[Jim Curtis]

I’m able to do the things (on a MacPro / Catalina) you are saying you can’t do. If deleting the prefs doesn’t fix these issues, try reinstalling the app.

[Jim Curtis]

I’ve seen major glitches in Pr from corrupted effects (video and audio) and transitions. You did the right thing my not trying the same fix over and over and over. Finding corruptions that cause weird performance are often a matter of search and destroy until you find the culprit.

Who doesn’t love a happy ending?

[Jim Curtis]

I don’t charge, as I see storing their footage as a value added feature of hiring me, and an inducement to hire me again to use the same footage in new or revised projects. I do charge for the time it takes to restore media from my tape archives.

If they want me to copy their media to a drive and ship it to somebody else, I charge them dearly (at 4X my hourly editing rate, plus expenses, marked up), and then look at archiving as another service.

I archive on LTO, which took a hefty investment for the drive and software, and it takes time and expenses in tape to manage, and space to store (I even bought a fire-resistant safe for the tapes.). I have to recoup that some way, and if possible, profit from it.

[Jim Curtis]

Nesting or using Ae. Please add your name to the chorus of professionals asking Adobe to make the Track Matte useful by not scaling the matte with the matted video layer. I don’t recall ever finding this behavior useful. They should make track mattes work like they do in Ae.

[Jim Curtis]

In a separate thread here, the news has been revealed that OWC is acquiring the BRU product tech.

https://www.storagenewsletter.com/2020/11/03/owc-acquires-bru-product-technologies-and-customer-base-from-tolis-group/

That’s great, IMO.

I still have two months of my support contract with Tolis. Do you know if OWC will honor that? And, what about these three lost months, when I desperately needed support and got none (from Tolis)? When will OWC be handling support tickets? Have they started yet?

Do you have any insight on these questions, Tim?

[Jim Curtis]

That’s great news! I’ve had nothing but excellent experiences with OWC. I had a TB Hub go bad about a week before the warranty expired, and they replaced it without a hassle. I got some bad RAM for my new MacPro, and they shipped me a new set overnight before I could send the bad RAM back to them. That’s exemplary customer support, IMO. I’ve bought a slew of other stuff from them, as well. Great company.

[Jim Curtis]

Tim, I’m glad to learn you and Tolis are not dead yet. Welcome back.

I have copied this info and saved it, in case I need it later on.

Just this weekend, I set up a 2012 MacPro5,1 running High Sierra as an archive station, running Bru PE 3.2.6, which has been solid for me. That seemed like the best option for me for the near term, as I mull over transitioning to something new.

It’s worth noting that the archive and verify process is noticeably faster on this older system than it is on my shiny new MacPro, Catalina, and ArGest 4.x. I’d mentioned on an earlier support ticket for ArGest that it seemed to be taking longer than I was expecting.

I’m looking forward to hearing what you have in store for us that will make us happy.

[Jim Curtis]

I’m looking at Cannister and YoYotta, and wondering which would be best for me.

I just want to make tapes with a verify pass, and have a searchable database of the files I’ve written to tape, and have the ability to write specific files back to RAID from my tapes.

The Cannister site is pretty sketchy on this, and their manual isn’t available to non-users. The site says, “Logs, Logs, Logs,” and lists three types (“transfer logs, media hash list, & Manifests.” I don’t know what those mean, and they’re not defined here.), but there are no screen caps or much in the way of explanation, nor much in the way of support on their site that I’m able to find. I downloaded and launched the app a few weeks ago, after you first suggested it, and I can’t launch it now as the demo has expired, and see the details, or look at the logs. It’s $300.

YoYotta LTFS looks like the product for me from this company. There’s a LOT more info on their products on their site. It’s $500, which is a pittance over Cannister if it’s a better product or company. It looks like a bit of overkill for my needs, but you never know what features you don’t need now that could come in handy later.

YoYotta looks like it won’t write to my LTO4 tapes that I’m going to have a surplus of, after I restore them from BRU PE and write them to whatever new version of LTFS I go with. Again, the Cannister site is sketchy on details about this.

Thoughts?

[Jim Curtis]

I have a new MacPro7,1. I have three displays attached via USB-C to HDMI or DisplayPort cables to the stock AMD GPU. One is a consumer HD TV set with a large screen. My clients like the big screen (and prefer it to my smaller calibrated EIZO display). No additional hardware is required. I can set two of the displays as the fullscreen Video Device in the Playback Preferences, and use the third display for my Pr Workspace.

[Jim Curtis]

I agree with Martin, that because your media is still on drives, it would be easiest to make new tapes from them.

Being in a similar predicament, and you may have read my long thread on this previously, James Vorley helped me discover that even on a new Mac running Catalina, it’s possible do transfer the media on older BRU PE tapes to a drive using the Terminal.

It’s not simple, but it’s fairly easy, once you know the procedure. It involves using the terminal to get some header info from the tape, and then using that info to restore the tape contents. In my case, I had to rename a drive to the same name the media was sourced when the tape was written.

Speculating here: It should be possible to avoid renaming a disk. James tried several text string variables, but since copying the whole tape to an external drive I could rename was good enough for my purposes, we called it a day. Again, I can’t thank James enough for his help.