[Malcolm Wright]

Hey Jon,

I’ve been in touch with Tolis for the past year. Throughout that time, the release has been imminent, but never quite there. Whilst I do believe they are actively trying to get it out the door, it is difficult to put too much faith in it after 4 years of dashed expectations.

If you can do without the media-specific functions, I’ve had great success with the most recent version of Retrospect. It is also a lot cheaper. At the end of the day, you just want to know your data is safe – the media bells and whistles are secondary. I can also vouch for Retrospect’s customer service: very good.

All the best,
M

[Malcolm Wright]

“1) What I’m doing is right-clicking on each of the ‘supposedly offline’ clips on my timeline, and ‘revealing in project’. Then I copy that clip (to clipboard), and then return to the clip on the timeline, and ‘replace with clip>from bin’ and that relinks it, so you can see it in your source monitor.”

This saved me. THANK YOU!

“Looks like a big that needs to be fixed. I hope someone out there benefits from this!”

Yes, well 4 years later, it doesn’t seem to have been resolved. Arrg…

[Malcolm Wright]

Hello Tim,

Any news on the BRU PE Windows beta?

All the best,
Malcolm

[Malcolm Wright]

Thanks Tim, good to know.

By the sounds of things, Preroll Post also has this functionality – its just that it has been disabled in the Windows version and I have no way of obtaining any further information than that. It is frustrating.

I very much look forward to your open beta testing!

Work flow wise, when I start archiving, the plan is to archive one shoot at a time, rather than entire project at a time. But when I reach the last fifth or so of a tape, odds are the next shoot won’t fit neatly in the remaining space so spanning will almost always be important if I’m not to either waste terabytes of storage space, or spend ages manually trying to figure out how to maximise the storage usage.

M

[Malcolm Wright]

Hello Tim,

Thanks for your suggestion.

I’ve been in contact with Imagine for the past couple of weeks, attempting to trial Preroll Post for Windows.
To be honest I’ve run into a number of bizarre difficulties. Crashes, which the company addressed quickly with a new build, but more recently and more strangely, the disabling of tape spanning on the Windows version.

After 10 days of helping them resolve the crashing, I was finally able to do my first successful archive and retrieval of a small amount of data. It is only when I moved on to a larger set of test data to archive, that I realised the important spanning functionality Preroll Post is supposed to have, where it smartly divides up the data to archive between multiple tapes and requests a new one each time it has filled up its current tape, is not working. Instead, when I try to launch an archive write that is larger than the tape in the drive, I get an error saying there is not enough space for the source materials, and that’s it.

Bringing this to Imagine’s attention, I receive a terse email saying that spanning is disabled in the Windows version for the time being. No further explanations. I requested any more details they might be able to supply: naturally it would be good to know if and when the functionality might be coming back? No response after 48 hours, and I don’t really know whether I should be persevering or taking a sober look at the 2 weeks of difficulties I’ve been having trying to test the software, and just cut my losses? Certainly I would be even more unhappy with this sequence of events if I were a paying customer already: my time is being wasted but I have not spent any money yet.

So anyway, right now, going by the word of the person who wrote to me from Imagine, and putting aside the misgivings from my experiences so far, the Windows version is crippled in a way that rules out spending $499 on it.

All the best,
Malcolm

[Malcolm Wright]

Haha – yes, I did see what you did there… sadly only on the second read (end of day, getting old and slow, etc).

That’s heartening news!

I had contacted the sales team, and they did mention the Windows and Linux versions were not far off, but I do occasionally suffer from a somewhat ‘show me’ attitude in these situations… Seeing the screen grabs goes a long way.

I’m in trialing mode right now: testing other solutions – if it is feasible, I’d happily join your beta testing. Windows or Linux. Happy to sign an NDA.

All the best,
Malcolm

[Malcolm Wright]

Thanks Jack!
From the look of things, those folks sell complete machines in a box: OS, software and LTO drive.
Neat solution for the field.

I already have an internal drive, and am just looking for the best software solution on PC at present.

[Malcolm Wright]

I know some water had flowed under the bridge since the last post to this thread, but I’d second Joe’s request to Dan for a tutorial on how Shotput Pro and Preroll post work together. I had the exact same grey area of not understanding the workflow between the too.

Thanks!
Malcolm