[Ernest Rosado]

Hi Mads,

I appreciate the reply. I am using an NVME Raid card to store the footage, so I don’t think there’s a bottleneck there. I haven’t tried editing on an Intel platform, but was told by the folks that shoot the video that nothing on the PC side can edit this footage and they’ve found that only the newer Macs can do it. That sounds fishy to me because I was always told PCs and Macs could do the same things.

In any case, they sent me a link to a $8000 Mac Studio that there’s no way I can afford, especially after dropping $3000 dollars on this PC just last year.

I haven’t tried resizing the footage, but wouldn’t that be just as slow as creating proxies (which are resized to 1080p for editing)?

I might have to decline further work from this client just because of their codec choice.

Thanks again for the reply, hope you’re having a nice weekend.

[Ernest Rosado]

The best transcription engines (the ones that rely on AI rather than traditional speech recognition) are extremely computationally expensive. OpenAI’s Whisper is one of the best and it’s open source, but it’s heavy and slow, slower than realtime, especially on consumer hardware. You could run it yourself and let it do your transcriptions, but it’s definitely not a one-click plugin. You’ll need to do some scripting to get it into a format you can use.

All this will improve over time but for now the AI stuff really runs best on enterprise hardware, which is why most of these are cloud services.

The engines also need updates. New words, phrases and names enter the lexicon all the time and if they are to be detected, the models must be maintained, which is a pretty good argument for a subscription business model.

[Ernest Rosado]

Thanks Ty for the reply and the info.

My camera is the Canon R5 and has a stereo unbalanced 3.5mm jack. Likewise if I use the Rode Wireless Go II it also has a stereo unbalanced 3.5mm jack.

I’d like to pick up a Sanken COS-11D based on a recommendation from a friend, so I suppose I just need to know if I need to get the Sennheiser-compatible 3.5mm end or the Sony-compatible 3.5mm end.

Thanks again for the reply, appreciate all your knowledge!

[Ernest Rosado]

No. I’m suggesting the OP can render two mp4 files, one with the content, and the other one with an animated grayscale matte representing the alpha values in the first video.

[Ernest Rosado]

Depending on what the purpose of your video is, you can render an MP4 of your video and then render an additional MP4 with your alpha channel only. These two files often result in a smaller total size than rendering a pure video + alpha channel and get similar results, provided you’re sending this to an editor who will recombine the two into transparent video.

If this is a final clip for consumption, then WebM is probably the most efficient codec with an alpha channel to convert to, but I don’t think Vegas supports it natively.

[Ernest Rosado]

Thanks for your insights. After consulting with a few other professionals in the industry, it seems Media Silo is the one most places use, but it costs hundreds of dollars a month and is really more for a shop and not a one-man-band.

Adobe doesn’t seem to make anything that does this. Does anyone have any suggestions for software to search and manage terabytes of video files in various codecs? My only requirement is it must have drag-and-drop capability for quick use in Premiere and AE.

This actually might be worth making a new thread about.

[Ernest Rosado]

Thanks for the replies, out of curiosity, if you don’t rename the files from the camera, how do you search for footage months, years later?

[Ernest Rosado]

What I find is with the higher quality codecs like ProRes 422HQ I can punch/zoom in closer on certain events and it still looks good in it’s delivered quality, despite not technically having the resolution in the source footage to do so.

An issue I ran into early with high-data-rate formats like this is that you need huge amounts of space to store them, so I went the HDD route. Problem is, a HDD may not be fast enough to playback the video realtime in your timeline, you might need an SSD or NVME drive for that. So hard drives should be used for archival purposes only.

[Ernest Rosado]

Thanks for the reply, however it’s not media that’s specifically offline, in my case it is mogrts that haven’t loaded in yet or something. I use mogrts for lower thirds or other elements but in some recent renders when they’re on screen and I’m watching back my render I see a big yellow “MEDIA PENDING” screen without having received any warning prior to rendering.

[Ernest Rosado]

The parts you’ll want, unfortunately, are currently unattainable. There’s a massive demand for the latest-gen components and unless you’re willing to pay scalper prices on eBay, you’re best off waiting 3 months.

I would recommend a system with a Ryzen 9 5900X or 5950X CPU. At least 32GB of ram (3600 MHz or higher with CL16 or lower), 64 is even better if you can afford it. Stick to Nvidia for GPU’s if you’re doing video editing. AMD’s gpus are competitive for gaming but their hardware video encoder is lower quality and slower. Get at least an RTX 3060 Ti. A 3070 or 3080 will be faster rendering effects, but the 3060 Ti is the sweet spot for price/performance. To power all this you should have at least a 650W PSU, bump that up to 750 or 800 if you go with a 3080.

You’ll also want as much NVME storage as your budget allows, and perhaps some large mechanical hard drives for archival.