[John Davidson]

We literally just installed our first iMac edit system today. Pegasus 12Tb should be here this afternoon. Have to say I’m pleased and a little excited about it. It already seems swifter than our 12core mac pro. Probably won’t be so great on big AE renders though.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

We’ve been really really happy building our site with an HTML app called Hype. Back in the day we used to do flash, but not working on phones is a killer. Flash lost me a few iterations ago. Hype is really refreshing (but not quite perfect yet).

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

I recommend anybody buying go for the 27″ and make sure to splurge on the 2Tb internal drive. You can get cheap RAM from Amazon or macsales – much cheaper than Apple sells it for. You’ll love the resolution and additional screen size.
Don’t forget to get your student education discount!

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

So does this mean that we can see Thunderbolt cards to install in mac pros soon? If it can work with Express cards, I can’t imagine that would be too far away.
We’re getting our first imac/Thunderbolt edit system Friday. Kind of excited to put it through its paces.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

It’s officially a rumor.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

We got it working somewhat on our site now. If you want to check it out just google me. It’s not 100% perfect, but we figured out a way to incorporate it without an issue as an iFrame and masking over some of the dead space their theme created. I’m much happier now!

Ironically, our first submission to a client via Vimeo was rejected because a client couldn’t see it. So we’re doing submissions the old way, but using vimeo as a backup to that.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Mine pretty much runs the same. 2 systems, one AJA and one BMG. The Blackmagic one occasionally loses audio sync and needs a restart – I think it’s a driver issue though.

I wouldn’t go back to Snow at this point. I like Lion. It’s a good kitty!

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

My base needs are:
1. OMF export.
2. External Monitor/Deck support with BM and AJA cards.
3. Project archiving clarity. Maybe it’s easy, but I can’t figure it out till I’ve actually taken some time working on it, which can’t be done until 1 and 2 have been fixed.
4. Upgrade old projects from FCP7.

Every time I get a ‘out of memory’ error on FCP7, I get a little more ticked with Apple about FCPX. Back in the spring I made light of people’s fears, and I was wrong. In the summer I advised patience for updates to fix it by August, and I was wrong again. Now, I don’t even see the point of thinking about this product anymore. We just have to live with FCP7 for now and hope, some day, X gets the attention is deserves.

At least my new 4S is really cool. Sigh.

[John Davidson]

I have to say – some of the features are great – and I understand it’s a relatively new service that just needs time (here it comes) BUT, there are some major limitations to it right now. You can’t save theme customizations, the themes are hard to manage and are clunky to work with, and video management is difficult and somewhat abysmal. I’m uploading hundreds of spots and want to make many portfolios, all of which have to be exactly the same for consistancy across my site. When I can’t save a theme style, it’s literally dozens and dozens of clicks and pages to just set up one single portfolio to be the same. Some things like searching through videos just don’t work. It seems like there’s no real support either – just lots of ‘we’ll think about adding that’ comments in their forums.

I’m going to stick with it for now, but I can’t recommend it officially yet. Not for $200, especially when YouTube is free and seems much more capable of handling larger playlists. The experience kind of leaves me wondering if Vimeo is only staffed by about 3 people in a shed somewhere. Vimeo Pro is not going to work for people with hundreds of videos to manage. Right now it’s sole benefit is for individual project review – but of course you can only put comments on the review page and not the portfolio, and they don’t have a screening page showing all portfolios, which seems like it would have been an obvious componant.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

I like the custom client logo. I think this will be a great way to get the process consistant. Another cool thing – it looks like I can build a CNAME reference to point subdomains each clients playlist. There’s a chance clients won’t even know they’re on vimeo! I’ll post back the results of that when I can figure it out.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.