[Justin Stephenson]

Thanks @mads. I am pretty set here now. I’m using a rigorous archiving structure with PAX GNU TAR on LTO8 with all the metadata in an SQLite database. I built a nice little pyqt interface and some automation scripts which makes archiving a breeze. It’s not perfect but it works for my use-case – it’s all open standards and I am no longer beholden to the whims of a proprietary format.

I’m in Canada and am using a Magstor branded HH LTO-8 drive. You get a hedge container license with the drive, but LTFS is not a useful solution for me given the path limitations, uncertain future and poor small-file performance.

Anyways – I hear you about the BetaSP and DBeta tapes. I bought a deck a while ago and managed to digitize all the important stuff before it finally failed.

Keep it all!

[Justin Stephenson]

This is a super necro post. It’s just heartbreaking to read this thread here. I had been 15 years into TOLIS BRU LTO Archives when Tolis went under. I was initially very hopeful that OWC would update and maintain the project. It’s an excellent archiving format with built-in checksumming and it is super fast with frame sequences (I’m in animation so millions of files+ are not unheard of). I think that BRU GUI applications were really hurt by their complex and unwieldy database/server/client experience. As a format on tape, BRU is awesome.

I found that LTFS was really not a good solution for complex media projects given the path restrictions and writing inefficiencies with small files. Solutions like Preroll Post were unbelievably awkward and IBM’s recent decision to discontinue LTFS support for Windows really put the final chill on LTFS as a future forward solution for me.

I love LTO – $100 CAD for 12TB of stable storage is amazing. I do disk to disk to tape X 2 archives and end up going back to tape once or twice a year for assets or full on project recalls when the nearline disk archive is unavailable/

I am now working with TAR on Linux using some scripts to do my cold storage archiving to LTO8. I break projects into 500GB folders, pull xxhash strings for future verification, pretar the folders, pull metadata including tar byte offsets and then write these to LTO while recording the block numbers for each TAR for use in an SQLite database so I can find everything.

My goal was to mitigate any proprietary format changes in the future. It’s not a perfect solution and requires some doing in Python or shell script (AI helps a lot with this), but I think open standards, not tied to proprietary formats, is the way to go for cold storage archives. I’ve got another 20 years of studio left in me and I do not want to migrate archives again.

I find nearline backups are best handled using mirrored NASes with shapshotting, C2 or backblaze etc.

For interchange and delivery, sure, LTFS. For stuff I want around for years, TAR is “forever”.

[Justin Stephenson]

Perfect! Thank-you, Dan. I also used the counter to create random seeds for some fractal noise layers that I am using for textures and light.

The end effect is that each time the bass drum is hit, a new background appears.

Best,

– Justin

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Design, Animation, Editing, Color for Cinema, Broadcast, Web and Installation.

Gear: 2 X Macpro 8 Core Nehalem, ATTO R380, Proavio EB8MS, nVidia GTX-286, Blackmagic Decklink Studio, AJA LHi, FSI LM-2461W, Tangent Wave, Yamaha HS50Ms W HS10w Sub

Tools: Avid MC 5.5 (formerly FCP), CS 5.5, C4D13, Resolve 8.1, VDMX, Quartz Composer, Processing, Cubase 5.

[Justin Stephenson]

I have just managed to resolve an issue with corrupted MXFs from a C300. The guy who DMTed copied the card over without checking the files, wizzed the card and was then not much help in recovery. Grrr.

Long story short, I was missing 5/6ths of the shoot and had to figure out a way to get the materials back. Here is how it went:

– copying to the cf card and then putting back into a c300 did not repair the clips.

– copying back to the cf card and playing back from the camera DID work – with some artifacts occasionally.

– Playing in MPC-HC on windows did work – with some artifacts occasionally.

So I managed to play back the clips and record to a BMD Hyperdeck Shuttle. I did a wipe between the 1/6th of the original material and my recaptured material and could not see a difference on a reference monitor.

This is not the ideal solution, but it saved the day in the end.

I hope it is helpful to someone facing the same issue.

[Justin Stephenson]

I am trying to accomplish something similar here and I wanted to see how this might me done:

“and a random opacity expression making only one layer of each group visible.”

Any help would be appreciated.

– Justin

————————-
Design, Animation, Editing, Color for Cinema, Broadcast, Web and Installation.

