[Mark Hollis]

If you go the Avid route, your Avid reseller will sell you new computers (They’re using HP workstations and Mac Pros presently). So you would be buying computers in any case if you went Avid — they do have software only versions of their Media Composer, but you will not be able to do any I/O of any kind, as that is not enabled in the software-only version.

As to a Final Cut Pro system, you should take a look at the workstation costs complete with software and any BoB (breakout box, such as the AJA or Blackmagic Design cards) you may require for your operation as a whole.

Trying to re-use your current PCs for editing and graphics workstations is not recommended for a system upgrade.

As to what kind of network you would use, that depends on whether or not you go Avid’s route (and I can recommend the Terrablock or Avid’s own proprietary Unity MediaNetwork for that) or you go Apple’s route.

You can save a lot of money by editing off of a server if you have several edit rooms sharing storage. That is the beauty of a server. In fact, you can cut a feature in one room and cut promos for that feature in another — all using the same material. You can also begin editing in one room while another room is doing your ingest.

So if you do have a SAN, that can really help with your workflow. Local projects are fine but they are local — you cannot take advantage of having multiple workstations and get work done faster that way.

One thing you might also consider is that Apple’s Compresser can run on multiple cores and multiple workstations at the same time. So if you have two edit bays that are not working, you can utilize the power of two computers to compress a show for a DVD (or distribution) at the same time, speeding up your workflow for output.

Apple also sells Final Cut Server, which is designed to aid in workflow and asset management as well as asset searches.

I do realize you are working on a PC base here, but you’re going to buy new computers whether you go with Avid or Final Cut if you choose to upgrade.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

RAID speeds everything up. But I do have to ask, why are you sticking with HDV? If you have enough dough to afford an array, transcoding to some other codec is a good idea, especially if it’s a codec that is native to what Premiere Pro wants.

And if you can get serial digital out and use an AJA or Blackmagic Design capture system, you lose long-GOP issues and edit in a codec that is native to your I/O card (which will speed up renders).

I have my renders on one drive and my media on another and I’m using the DV (NTSC) codec. I never have indexing issues and I am using a really old version of Premiere Pro (1.5).

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Don’t upgrade in the middle of a project.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

CS4 taxes your processor a little more and may not take full advantage of your Mac’s dual cores. Adobe has been writing better software for Windows than they have been writing for Macs because their Mac-based applications all use the Carbon API (which Apple told them in 2000 was an API that was for transitioning between Apple’s former System Software to their then-new OS X).

I do not think Carbon applications will ever be 64-bit, either, which means that as other applications for Mac’s OS X make that transition, Adobe will be left behind if they don’t move to Cocoa.

Here’s how to avoid dropouts in audio and dropped video frames in video applications:

Use a disk stripe. Striped disk arrays can thoroughly saturate the SATA or Firewire bus and give you the throughput to do video of any size, including HD.

Don’t run anything else. When you’re editing video, make your Mac clean and lean. Take everything out of your “opens on startup” in your System Preferences. You can create an “edit” user with a slimmed-down bootup. Don’t be tempted to allow “fast user switching.”

Use current drivers. Make sure any AJA or Blackmagic Design I/O card has the latest drivers and firmware.

Use seperate Firewire channels. If you are using Firewire to capture and you are capturing to a Firewire array (or drive) you can get dropped frames if the array (or drive) uses the same Firewire channel as your VCR or your camcorder. Sometimes what you have to do (if you only have one channel available) is to capture video to your boot drive (on single-drive Macs) and then shuttle the material out to a Firewire array for work. You can find out how many Firewire channels you have by opening “Aboud My Mac” and clicking “More,” and you will open up your System Profiler and you can see what is attached to what. Remember, Firewire 800 runs at 400 speed when there is a Firewire 400 device in the chain.

If you simply cannot get CS4 to work, reinstall CS3 and return the CS4 package as incompatible with your computer. If Adobe gets a lot of those types of returns, they may actually go out and get themselves a steaming hot cuppa Cocoa.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Please pardon me. I have had nose to the grindstone the last several days and haven’t had the chance to reply.

