[Mark Hollis]

I have ordered Snow Leopard because Apple says I can upgrade for the cost of shipping (I have a new Mac Pro at home — I’m editing on PCs at work). That discount dies for new Macs in January.

I shall install Snow Leopard when I know that it will work with everything.

Can you tell me if you can install Rosetta in Snow Leopard? I have a fair amount of legacy software that was written for Power PC that I still use on my Intel box — most particularly Intuit’s Quicken.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Great video. I just love how Mr. Creepy talks about how he can edit Miss West Virginia or Miss California (and later talent contests) programs on his system. I doubt that he’d get near any of these pagents because the women would find him too creepy.

As to his Mac Bashing. That is 90% of his message. A computer is a tool. You buy a Mac because you want to invest in Apple’s professional edit system (Final Cut Studio). You also invest in a Mac because Apple does do WYSIWYG on their displays and Windows doesn’t (I don’t think that Red Hat Linux does, as well).

He’s whining about how it’s impossible to install hard drives on a Mac. For internal drives, it took me 2 minutes to install three 1.5T SATA drives on my Mac Pro and it will take a fourth. While they are not as easily removed as his front-loading ones, I would argue that Real Men use Fibre Channel SAS disk arrays, which they place in another room (or ventilated closet) so they don’t have to listen to the array.

Oh, and he cannot spell “swappable.”

If you are doing large projects, you need an external array. There are real reasons why Avids sell with external arrays and they’re all good ones. This is not to say that one ought to compare Adobe’s Premiere with an Avid Media Composer, Symphony or DS, but these systems are certainly capable of large projects with multiple streams of HD throughput in real time with no dropped frames.

And system integrators who sell Final Cut systems also specify proven external RAID arrays for editing, usually with 6, 12 and 24 drives in an array. Depending on the stripe, you will absolutely get reliable throughput that is faster than any internal array you can set up — even if you can swap out a drive and boot Linux or Windoze 95.

I find Mr. Creepy there to be more amusing than anything else. I hope he likes the sound of the fans trying desperately to keep up with the heat generated in his packed computer case.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

How are your export settings configured?

Standard DV (NTSC) General settings should be:
File Type Microsoft DV AVI
Export Video checked
Export Audio checked
Embedding options Project
Video Settings should be:
Compressor DV (NTSC)
Color depth Millions of colors
Frame size (grayed out 720×480)
Frame Rate 29.97
Pixel Aspect ratio D1/DV NTSC (0.9)
Recompress Maintain Data Rate
Keyframe and Rendering
Rendering options Lower Field First Deinterlace not checked
Optimize Stills checked.
Audio:
Uncompressed
Sample Rate 48000 Hz
Sample Type 16 Bit
Channels Mono (or Stereo as you prefer)
Interleave 1 Frame

Those settings ought to work.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Random crashes like that during an auto-save suggests RAM issues.

Do you have the maximum amount of RAM you can have for the application? (Win 32-bit is 3.5 G but most computers make you put in 4G, Win 64 — Vista Windows 7 and XP-64 — is as much as you can cram into the box.)

Is your C: drive low in fragmentation and high in free space?

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

If it’s mixed, you may be looking at a foley session to recreate the natural sound.

Else get your own music and substitute it for the audio on the DVD.

There is an alternative though — but you may find it extremely difficult:

Take the music (you would have to get a CD of just the music and not the natural sound) and add it then invert the waveform and hope that “cancels out” the music on the DVD.I have tried this once and was successful for a very short clip. Problem is, even with CD audio, the music may play back at different speeds. And the sound I got as a result was really “muddy.”

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

If it’s that pricey, look at the SAN solutions. That way one bay can edit promos for the same material that another bay is cutting a package using.

I can highly recommend Facilis Technology’s Terrablock systems. They look like hard drives attached to your PC and not a SAN, so applications (like Avid’s) that will only connect to really expensive and proprietary SANs won’t know the difference.

Terrablock will support a facility with heterogenius editing systems, as long as they can all work with each other’s codecs (and I recommend the use of Avid’s free DNxHD and MXF for easy sharing between systems). And Facilis’ systems will support HD. Last thing I did on HD was off a Terrablock array. Aired on ESPN.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Exporting an AVI is very simple. If you have your mix to your liking, the AVI will be mixed just fine.

I have to deliver a mono mix, so that is really easy. I have done 5.1 sound two times and not using Premiere. Mix for that was complicated but very rewarding — but then I was set up in a room with good monitoring.