Gear: 2 X Macpro 8 Core Nehalem, ATTO R380, Proavio EB8MS, nVidia GTX-286, Blackmagic Decklink Studio, AJA LHi, FSI LM-2461W, Tangent Wave, Yamaha HS50Ms W HS10w Sub

Tools: Avid MC 5.5 (formerly FCP), CS 5.5, C4D13, Resolve 8.1, VDMX, Quartz Composer, Processing, Cubase 5.

[Justin Stephenson]

Hi All,

One final entry on this workflow. Again, I was working on a title sequence for a feature that was finishing in LOG C. I could not rely on the lab’s transfer from sRGB (happening in France), so I needed to get my sequence looking perfect in LOG-C.

To further complicate things, I could not work in a linearized space in AE as the compositing transfer modes do not work the same. I had to revise a few things from my original breakdown:

– working in 32bit sRGB in AE

– the timeline had an adjustment layer with a Video to Log C LUT from ARRI’s LUT maker (extended in extended out) + the Log-C to 709 display LUT from Eclair so that I could see what things would look like in Eclair’s DI suite. I would turn this off for rendering.

– Render to DPX sequence with “scaled for video” settings.

– Use an input LUT in Resolve with the Video to Log C LUT from ARRI’s LUT maker (legal in, extended out – scaling the video and using the legal-in LUT was important as I was getting some chatter in the whites when working extended to extended range).

– Use the display LUT from the lab (Loc-C to 709)

– Final Grading

– Output to DPX.

I attended a preview DI at Delux and it was perfect. What I saw here is precisely what they projected there.

Log-C is a newish format and until AE builds a colour space/profile for it – like they did for CineLog, I think that this is the way to work if you do not want to leave your sequence in the hands of the lab to translate from sRGB or 709 into Log-C

I hope this is helpful to anyone embarking on a design project in LOG-C.

– J

————————-
Design, Animation, Editing, Color for Cinema, Broadcast, Web and Installation.

Gear: 2 X Macpro 8 Core Nehalem, ATTO R380, Proavio EB8MS, nVidia GTX-286, Blackmagic Decklink Studio, AJA LHi, FSI LM-2461W, Tangent Wave, Yamaha HS50Ms W HS10w Sub

Tools: Avid MC 5.5 (formerly FCP), CS 5.5, C4D13, Resolve 8.1, VDMX, Quartz Composer, Processing, Cubase 5.

[Justin Stephenson]

Well I might be the lone voice of dissent here. I just made the switch back to avid. I worked in FCP fro many years. When they made the switch to X I needed to find a new home as it really is not a professional solution.

I moved over to PPro5 and I LOVED it. The functionality and the user experience is the best there is I think. The issue is that it really does not work properly yet. The media manager does not do what its supposed to do, AAF exports don;t work, EDLs are not standard. This is not to mention the dropped frames and stuttering timeline.

Its an amazing system if you are starting and ending in PPRo, but if you need to talk to other systems, its not ideal. I’ve been bouncing out of PPRo into FCP to get things to work in other systems.

I would say that the promise of PPro is greater than what it delivers. I’m sure they’ll get better with each iteration, but there’s nothing like a few shotty EDLs and AAFs when you’re on a deadline to make you want to switch.

MC6 is truly amazing and everything works. Yes…its got its parochial hangups, and I would never dream of doing any motion or compositing in it, but its a cutting machine and it talks to everything.

————————-
Design, Animation, Editing, Color for Cinema, Broadcast, Web and Installation.

Gear: 2 X Macpro 8 Core Nehalem, ATTO R380, Proavio EB8MS, nVidia GTX-286, Blackmagic Decklink Studio, AJA LHi, FSI LM-2461W, Tangent Wave, Yamaha HS50Ms W HS10w Sub

Tools: Avid MC 5.5 (formerly FCP), CS 5.5, C4D13, Resolve 8.1, VDMX, Quartz Composer, Processing, Cubase 5.

[Justin Stephenson]

HI J,

I’m on 10.6.8. Apparently not officially supported, but working for me. I’m in the middle of some animation projects and don;t want to switch to lion until their done.

– J

————————-
Design, Animation, Editing, Color for Cinema, Broadcast, Web and Installation.