I have a very good friend who works up in New Hampshire and is using CS4 for exactly what you are doing. The real advantage with his workflow is the interplay between Adobe’s After Effects and Premiere Pro. His biggest problems have to do with ingest — especially where he has to work with legacy tape formats.

For that, he’s using an Avid Newscutter and he does not like that. He upgraded to CS4 to be able to read P2 cards in a new camera they purchased and he’s capable of working in both HD and SD formats. Others will tell you that Adobe offered upgrades to CS3 that can deal with P2 media but I think he was interested in the upgrade for the tighter integration between Adobe applications, which was a real win for him.

He’s using CS4 with Windows XP Pro. I don’t think one would need a 64-bit Photoshop (which does work in Vista and, presumably Win 7) for video applications. Premiere and After Effects are not 64-bit in CS4.

Use a regular Windows server to transfer materials from one workstation to another and I’d RAID 5 stripe it, unless I could afford to RAID 1 (complete redundancy) stripe the server. You’ll want Gigabit Ethernet to transfer materials.

I have a Gig-E system but I do not edit material that is on the server. I place media on local storage for editing only. If you need ot edit off of a server, I would recommend 10-Gigabit Ethernet (and the switches for that are kind of expensive).

If you are doing features, I have to say that the Adobe applications may run out of gas for that. I have done feature-length material on Avid and Final Cut. Avid is superior to Final Cut in media management, while Final Cut is supreior to Avid in terms of being able to work with just about any media that is out there. Final Cut also is not tied to proprietary hardware for support — but you have to support yourself or have a VAR or integrater offer you support.

You can get very good centralized servers for either Final Cut or Avid (or a mixture of the two) from third-party vendors. Avid will not support any server that is not made by them (and their servers are very costly) but I have personal experience with Terrablock and my experience is very positive. Terrablock systems mount on your computer (be it an Avid system running Windows or a Final Cut Studio system running on a Mac) as if it were a local hard drive. The “drives” may be expanded or contracted based on the needs of the job by using a Terrablock control panel that runs on both systems. All media may be passed through the Terrablock system and Terrablock arrays may be expanded using off-the-shelf hardware. Terrablock topology uses Fibre Channel, so it scales nicely all the way to HD formats.

The reason why I am pointing you away from a complete Adobe suite of applications for feature work is because Adobe does not yet have the kind of media management and handling that Apple and Avid have put together. And I know very well that you can use After Effects to composite material for use on an Avid or on Final Cut system within a facility. Adobe scales well to :30 or :60 spots and I’m currently cutting a half-hour program on Premiere Pro 1.5, but I would hesitate to take a feature on using the Adobe Suite.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

That really depends on what you are doing.

I worked at NBC at 30-Rock as well as at ABC. Both facilities may be doing a lot more than what you would be interested in doing in Trinidad and Tobago. Both rely extensively on Avid editors for cutting and Avid’s servers for capture and for distribution. Both NBC and ABC have ISIS servers running in tandem — in other words, they have redundant servers that record everything that comes in from their brueaus as well as from the Associated Press Television Network and Reuters (to the extent that they purchase that material) as well as their own affiliates.

Feeds from APTN and other sources happen 24 hours daily, 7 days weekly, 365 days yearly. There’s no break for Carnival, no halt during Christmas and so on.

Both companies are using Avid’s Capture Manager, Media Manager, Interplay and iMews systems extensively for their work. Avid’s tools are not used for playback to air at NBC, I don’t know about how ABC plays back to air.

Where I work now, we’re on a much smaller scale. While Avid’s Media Composer software (a special version called Newscutter is used for news) is a major standard here in the US, many people graduate from university here knowing Final Cut Pro.

At CT-N, we’re headed in that direction. We have identified a server product which can also do playback. Final Cut Pro workstations will be doing a lot of heavy lifting, from just conforming shows to editing a newsmagazine that is a wrap-up of the week’s events.

