..
Ed