Mike Chapman
Forum Replies Created
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Take a look at A3io’s MetaSan Appliance – https://www.a3io.com. An all-in-one solution combining enterprise level hardware with proven MetaSan software.
Mike Chapman
Senior Editor/Associate Producer
DigiNovations, Inc -
If Avid has any brains they’ll roll out another sale very soon – the “Buyer’s Remorse” special!
Mike Chapman
Senior Editor/Associate Producer
DigiNovations, Inc -
Well, maybe Apple learned from us better than we thought – only it’s backwards. We’re paying to polish their steaming heap. Gonna take more than a few cans of Simoniz to make this one gleam though…
Mike Chapman
Senior Editor/Associate Producer
DigiNovations, Inc -
Thanks!
Mike Chapman
Senior Editor/Associate Producer
DigiNovations, Inc -
Bob – What’s the name of your reseller? Like you, I’ve been blown away by how well it works and how it’s streamlined our workflow. But trying to find a reseller in these parts has been tough. Who is your source and how can I reach them??
Mike Chapman
Senior Editor/Associate Producer
DigiNovations, Inc -
It’s a dirty little secret that most shared-storage manufacturers introduce fragmentation to keep performance linear over the capacity of the drive. That’s why it’s usually not a good idea to defragment a media volume – your performance might die in the middle of the sequence, depending on where your now-contiguous files end up. If they’re at the outside of the disk platter, performance goes into the tank. I don’t know if fragmentation is built into the editing apps themselves; all I do know is that Avid especially used to issue warnings about defragging your media drives.
Mike Chapman
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I’m with you, Cal —
I gave up on the whole interop thing pretty quickly after a “finished” sequence we burned to a DVD came up with color bars because the link had somehow broken between AE and Encore.
Adobe marketing is run by clever people and they parse their words very carefully, and they’d have you believe that everything works together seamlessly. And it may do so in their lab while being tested by engineers (nothing wrong with that), but here in the real world it’s not quite so pretty, at least in my experience. I too have had problems with the whole interop concept, especially over issues like scaling stills. In CS3 I could scale still shots (like Jpegs) in the timeline if the stills weren’t too big (else it would crash the app.) Now I have to export the bloody thing to AE, wait while AE fires up, do my move, wait for the round-trip, and hope the plumbing holds together.
Again – looks great on paper and looks fantastic in the press releases and brochures. But I doubt that anyone at Adobe has ever earned a living as an editor. If so, they would realize that “feature creep” and “design-ship-test” has no business in our business.
Mike Chapman
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That’s only partially correct.
We have the same performance issues with Premiere, both CS3 and -4, with drives that are only half full. CS4 is better at regaining control after a switch in and out, but CS3 could take several minutes. BOTH apps take many minutes to open a project with a couple of hundred clips. Since Premiere doesn’t use proxy files, it seems to have to “walk” every file on a disk before it will open the project fully. This is the downside of editing native files; I’d rather edit on proxy files and take the (subjective) hit on image quality – which disappears at final output anyway.
It’s also a dirty little secret that many shared-storage vendors intentionally introduce fragmentation when writing to disk – that way you get linear performance as the volume fills up. Otherwise performance would degrade as the disks filled linearly from the inside of the platter to the outside. That’s why you normally wouldn’t defragment a media volume.
Mike Chapman
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I have to agree. We had mixed results with CS3 and XDCam – no metadata support, but it held up fairly well until projects grew beyond a certain size.
CS4 has been anything but stable for me, even on a one-year old PC. Trimming in XDCam crashes the app as often as not. And though it’s nice to be editing my native files instead of proxies, the hit I take on performance (along with stuttering audio and video, this on a 35mb/sec, single stream of XDCam) makes editing quite difficult. That and having to wait for minutes while Media Encoder launches to export a single still makes me wonder if anyone at Adobe has ever earned a living as an editor. I wouldn’t dream of having clients in while I try to edit on this trainwreck.
This seems like a blatant case of design-ship-test. FCP may not have the allegedly rich feature set that CS4 boasts, but at this point I don’t care if Adobe ships it with a juggler and a brass band – the feature set is worthless if I can’t do basic editing, and/or have the app run for more than a half -hour without a crash.
Mike Chapman
Mike Chapman
Post Production Editor
MadDash E-Media -
Well, that actually won’t do it – XDCam isn’t DV, it’s MPEG. We actually monitor through a Sony deck when we’re cutting HDV (as we have been up until now) but without an additional card in the PC (or so it appears) the option to “Monitor on External Device” is greyed-out.
Mike Chapman
Post Production Editor
MadDash E-Media