I think that, from the standpoint of providing a television service to your country, you’re looking at something along the lines of what CT-N plans to do. What we’re doing will scale to high-definition, should there be any such mandate in your country. It will also work with legacy television formats.

A certain amount of our ingest is live, into a production switcher. We also must record clean feeds without graphics for later editing and production. We also put out a live stream to internet. We also shoot remotes with P2 cameras, using Panasonic cameras that can shoot both standard definition and high definition.

One workflow that you might consider is along the lines of what NBC does with their news divisions: They make graphics (and graphic elements) seperate from their standard news and show editing and then integrate that material into the edit. That way graphics, which are time consuming, can be done by people trained to that task and there is a division of labor. Many hands make light work and you get on the air better when you have multiple people contributing to a common goal.

We would make graphics for news production in one area and send the graphic to the editors in another area as a Quicktime file that they could just drop into their packages. The same technique was done for the in-show promo for NBC’s nightly news program.

At NBC, material was then sent to Grass Valley playback systems and rolled live into a news show through a switcher with a Director. There were generally 12 editors available for the news show, six playback people, an audio engineer, a Technical Director, Director, ten graphics people working in everything from Photoshop to After Effects and on the Avid DS about 20 producers, 5 or 6 production assistants, four executive producers and an anchorperson. Lots of reporters, too.

So if you can describe what you are intending to do, I can probably nail down how you can do it.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

I’m thinking not. But there is a way to deal with this quickly:

Go into your preferences (General) and set your video transition to 15 frames. Open up your video transitions, choose Cross Dissolve and make that your default transition by right-clicking that in your transitions and pick “Make Default Transition.” Then go to your start and use the [Page Down] button on yout keyboard and hit [Ctrl]-D to do the dissolve on your first cut. Repeat for length-of-show. Enjoy.

I don’t do wedding videos any more. Last one was in the 1980s. They tend to completely rewrite the rules on what makes good, watchable television.

According to the grammar of television, a cut (to me) means a change of angle during an event that is in the same place and time. A dissolve means a change of place or time. A dip to black means someone passed away. Wipes are rarely used or needed (save to mask things or as a special transition for keyed elements).

I’ll bet you’ll be asked to do a heart wipe.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Kevin, most probably your computer won’t have a BNC input for composite video or serial digital video input. Nor would I expect it to have inputs for professional audio. AJA and BlackMagic make cards with breakout boxes for that kind of capture.

What many PCs may have is Firewire. Almost all Macs have Firewire. The method of getting your DVCPro footage into your computer (and also back out to tape, once you are done) is Firewire 400, or IEEE 1394a.

If your computer does not have a firewire port, you can add one in one of the slots on your PC. If you have a laptop, there are Firewire solutions for laptops that will work (please note, this is not an endorsement of the company at the link).

Be aware that there are two Firewire speeds, Firewire 800 and Firewire 400 (IEEE 1394a and IEEE 1394b). Firewire 800 cables are not the same as Firewire 400 cables, so if your camera or VCR came with a Firewire cable it’s most probably a 400 cable, not an 800 cable. The only devices I know that use Firewire 800 are hard drives and they’re mostly arrays.

Be advised that Firewire 800 cards and slots will work at the slower speed with an adapter cable but, since you pay more for the faster speed it’s not worth, it in my opinion, if all you intend to do is video capture.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

Then there is the 10-hour render I am doing presently.

It’s a built-up 3D image of a state, with lights and movement. Things like that ought to take ten hours. I think there are over 60 layers of the state to build up a 3-dimensional extruded look (even though, if you turn the object to 90 degrees, you see the planes).

Be nice if AE extruded.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Mark Hollis]

You work for what police unit?!

Policemen to driver: “You have bloodshot eyes, have you been drinking?”
Driver to policeman: “You have glazed eyes. Have you been eating doughnuts?”

What if there were no hypothetical questions?