Gear: 2 X Macpro 8 Core Nehalem, ATTO R380, Proavio EB8MS, nVidia GTX-286, Blackmagic Decklink Studio, AJA LHi, FSI LM-2461W, Tangent Wave, Yamaha HS50Ms W HS10w Sub

Tools: Avid MC 5.5 (formerly FCP), CS 5.5, C4D13, Resolve 8.1, VDMX, Quartz Composer, Processing, Cubase 5.

[Justin Stephenson]

“Funny hearing Avid described as “cool.””

True. FCP brought in what I think was the great game changer – it opened up choices for people – you could use any hardware you like. Uncompressed SD, HD, 2K for a grand + your hardware card. Pick the card you like. It had working EDL, OMF, XML – it talked to everything quite nicely. It ushered in a professional workflow (though not without some bumps) for a fraction of the cost of an AVID. This was super cool as it put these tools into the hands of creative people that would not have been able to afford an avid system – like me. Not only this, FCP allowed you to work with traditional 3 point – clip based editing, or wing ding drag and drop timeline style. Super duper cool. People coming from AVID or M100 or Premiere could get in and up to speed quickly.

Sadly, instead of building on this, Apple chose to “change the way video editing works”. Puh-lease! They’ve created what is probably a fabulous system for a certain type of production, but not one that integrates with established professional workflows. Likely a business decision – going for the bigger iMovie market.

AVID has been so smart about this I think. They’re rightly capitalizing on the fact that they have always been in the business of serving the professional customer. All of us using FCP in professional workflows are hungry to find a new home. I would actually say that Premiere would be awesome if it worked properly, but it doesn’t.

AVID is going to win this one by combining their cachet of “always there for the pros” with the coolness of Open I/O, more functional UI, ProRes support, and their new brand orientation of “were listing to you”. Smart.

Having worked on lots of different systems, I would still say that AVID still has a lot to learn from other apps though: the marquis tool, avid fx, the way that you import and output material really feel like bolted on and parochial solutions rather than cleanly integrated, robust workflows. These are things that even Premiere does really really well – if I have to put together a quick animatic with stuff coming from all over the place, that’s sadly the tool I would use.

I would just finish this up by saying that I really do think they;re headed in an great direction. Like I said in my opening post, I installed MC6, the BMD 9.0 drivers and it all just worked. Yes! Black Magic Decklink from an AVID. In the wild west of open I/O, shifting software paradigms, seemingly daily video format inventions, this is indeed very cool. I love my new home.

– J

————————-
Design, Animation, Editing, Color for Cinema, Broadcast, Web and Installation.

Gear: 2 X Macpro 8 Core Nehalem, ATTO R380, Proavio EB8MS, nVidia GTX-286, Blackmagic Decklink Studio, AJA LHi, FSI LM-2461W, Tangent Wave, Yamaha HS50Ms W HS10w Sub

Tools: Avid MC 5.5 (formerly FCP), CS 5.5, C4D13, Resolve 8.1, VDMX, Quartz Composer, Processing, Cubase 5.

[Justin Stephenson]

Hello All,

Alright. After some conversations and testing I’ve got this working.

– Working in AE at 16bit linear. Rendering ProRes 4444 or DPX.
– Importing sequences into resolve.
– Import LUT set to a lut generated from ARRI’s LUT generator:

AlexaV3_K1S1_Video2LogC_EE_davinci3d.cube

– Display LUT set to DaVinci’s Alexa_2_rec_709.
– Finishing touches…fun.
– Render to a DPX sequence.

Works perfectly so far. When re-imported into another package: AE, Nuke, Resolve and the Arri Log-C to Linear LUT is applied, my original image is there. I have yet to test with the lab but I quite certain this will work fine based on other log workflows I’ve been involved with.

I hope this workflow is helpful for anyone else in the situation. Also, if anyone has any suggestions as to how it could be improved, please let me know.

– J

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2 X Macpro 8 Core Nehalem 2.26, ATTO R380, Proavio EB8MS w 1.5TB segates, nVidia GTX-286, Blackmagic Decklink Studio, AJA LHi, FSI LM-1760W, Tangent Wave, Avid MC 5.5, CS 5.5, C4D12, Resolve 8.1, Cubase 5, Yamaha HS50Ms W HS10w Sub