[Jaeson Koszarsky]

Have you tried adding/changing the MEDIA LOCATIONS manually in PROJECT SETTINGS and resetting the MEDIA DESTINATIONS?

Jaeson

[Jaeson Koszarsky]

For fast & simple archival/transferal of old vhs/svhs/hi8/etc tapes, I just use a stand-alone DVD recorder. No large drive space needed, just straight to disc transfer in realtime.

If I then want to use something from the DVDs later, I just rip the material that I’m interested in.

If you just want to make a bunch of MOV files, I used QuickTimePro to record via Firewire. You can pick up an inexpensive analog-digital converter box if needed.

Going through the NLE seems to be more work for just archiving. A lot of stuff that I’ve archived I really don’t ever touch again. So you need to consider that too when determining how much time, effort & money to devote to something that you “might” use one day.

Jaeson

[Jaeson Koszarsky]

I’d set it up as striped raid set (raid 0). Mirroring provides a level of recoverability from a drive failure but it’s slower. If you want the performance, just use the striped raid option.

Use quality drives rather than inexpensive or refurbed drives. Check reviews. Check the drive integrity regularly. Head off a drive failure headache. I like DiskToolsPro for regular maintenance. ProSoft Engineering’s Data Rescue 3 is the best recovery tool I’ve tried.

I had two new western digital drives fail within a year. WD replaced the drives.

Get a back up drive for your raid & system drive so you can recover from an unexpected failure.

Jaeson

[Jaeson Koszarsky]

“Fixed the chronic “Media 100 is busy while the clip is being edited” (in RED) problem.”

THANK YOU!!!

I’m very much looking forward to trying the update today.

I’m still running our Macs with 10.7.5. If your running your M100 with Mavericks, what’s the experience been like?

[Jaeson Koszarsky]

I have experienced this problem with RED from time to time too. It happened a number of times with video clips we downloaded from https://www.videoblocks.com. They play ok in QuickTime but in RED they are static. Converting to ProRes made them work with RED.

Jaeson

[Jaeson Koszarsky]

Velocity Remap at 500%? Then remap that back at 20%?

Or get something like Twixter.
https://www.revisionfx.com/products/twixtor/

[Jaeson Koszarsky]

I also have a VLabMotion/Toccata setup, DraCo’s predecessor. It’s a decent NLE for the big box Amigas. The cards are Z-II so the video quality is limited by Z-II bottleneck. Composite & Y/C in/out only, no firewire option for VLM. Also, it can only use 4GB partitions and only the 1st 4GB of a drive. Going beyond that with another partition will overwrite the first one. There’s no patch available since MovieShop bypasses the normal AmigaOS for drive access and uses custom format partitions. When I get my A4000 reassembled, I’ll try using 4GB CF cards.

Broadcaster Elite was the only NLE for Amiga with component video. There was a prototype add-on for DraCo but it didn’t get released. But the DraCo firewire more than makes up for that shortcoming. An you can pick up an old M100 card to harvest its firewire board for the DraCo at a reasonable price, compared to what MacroSystems charged when they sold it.

MovieShop has two editing modes for timelines, basic a/b with an fx/transition track & 1 title track (like the older M100) and an RPN mode (reverse polish notation) that offered unlimited layers. The multiple layers are processed in RPN order. With nesting, you can mix & match timeline types in the same project.

Some timeline editing features are insert/move/replace, auto-length, snap to position. Window tabs are nice. You could add meta-data to the clips in your bin. Save multiple custom window arrangements. It also supports arexx scripting so you could simplify complex functions with custom scripts.

Sample MovieShop5 screen:

For a few projects, I used M100/RED for more complex composites & rendering, transferred the 24bit frames to DraCo via data-DVD.

[Jaeson Koszarsky]

DraCo has very nice image quality and its MovieShop NLE software was ahead of its time.

The basic system is powered by a 50mhz Motorola 68060 processor and RAM topped out at 128MB. You could play 720×486 24bit video with 48.1 stereo audio in real-time. You could have up to 99 layers of audio/video. Once you got into layering though, you needed to render things out.

MovieShop has a multicam feature that allows you to work with up to 6 synced clips. When you would done making you edit selections, it built a new timeline for you.

I liked the ability to nest timelines. I could drag a complicated timeline into the bin and that use that as a single video track in a new timeline.

On the I/O side, the basic DraCo has composite and y/c video and rca stereo audio in/out. You could add on a firewire card and an optical audio card. You can shoot with an HD camera, downconvert to SD via firewire to the DraCo and get really good looking image quality.

Remember the Media100 P6000 boards? It turns out that they used the same Sony DVBK firewire cards as the DraCo. Pinnacle used those cards too. DraCo only supports a/v i/o through firewire though, not device control.

There was an add-on card for serial device control & a jog/shuttle controller.

DraCo uses a SCSI-II bus. With SCSI bridge cards you can use SATA drives. I have a few 120GB drives in mine. I’ve been meaning to try an SSD at aome point. If you can speed up the drive access, render times will improve. Every little bit helps on a 50mhz system.

If I burn data DVDs in ISO9660 format, I can read them on the DraCo. I’ve transferred data back & forth between the DraCo and Mac that way.

I do have a 10mbit ethernet card and USB1 card installed too. I’ve used VNC from the DraCo to control my mac.

I have ImageMasterRT and ImageFX. These are the PhotoShop-like apps for the AmigaOS. DraCo will run AmigaOS 3.9 and ProDad’s p.OS. I mostly use ImageFX but I like ImageMaster’s morphing better. I also have Imagine3D, Lightwave, and Aladdin 4D.

My DraCo is 16 years old, a dinosaur NLE, but it still works and I’ll use it now and again for nostalgic reasons.

[Jaeson Koszarsky]

I wondered about that. It would be great if the queue item could remember the range that existed when it was added to the queue and be given a user-definable name.

Jaeson

[Jaeson Koszarsky]

I can’t force the bug to happen but I know that I won’t get through the day without it happening at least once. It happened this morning. As soon as I wrap up the project, I’ll force-quit and move on to the next one.

I don’t know enough about how things work under the OSX hood to give something concrete but it has persisted with our new system & upgrades through OSX 10.7.5 and Media100 Suite 2.1.3. We have two 12-core 2.66GHz MacPros with 12GB RAM. It happens on both systems regularly and it is unique to Media100 & RED.

When the bug occurs, I always get a fixed “Media 100 Suite is busy while the clip is being edited.” message. The window with the message can’t be closed.

Jumping from one Media100 window to the next is prohibited while in this bug state. You can freely move to the finder other applications. If you want to move from one Media100 window to another, you can do so by switching from the Media100 to the finder (or any other app) then clicking back on the Media100 window you want to use. You need to do this application tap dance to bounce from one Media100 window to the next while in the bug state.

So what happens when exiting RED and handing control back to the Media100 that causes the hang up? The bug resides somewhere in that transition.

Does this happen with Boris and other NLEs or just Media100?

Is there a debugging tool that end-users can use to snapshot the system state and save relevant information that would be useful to Media100 coders?