[Gary Huff]

[Douglas K. Dempsey] “Just talk to the video pros who cannot play old tape formats, or for that matter early Mac adopters who have a stack of floppies populated with old Word, MacWrite, FileMaker and other docs that are a nightmare to access.”

Those situations kill me, because I always intend to boot those up and get them into newer formats…some day.

Anybody got a Zip Drive that can read 250MB disks, or one of those Super Drives I can borrow? 😉

[Gary Huff]

[Dave Gage] ”
Sorry, I didn’t quite follow. Are you using the Optical Drive slot for your edit drive? I ended up putting my boot drive there because my understanding was that the Optical Drive slot will give you 3 Gbps, whereas the boot drive slot can do 6 Gbps, so I put my edit drive there for faster reads and writes.”

Apparently the early 2011 models have an issue with putting a SATA III drive in the optical slot (at least from what I read at OWC). So I have my SATA III Crucial M4 in the primary bay, and then an HGST 750GB drive in the optical drive slot. I rarely edit off the Crucial as I haven’t been having any speed issues with the LaCie TB drive or the HGST.

[Dave Gage] ” Although, I’m using a hybrid drive for editing at the moment and it is really designed more as a boot drive with 8GB SSD built-in, so I could just use it as a boot drive and put in a SSD for editing.”

Do you have the 500GB Momentus or the 750GB version? I had the 500GB in a VAIO system I had before the MacBook (edited a Red One 4k feature on that beast!) and I can’t say I was very impressed with it over a 7,200 RPM drive for editing. I hear the 750GB is supposed to be better.

[Dave Gage] “With that card and Sonnet driver, does it work as advertised, “hot-swappable”? Do you find you have to re-boot after disconnecting it? That’s where I was at, otherwise with 12-24 hours the computer would crash.”

Do you mean “hot-swappable” with the drives connected to it? If so, yes. Otherwise, the card itself should be “ejected” using the icon up in the bar before ejecting it, and if it happens to come out while working (one of the really poor flaws of ExpressCard, but it doesn’t happen that often), then you’re probably better off doing a power cycle of the laptop (shut down completely, re-insert card, boot up). The card only works if it is in the slot when you turn the laptop on, which is a downside, but no drivers is a plus to in my opinion, so I’ll live.

The other positive is that it’s made to work with the Sonnet Echo Express which I have as well. I don’t use it too often because I rarely need dual ExpressCard devices on my 17″, but will definitely get more use if I go for a new Haswell MacBook to add to the fleet.

[Gary Huff]

[tony west] “Congratulations to you also, unless you designed AE yourself, you’re working off somebody else’s work.”

Doesn’t quite follow, so I’m not sure why you thought it appropriate to make that comparison. That’s like saying using the same hammer means you build a house that looks exactly the same, when we were talking about pre-fabs in the first place.

[tony west] “Plus, you are assuming the corp hiring for the job even gives a rip that it “now sticks out””

No, you are correct. Most of the corporate video is embarrassingly bad. And, hey, I’ve been there (have definitely put plenty of lipstick on pigs). But I don’t see much response from the public on these to the point where even having video content at all seems like a waste of time and money. If you’re trying to produce cheap content just to have content, and no one watches it, then is it even worth the cheap rates they’re already paying?

[Gary Huff]

[tony west] “You’re not familiar with his work?”

I am not. But I would be interested to know the specifics of what is “high end” about it, outside of simply the way it’s shot. I could go shot the most interesting stuff and shoot it in such a way that the edit is simply stitching clips together.

So just because something looks nice, doesn’t necessarily mean the edit is “high end”…unless by “high end” you mean high paying editing jobs, regardless of doing anything more than stitching Alexa ProRes 4444 clips together.

[Gary Huff]

[tony west] “Maybe. Each situation is different.”

I don’t see how that applies that a certain situation could allow for polished results when someone isn’t competent. Can you “accidently” stumble upon polish?

[tony west] “In the past if you didn’t know how to do motion graphics you had to learn or you didn’t have them. Now you can just drop somebody else’s pre-made motion graphics in your timeline.”

Yes, you and hundreds of others, so congratulations, unless you’re the first use of that template, your viewer has now recalled something entirely different while viewing…perhaps even from competition.

[tony west] “Does it look more professional? Most likely.”

Only if the entire piece was motion graphics. Then, if you don’t know shooting or editing, everything else that you can’t template in now sticks out. And, of course, there’s the copycat issue I mentioned above.

[tony west] “What we deem as”professional” really doesn’t matter if whoever is paying the bill at the end of the day accepts it as such.”

I would agree with that, but is it an excuse? “Well, I don’t need to learn motion graphics, or even how to significantly tweak these templates because the work I do is good enough.”

I hope so. That gives me less competition.

[Gary Huff]

[tony west] “The kind of work that Tsui Hark does would be an example.”

What kind of work does Tsui Hark do that is explicitly “high end”? Compared to what you would describe as “low end”?

[Gary Huff]

[Dave Gage] “Are you using one of these cards, and if so, how is it working and have you tried editing via USB 3 and the ExpressCard slot?”

Dave, I mostly use that for the occasional USB3 client-provided hard drive (the bane of my existence), and the Hoodman USB3 Card Reader for CF. I was able to offload an entire 32GB card in about 8 minutes that way, so it seems to be working well, though I haven’t edited off it. Mostly I’ve been moving things to my internal spinning drive from the Data Doubler (my primary drive is a Crucial M4 512GB SSD) and a LaCie Thunderbolt drive.

The only issue is that you can’t really get more than one USB3 powered device on there before OSX starts kicking off devices because the USB power adapter draws too much, so I’ll probably get a USB AC adapter to give it power instead. That’s the only issue I’ve had with it so far.

I had a no-name Rosewill eSATA card and it always gave me trouble, and then I noticed I was maxing out at 120MBps no matter what (even SSDs), so I switched to the Tempo Pro from Sonnet and it’s been nothing but smooth sailing. I know an editor who bought it based on my recommendation and he’s been using it with great success on his 2010 MacBook Pro 17″.

I just purchased the UHS-I reader, but I haven’t had any major offloading to do with it yet, so I cannot yet say how great it is (my two primary SD cards for my C100 are the Hoodman UHS-I one and the Sandisk Extreme 95MBps one). So far, what little I’ve done with it has worked great.

[Gary Huff]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I also have really strange audio issues. I will adjust audio to a level that I want. I will then stop playing or commence playing, and the level will change, literally change by more than a few dbs. The waveforms change, the keyframes change.”

I forgot about this one. Whew, glad I’m not the only one, though when I had that issue, I found that setting the audio to “Flat” under “Audio Enhancements” fixed that issue for me in that particular project.

[Gary Huff]

The 17″ 2011 is great because you get ExpressCard AND Thunderbolt. With the Echo Pro from Sonnet, I can have USB3 and eSATA together, or a UHS-I reader (also from Sonnet) AND eSATA. I do a lot of offload so that’s idea, plus the laptop still performs well (I also did the data double deal and it’s awesome).

[Gary Huff]

[Marcus Moore] “Why? What issues are you having?”

I can’t speak for Jeremy, but one issue I’m having is that I routinely get to a point where I can no longer play the timeline and have to restart to fix it.