[Jimmy Brunger]

Thinking it through I think I will go for an SATA RAID-0 of 2x250gb disks for source footage/renders and then my 80GB scsi drive for projects/PSD’s, etc. then I would have a backup set up for my scsi>system drive every night.

Does that sound like a good workflow?

Going RAID 5 would mean extra drives and a new motherboard that supports it, which is not really viable, as this system I am building up will probably be redundant (or used as a back up SD system) in a few months when we go HD anyway.

My current board only supports software RAID 0 – which has got me thinking…I hear that software RAID can put a strain on the CPU and my CPU is right on the cusp of min spec as it is – will this s/ware RAID make my system go bonkers?

Thanks for your help guys.

*AE 5.5 Pro – *PS CS1 – *Combustion 3
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Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / BMD DeckLink Pro / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation

[Jimmy Brunger]

Sorry – forgot to mention…the place where it stated about 10000rpm drives for SD was the Decklink Manual PDF that was included on my s/ware disc. (page 4 of 35)

*AE 5.5 Pro – *PS CS1 – *Combustion 3
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / BMD DeckLink Pro / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation

[Jimmy Brunger]

Hi Luke,

Thanks for your feedback. I sorted out the pink/green picture on lay-off…Turns out the ‘Black Video Output to Deck in Capture’ was actually sending the digi deck out of sync! I tried analogue/digital and disabled – disabled seemed to make it work. This was with a deck directly hooked up to the card (SDI in/out) and no genlock (genlock didn’t make any difference) however I may have to fiddle with the settings a bit more when hooked up through the machine room patch bay, but we’ll see what happens.

As for the SATA drives, I was thinking of getting 2 or 3 of these, depending on how many drives the RAID controller on my motherboard can handle:

https://www.misco.co.uk/productinformation/~Q74482~WW~/

Do they look suitable do you think? I’d rarely capture more than a couple of minutes footage at a time, as we work mainly on TVCs..so demand on the drives should be too much?

The test QT movie I was playing back was a 1 min clip I had on the system already that I rendered out of AE from an AVI. Seemed to playback fine, like I said.

I’ve just ordered Adobe Production Studio, so will have Premiere for capture/playback by end of the week hopefully. A Deck Control update would be good though, as booting Premiere everytime I want to playout a few GFX will take up valuable time and booting Deck Control is almost instantanious.

Any idea what the chroma/luma shifts are all about when using the BMD 8bit codec? I may have mentioned it in the other thread about GRAB FRAME vs PS IMPORT, but it is a bit of an issue. Is it normal?

*AE 5.5 Pro – *PS CS1 – *Combustion 3
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / BMD DeckLink Pro / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation

[Jimmy Brunger]

…Just to add. I WISH PS had a 3D environment instead of all the guess work!! Maybe an addition to CS3? Any rumours abound? (I know, I know – the cow doesn’t DO rumours! 😉

Shall have to use AE until that time..

*AE 5.5 Pro – *PS CS1 – *Combustion 3
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / BMD DeckLink Pro / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation

[Jimmy Brunger]

Thanks for that Mike – yeah that’s what I currently do aswell, but it’s not an ideal workflow and can often mean a bunch of extra layers/layer sets and can make it hard to navigate around them, plus makes the file size that much bigger.

I’ve just ordered Production Studio Premium, so will have CS2 by next week hopefully, which *I think* has a fix in that you can convert any image to a smart object and warp/stretch/twist & distort it to your hearts content without degrading it and keeping it ‘live’ from the previous transform….Have I got that right? Hope so!

*AE 5.5 Pro – *PS CS1 – *Combustion 3
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / BMD DeckLink Pro / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation

[Jimmy Brunger]

Good stuff. I’ll only be using 8bit SD (& poss 10bit SD) but we’ll be upgrading everything for HD at some point so I don’t need to worry about that with this machine.

I only asked because the min specs for SD stated 10,000 RPM drives, HD specified 2GB Fibre Channel or SCSI drives.

*AE 5.5 Pro – *PS CS1 – *Combustion 3
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / BMD DeckLink Pro / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation

[Jimmy Brunger]

Search the archive for “the ring” and there should be loads about it. There were a few theads kicking about a few months ago about it.

*AE 5.5 Pro – *PS CS1 – *Combustion 3
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / BMD DeckLink Pro / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation

[Jimmy Brunger]

One other thing I have noticed is that when I compare an uncompressed AVI of the same bit of footage that has been rendered out of AE using BMD 8bit codec, the colours are DRASTICALLY different. Similar to the difference I saw with Photoshop import vs. Grab frame with stills.

The same goes for footage captured uncomp’d AVI via Clipstation or VT toaster board compared to the same digibeta footage captured using the BMD codec via Deck Control. The only time I see no difference in colour is using the PS import. That’s fine as long as it’s stills, but as the Deck Control app doesn’t support AVI or Targa sequences I am a bit stuck if I need to grab in footage.

Is this normal?

*AE 5.5 Pro – *PS CS1 – *Combustion 3
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / BMD DeckLink Pro / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation

[Jimmy Brunger]

Switching everything off and on to try get things working I have managed to successfully dump to tape (JPEG and BMD 8bit – odd!) It turns out that have blackburst output to SDI outputs switched *ON* was causing all the problems. I assumed it should be on to sync up the deck, but actually switching if off made everything work. Bizarre.

Full JPEG capture & dump to tape is working fine now, but 8bit BMD is still a little iffy to capture (after new drives in RAID 0 I’m hoping it will be OK) However printing 8bit BMD to tape, as I said works..which as you said Luke, SHOULD be more drives intensive than capture, but seems not.

Thoughts?

*AE 5.5 Pro – *PS CS1 – *Combustion 3
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / BMD DeckLink Pro / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation

[Jimmy Brunger]

Hi Luke,

Thanks for the advice – I tried capturing from digibeta in easy JPEG setup and worked fine! I pretty much knew I was going to have a problem with uncompressed until I can stripe a couple of drives but I just wanted to try it. My system has pretty much defied the min spec requirements already and I wanted to see how much I could get out of it! (865p chipset and 32bit PCI slot – Asus P4P800 Deluxe board)

So 7,200rpm drives should be solid for uncompressed SD then? I just want to be sure before shelling out for a TB of storage! How come the min spec requirements state 10,000rpm then?

Also, sorry to be a question machine right now..but can you explain the ‘safety margin’ bit on page 3 of the DL manual? Not quite sure quite how to calculate what I need to..

For your reference – when I said playback worked I meant that I could mount a QT mov into Deck Control and play it back without any jumping or stuttering. It was a BMD 8bit Quicktime, so I guess not STRICTLY uncompressed. I can also playback the output from the digibeta deck and get it to monitor fine on my broadcast mon. When the QT mov plays back I can view it on my broadcast mon, but the left viewer in Deck Control remains frozen until I pause it, I presume that’s normal.

I couldn’t however get the 8bit BMD to lay off to the deck – it dropped frames. However when laying off the JPEG footage back to tape, it let me do it but the resulting footage on the tape was all out of vertical sync and had gone a nasty posterized green and pink! Any clue what that might be? My first thought was genlock timing but I have no idea where to start with that.

[Rolls eyes] I’m not an engineer, just a lowly graphic artist. but I’m trying to learn!

*AE 5.5 Pro – *PS CS1 – *Combustion 3
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / BMD DeckLink Pro / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation