[J.patrick Southern]

Hey Melany! Patrick from LumaForge here. Just wanted to assure you that you are correct, the Jellyfish is essentially plug and play. With the Jellyfish App, you simply need to connect the Jellyfish to you computer, hit “Automatic Setup” and toggle which shares you want mounted.

As Bob and Nick mentioned, if you need high speeds and are on a Mac Laptop or 5K iMac, you will need a 10GbE to Thunderbolt adaptor. The iMac Pro has 10GbE built right in.

To clarify, the Jellyfish is, in fact, a video workflow server. All of it’s features are aimed at getting you connected and collaborating as quickly as possible. We don’t currently provide apps to remotely view your footage. This is true. We’d rather make sure you have great performance while editing within FCPX, Premiere, or Resolve, so that’s where we focus our energy.

Happy to answer any questions you have.

[J.patrick Southern]

We didn’t capture the footage directly into FCPX on OJ Speaks. We captured the tapes using Blackmagic’s Media Express. The tape was captured at its original resolution and then upscaled in FCPX. The footage we received back from the post house looked worse than the footage we’d been cutting with in FCPX. They had used a Terenex for the conversion. In this case, they were converting digital files to digital files. Had they been converting tapes to digital, they may have had a better result. As it was, there were all sorts of frame blending artifacts, and the image was soft.

As Shane may have mentioned, we used an AJA Kona 3 on Challenger Disaster: Lost Tapes and captured within FCP7. When working from tape, this seems the best solution. For upscaling footage downloaded from a resource like AP, Conus, Getty, or Critical Past, software solutions probably fare best.

FCPX has great software scaling. So does Resolve. I’d take Shane’s advice on upscaling & conforming frame rates any day. He’s been a delight to work with on all of the 1895 Films projects. In fact, we collaborated on the workflow we used on Challenger Disaster: Lost Tapes. And despite the fact that he consistently drops the “P” from FCPX, he still does a great job with the online edit of some of the best documentaries cut in it.

[J.patrick Southern]

If you set Subroles for the various languages, you can set them as additional tracks in a Multitrack QuickTime. When you do File>Share>Master File, you can select Roles As: Multitrack QuickTime Movie. You can then add audio tracks and configure whether they play as mono, stereo, or surround. I believe this has to be don as ProRes, H.264, or Uncompressed, but you could then run through Compressor later.

[J.patrick Southern]

“The Secret Tapes of the O.J. Case” had Optimized media for almost everything. Due to the cost of storage once we got the SHARESTATION, we did not Optimize all 10,000+ clips. We did have a lot of photos and a lot of variation in sources. We also had 4K & 5K footage that we were running across a 1 Gbps Ethernet connection. When we finally rented a 10 Gbps Ethernet to Thunderbolt adapter, it became less of an issue.

Then we used Optical Flow on a lot of our footage that didn’t meet the project’s frame rate and used Neat Video on nearly every single one of our archival clips.

So there was a lot going against us in terms of system efficiency. David and I are now onto another project. Everything has been made into Optimized and Proxy media, we have far fewer clips, and everything seems to be running just fine.