[Erik Speer]

Hey guys,

Thanks so much for the helpful responses. I thought I’d throw the carrot out there to see if anyone could help before getting into too many details since it’s a long, fairly complicated story but here goes:

The company I work for produces half hour shows for broadcast on the Sportsman Channel and Fox Sports Nets. This past year we produced 23 half hour series, 13 episodes each plus promos, commercials, special projects and DVDs for retail sales. We have offices in Minnesota and Montana but in February we were told that the entire TV operations would be consolidated and moved to Peoria, IL to take advantage of tax incentives offered by the Film office there. Our facility in MT was Avid and MN FCP 7. We had made the decision that we would not be able to continue with FCP in it’s newest state and we are thinking Avid is too expensive as we would have to dump our 100 TB Rorke Aurora Raid system and start over. We now have editors set up in a new temporary facility in Peoria, all on stand alone systems for the time being. Those on systems that were moved to Peoria are still using FCP 7 but our new systems have only PP6. I am still in MN and will not be moving to Peoria and am on FCP 7. That’s what makes it kind of difficult. I’m not there to help them work through these issues and I don’t know first hand what the issues are. We need to make a decision soon weather we’ll be Avid or Premiere Pro but it’s a big deal as we’ll have 20 systems set up all connected to a SAN and archive system. Here are the specs for the newest machines that are running CS6:
Apple Mac Pro Workstation (12-Core) Apple Mac Pro Workstation (Westmere) CTOMac Pro Two 2.66GHz Six-Core Intel Xeon,
24GB (6X4GB) RAM,
1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s,
ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB Graphics Card,
One 18x SuperDrive, OS X LionNote

The main issues they are having are with audio. We are working on projects with about 2-3 TB of footage, mostly XDCam but some HDV, Go Pro and the like mixed in. Some of these projects were started in 5.5 and moved to 6. After completion of the show they need to create a Pro Res QuickTime with 4 channels of audio for network delivery. The are telling me they are missing audio clips in the transition, lose render files every time they open a project and can’t ever get a clean QuickTime on export. Bits and pieces of the audio are missing randomly.

I’m convinced all of this is fairly easy to fix and it must be some system optimization we have wrong but Adobe Tech support has been useless, it seems like they are only familiar with people doing home videos or small projects and if I can’t get the editors happy and comfortable with the software it’s going to be bad. We are already missing deadlines because of this.

I should also mention that once we get into the new facility all systems will be connected to the SAN, have some kind of asset management platform and have AJA boards for deck on monitor output/input.

Thanks in advance for any help and feel free to contact me directly if it’s easier at: erik.speer@imoutdoors.com

Erik

[Erik Speer]

People keep saying if you like FCP 7 and it works just stick with it. Well that doesn’t work if you have plans to expand or just like to stay on top of software upgrades. This is a very disappointing day.

[Erik Speer]

And we were about to expand our business by 10 edit suites and were planning on installing X in all new suites and upgrading the rest. What to do with the 10 new suites? Can’t buy 7 anymore, can’t use X for shows that need to go to broadcast facilities. eBay I guess.

[Erik Speer]

What we need to do is take old versions of our shows and update some of the graphics so basically we have to recapture the show, find the spots that need new graphics and replace that shot then go back to tape when all is said and done. This all going Betacam to DVCam.