My view of sterero is as follows:

All music is stereo. All content (voiceover and interview or mic sound is centered, equal on both channels no matter where it occurs in the picture). I realize there are ways to mix stereo that is more realistic and “better,” but that is the domain of sound design and they’re paying me to edit picture and sound, not to do sound design which is an art form that is different.

I set my levels on my mixer so that overall peaks are averaging -12. If program audio needs to be “ducked” behind narration, I do that in the edit by inserting keyframes in the audio channel(s) in question and adjusting that audio that way. I don’t do live mixing and ask the editor to follow my faders. While that works for some, I find that introduces about 100 keyframes when two to four will do just fine.

For audio, once I have things set to my liking (including EQ if necessary), I do a lot of copying and “Paste Attributes” to get audio from the same tape or take to be the same throughout my sequence. Takes a few minutes to set an initial level that works with the show, but once done, it’s done.

When I do a show assemble, I’m exporting AVI files and then reimporting them. I have a master level set for program audio on channel 1 or 2 (depending on whether or not it’s stereo or mono) and I also have effects audio beyond that.

I have a keyed effect that transitions between stories with a sound effect. I keep that keyed effect “in sync” with the sound by linking the two. That way, if I copy one to a new position, I copy both.

Anything complex that takes several layers of audio and video is [shift]-selected and linked. That way everything stays in sync the way I want.

I get repeatable effects with sound effects. I get program audio that is premixed to the correct level before I lay out my show. My producers all love my audio.

Short of sitting down with you and showing you what I am doing, I cannot think of anything else to tell you.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

You want the best way?

Use a Teranex.

Good, Fast, Cheap. Pick any two.

I have never seen a software conversion that would make NTSC video look as good in HD as a Teranex. There are other hardware converters out there that do a good job but I have not used them and cannot recommend them.

If you charge your client for the conversion, they will make sure that, next time, they shoot properly.

I am, of course, assuming that by “16:9” you mean HD. You can do 16:9 NTSC by simply moving the video (to keep the head of the person in the picture) and doing a letterbox.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Vince is absolutely correct here and you should be looking for an external RAID array, controlled by a card in a slot in your computer.

It’s all about throughput, really. You need to be able to play back HD files without dropping frames and today’s 7200 RPM drives, as well as the speedier 10,000 and 15,000 RPM drives just cannot keep up with uncompressed HD.

You have been burned once and I know just what happened. You had a RAID stripe set to RAID 0, which is interleave stripe where every other block of data was placed on the other drive. This allows the two drives to (more) fully saturate the disk drive controller’s pipe and that gets data into your RAM where your CPU can use it lightning fast. It’s a good solution but, if one drive fails, you lose 100% of your data.

If you don’t want to risk the data loss, there are other means by which you can stripe the drives to give you some data protection and RAID 5 (with enough disk drives) will do the trick. RAID 5 creates an array with a “checksum” drive that will rebuild the array if one drive fails. You just replace the bad drive and keep on editing. The array will do a rebuild.

You can only get this kind of array in an external chassis, as the maximum amount of drives you can put inside of any computer is four.

I would encourage a quick read of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID‘>WikiPedia’s article on RAID arrays. You don’t start getting any decent speed out of an array until you have 4 drives or more. RAID 5 can be made to deliver close to RAID 0 performance and Dave Altavilla did testing of a RAID 5 array that is capable of delivering speed that is appropriate for HD. His article is here and it is highly recommended reading as he specifies drives to be used in the array as well as the controller card he uses. What he doesn’t offer you is a chassis. Also the drives he’s all fired up about don’t have industry standard connectors (as of June).

Investing in a RAID array is kind of a big deal. But you should be able to charge for that investment if you are editing HD and you’re not just a hobbyist.

If you are a hobbyist, keep your tapes handy in case of drive failure, check your drives’ status every time you initiate a new project (before you load in your material) and do a RAID 0 stripe. You simply will not get reliable uncompressed HD playback from a single drive. They just aren’t built to give you the raw throughput.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

I agree with Brian that increasing your system RAM is a good idea. He states 3G and he is correct in that your system may only allow your applications to use 3G but, if you have to add RAM in identical pairs, you may need to max out your system at 4G. Good thing is that RAM prices continue to drop.

Premiere Pro may be failing to release RAM and also remember that your boot drive is being used as virtual memory. Make sure that your startup (C:) drive has enough free space and is not heavily fragmented so that, as Premiere Pro needs more memory (physical or virtual) it has the ability to get what it needs.

Save your work and exit the application at least two times daily. That will clear out any RAM that Premiere Pro does not appropriately release. If you are using other applications or have a number of background tasks running, do a reboot, which will free up the maximum amount of RAM.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?