Joe Murray
Forum Replies Created
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[Cory Caplan] “After digging and digging, I found an internal apple reference number, that once mentioned, was like saying “open sesame.” They actually agreed to swap out my x1900 xt out of warranty, without my exploding beforehand.. (Which is good, because If I would have had to pay for a manufacturing defected 2+ year old video card at “full mac retail” I probably would have firebombed cupertino.)”
PLEASE let me know what this reference number is. I’m having lots of issues with my ATI X1900 – screen artifacts mainly, which make it into my rendered files from Color – and I have Applecare, but they’re telling me I have to remove all the peripherals (including the Kona card, RAID card, extra RAM, etc.) and run the hours-long hardware test to see what it reports. It is so obviously a failing graphics card, and I don’t have time to shut down my main edit suite for a day anytime before the middle of March.
Thanks if you can provide that number.
Joe Murray
Edit at Joe’s
Charlotte, NC -
The cool thing about the duplicate frames feature is it tells you which part of the clip has already been used in the sequence, not just the clip as a whole. Very useful if you capture large chunks of footage with many potential clips in them.
Joe Murray
Edit at Joe’s
Charlotte, NC -
Turn on the Detect Duplicate Frames feature in your timeline, then drop the clip in at the end of the timeline. If it’s used already, it will have a colored line over the bottom portion of the video track of the clip, as will the instance of the clip that already exists in the timeline.
The Duplicate Frames feature is in the little arrow menu at the lower left of the timeline.
Joe Murray
Edit at Joe’s
Charlotte, NC -
[Robert Broussard] “Do you use the singe-bay or the 4-bay? How do you like the tray-less enclosures? What interface connects this RTX box to your Mac? Do you rotate backups or have more than one backup? What are you backing up, I assume it’s a RAID o some kind–yes?
ANSWER: I have a Caldigit HDPro RAID 5 4 Terabyte unit that serves as the main media drive. I do not back this up, trusting that if a drive fails I will be able to rebuild data by replacing the drive. The Wiebetech unit I use is the single-bay model and I connect with firewire (USB on our PCs) and use this only to back up the Projects drive on each computer, which houses project files like Final Cut Pro and After Effects project files, Photoshop & Illustrator files, basically anything that can not either be recaptured from tape or rerendered from a graphics projoect file. I figure that with any Final Cut project, the project file itself will give me all the information to recapture a project from tape, which is another reason why I do not back up the Caldigit RAID. I use Super Duper to back up the Projects drive (an internal drive but not the one I boot from) and run this backup every evening.
Q: When you archive, do you have more than one copy of the media before erasing the RAID? What Disk Library software do you use.
ANSWER: I only keep one archive of the project. I do recommend to all clients that they have two final masters, one kept at my office and one at theirs. Many of the projects we do are commercials or short form communication pieces and have a fairly short shelf life of a year or so – and they expect that over time formats will change and older projects may eventually become less than useful for future updates.
Q: So, are you thinking that I would benefit very little with a fast (much faster than required) drive setup–such as HD capable with an SD workflow?”
ANSWER: The amount of benefit you derive from a faster array depends on the kinds of work you do. Fast drives speed up everything…searching the Caldigit RAID for a wayward file is lightning fast compared to searching one of the internal drives. And if you use Final Cut Pro it will create a realtime profile of your system that will allow you to have more realtime layers the faster your drives are. Of course FCP’s version of multiple layers can look really bad sometimes, but that’s a different subject.
It sounds like you require a much more robust backup process than I do. Good luck with your solution.
Joe Murray
Edit at Joe’s
Charlotte, NC -
Robert,
Here’s what we do, for whatever it’s worth…
Backup: daily backup of projects drive to an external Wiebetech trayless enclosure with a 500 gig drive (projects drive means anything we can not recapture from tape or from a P2 project media backup drive from the shoot). We use Super Duper software which is adequate for this.
