[Gary Hughes]

I threw all my old ide drives in the trash during my last spring cleaning, including a 6 megabyte drive, (my first hard drive ever). Now, my closet is full of 3 to 6 year old scsi drives and arrays. I’ve been thinking about listing them on ebay, but don’t really know if it’ll be worth messing with. I’ve got several 18GB and 36 GB cheetahs, mostly in arrays or single drive external cases.

I’ve used Medea, Rorke Data, and CTI arrays, but always scsi. Now I’m working in DV so I have the G-Tech G-Raid 500GB FW800. For what I’m currently doing, I love it. I just added a G-Tech G-Drive 250GB for pics, music, sfx, and misc. I’ll probably stay with this for another 3 or 4 projects, then switch to a SATA array and upgrade my capture card and TV to HD.

I read about the Max Upgrades deal and it looks interesting to me, but for some reason, I like the idea of going external. I have one case that has 8 swappable drive bays. I’ve never swapped them, but it sure would make it easy if I needed to.

BTW, my drive failures in the past have always been in the top position in an external, multiple drive case. I learned quickly, it’s very important for the case to have proper cooling. I’d almost put more priority on that than on the brand of drive. The swappable Rorke Data case that I have, has very good airflow via multiple fans, and it has dual power supplies, very nice.

My 2 cents,
Gary

[Gary Hughes]

Thanks Kevin. I’d love to attend your seminar, but I’m just too busy to be traveling west right now. Do you think you’ll hit Ohio or Tennessee anytime?

Thanks,
Gary

[Gary Hughes]

Just a tip, try blurring only in the Y (vertical) axis using directional blur in photoshop. I’ve fixed many images this way and you can’t see the softness as much, because it’s only in one direction. Lots of flicker problems that are because of sharpness, are caused by interlace lines, so in that case, there’s no need to blur horizontaly, it doesn’t help the flicker, and it causes the softness from the blur to be more visible. It doesn’t always work, but it’s always my first attempt.

Thanks,
Gary

[Gary Hughes]

To expound a little, “store-bought” DVDs and CDs are processed with the audio at or extremely near 0dB. You can’t go above 0dB, but it’s still possible that at 0dB, your’s will sound quieter than a “store-bought”. They will generally use a very expensive, high-end mastering limiter (fancy compressor/limiter) to squeeze the peaks down a little so the volume can then be raised back up to 0dB, which in turn, raises the perceived loudness while staying at or below 0dB peak.

I have two different workflows. One is for down and dirty quick, when good is needed, but perfect isn’t needed. For that, I duplicate the sequence, then on the duplicate, I open the mixer view and raise the master fader till the peaks are very near 0dB (without ever going over). Maybe I’ll use a compressor/limiter too.

Since I started out as an audio engineer many years ago, I take great pains on audio for DVD’s that will be sold, but what’s most important to your question is that in soundtrac pro, I do use a mastering limiter (compressor/limiter will work too), then normalize to 0dB (or -.5dB because I don’t trust FCP to be dead accurate), then bring it back to fcp and put it on two new tracks, and mute the original audio tracks, then export using compressor to take to DVDSP.

Thanks,
Gary

[Gary Hughes]

Sounds to me like you’d be a good candidate to use the multiclip feature now available in FCP5. You can basically edit in real-time while watching through, then go back and trim edits to tweak as needed. I’ve never used it, but I saw it at NAB and it was impressive.

Thanks,
Gary

[Gary Hughes]

FWIW, I use the decklink extreme. Strictly SD for now and mostly DV for now, but in planning to do the occasional HD project, Niche video in Atlanta informed me that I can pull my extreme card and put in an HD decklink card later, and swap back and forth as needed. They use the same drivers.

All my friends use that AJA cards and/or boxes, and they love them. If I had to have an all-in-one HD/SD solution, I’d go AJA also, but for my needs and budget, I didn’t go wrong with the decklink extreme.

Thanks,
Gary

[Gary Hughes]

Shane, I have a similar question. I’m currently using a single FW800 drive for DV video capture/render and all graphics and music files as well. I’m considering repurposing my USB2 drive for all the pictures, music, motion projects and AE projects and renders (to save some space, as well as, to make the FW800 drive only for capture/render). Out of all this, the only “stream” would be AE renders and aiff music files. Will the USB2 sustain enough throughput for that?

Thanks,
Gary

[Gary Hughes]

Personally, I’d add a little something simply for the inconvenience, not hourly though. Maybe a small per/day fee, for gas and inconvenience.

Thanks,
Gary

[Gary Hughes]

I have the decklink extreme and I’m using the component cables to my TV.

1-In the system preferences, (not in fcp) under Blackmagic Decklink, I have output set to Analog Y, B-Y, R-Y.
2-In FCP, under the View menu, under Video Playback, I have it set to Blackmagic NTSC – 8 Bit (720×486).
3-Also under the View menu, under external video, set it to All Frames.
4-Also under the view menu, under Audio Playback, set it to Audio Follows Video. Be sure to monitor the audio on the blackmagic audio outs (not the system out) or it will appear to NOT be in sync with the picture. (I can expound on that if you need it)

I have found that occasionally the decklink will display a green screen to the TV and I have to go to the system prefs (not in fcp) to the Blackmagic Decklink and change some settings, then put them back. Works every time.

Hope this helps,
Gary

[Gary Hughes]

I can’t really tell you about exporting directly from fcp, I do have quite a bit of experience with sorenson squeeze. In my research, I never found anything that compresses to a smaller size and better quality than the spark pro codec for flv. That is the codec that squeeze uses. I can tell you that with other NLE’s I’ve used that allow export directly to flv, they only use the spark lite codec, which doesn’t do quite as well as spark pro. In my experience, you can’t do better than exporting out of the NLE with the same codec that your sequence is set to, then use sorenson squeeze. I can show you several examples and tell you how I got there, but I can’t post the examples here. Contact me directly at garyhonline-forums@yahoo.com if you want to see them.

Thanks,
Gary