Archive: Quantum LTO3A, which is ethernet connectable and can be seen as a network storage device by any computer on the network. An ftp client is used to drag and drop each finished, consolidated project to the drive. The drive’s a bit finicky at the moment but its record speeds approach 70 megabytes per second and a 400 gigabyte cartridge is about $50. We store these in a FireKing fire-resistant lateral filing cabinet, but the cartridges could just as easily be moved offsite. Disk Library software is used to create and maintain a searchable database of each cartridge on a central computer in the machine room.
Doesn’t sound like you need HD capable storage at the moment, so you might as well wait and let prices continue to get better, and buy when you really need it.
Hope this is helpful in some way-
Joe Murray
Edit at Joe’s
Charlotte, NC -
Hi Craig,
Do we get a prize if we keep this thread going more than a year?
I’d be glad to get your patch/settings and give Episode another shot at encoding for DG. Only thing I’ll miss about Cleaner is the watch folder. Any way you could put in a word with the good folks at Telestream about adding that at some point? It’s just a watch folder after all.
Anyway, when you get a chance please send the goods to me – joe at editatjoes d0t com. First “at” is a symbol, second is not.
Thanks a lot.
Joe Murray
Edit at Joe’s
Charlotte, NC -
I’ve never tried to work from home, but originally I was set up as someone who would work within an ad agency or production company. Eventually I got enough gear that it wouldn’t fit in my car anymore so I started renting space. Two years ago I purchased a 2200 square foot business condo and built two edit suites, graphics suite and machine room, and audio suite and two VO booths. It’s one mile from my house; not quite like rolling out of bed into the suite but about as close as you can get without actually working at home.
In my situation it’s still important to have a decent environment to host clients, sometimes 10-12 at a time when things are busy. And owning an appreciating asset as opposed to all the computers and decks is a very good thing. I have no idea what the real estate market is like where you guys are but if you don’t need too much space it can be a great way to build some equity, which is otherwise very difficult in our line of work. It’s more difficult to make this affordable if you need studio space for shooting, with high ceilings etc. but it can be done.
The hairbrained scheme I’ve never pulled the trigger on is buying a 30 foot Airstream and setting up a pimped out suite in it. Then park it at the house or pull up in front of a client’s office…still some separation from either the house or the client, and all the panache of a Hollywood trailer on the backlot of a studio.
I still may do that someday, but the condo is working pretty well right now. Good luck on figuring out where the balance is for you.
Joe Murray
Edit at Joe’s
Charlotte, NC -
Yes it could leak, but it has a pump that pushes the water out through the drainage hose. I have had a couple of minor issues – once I had the thermostat turned down to 63 degrees and it accumulated some ice inside the unit that melted and dripped on the floor. And just recently the condensate line froze because there was too much extra hose lying on the roof out in the cold. Once our AC guy trimmed the hose we haven’t had that problem, and it doesn’t really accumulate that much water anyway. Certainly not enough to cause major problems.
Joe Murray
Edit at Joe’s
Charlotte, NC -
My experience with Gefen has not been good. I needed to go 150 feet with a 23″ monitor and never got it to work properly with the product they recommended. But in our case it may have had something to do with a radio tower a couple hundred yards from out building that was illegally boosting their signal…no way to know for sure, but in any case the Gefen didn’t work as advertised.
I also tried a DVI extender from Black Box but was only able to get it to work at a 75 foot length and only at 1600 x 1200. They do have a Cat 5 extender for USB that’s a good add-on if you find a DVI solution that works for your monitor. Let me know if you want that model number.
As far as air conditioning in our equipment room, we use a Mitsubishi wall mounted unit that didn’t require an external vent, but it did require a refrigerant line and a 3/4 inch flexible hose to expel the condensation to the roof. Not sure if your situation will allow any access to an outside wall or roof but the AC is very quiet and cools really well. Here’s a link:
https://global.mitsubishielectric.com/bu/air/products/room_air.html
Joe Murray
Edit at Joe’s
Charlotte, NC -
Bigger maybe, but definitely thicker. The serifs and script font are pretty thin to expect good results on a DVD.
Joe Murray
Edit at Joe’s
Charlotte, NC