[Morten Balling]

You’re right. Avid’s way better (and cheaper) than it used to be. And I’m pretty prejudiced against it. Regarding familiarity I’m not that easily scared. A hammer is a hammer.

The customer offered me to buy me a MC license, which is probably what we’ll end up doing. That should fix most of my worries, and give me the possibility, to sort out most of the stuff they didn’t think about. I’m looking forward to the day, when i finally get a closed edit… 🙂

[Morten Balling]

@Mike

I’m going to grade on my own Mac (I’m a freelancer working at home). The editing will be done at the production company. Previously I’ve recieved FCP7 projects from the same customer, on an external hard drive, which they exported using Media Manager. That way, I could open the project, clean up the timeline and remove anything that Resolve didn’t like. After grading, I round tripped back to FCP7, fixed issues like text etc, and made a ProRes master.

With the AAF workflow I foresee problems with things like stabilizing, credits, speed ramps etc. Also, there are the occasional missing clips, due to something I never figured out. Using multicam editing in FCX makes Resolve pretty confused.

I think we end up with a workflow, where the MP4 dailies are backed up, and later converted to a MOV (XDCAM EX) container, using “XDCAM Transfer”. I tested that, and resolve loads the MOV perfectly, without white clipping. Compared to another project I’m working on, (RED/FCX/Resolve), I honestly can’t figure out, why the XDCAM/AVID/Resolve workflow has to be so difficult. I think the money saved on camera rent will quickly be spent on an Avid assistant, having to convert/transcode everything.

My skepticism towards Avid goes way back, but I think it started when I was technical manager at a large facility many years ago. I was asked to upgrade an Avid MC from low res offline to online. That cost close to 100K$ back then. The upgrade was an extra SCSI cable and a new dongle for the software. Extra hard drives were 10x the price of the exact same drive without the Avid software header. I could continue for hours, but I will spare you that 😉

All in all, we just need to do what everybody always should do: Test the workflow before starting up.

@Andrew
Last week I called about 15 of my old colleagues at different facilities in Copenhagen, to make a quick poll on the NLE situation. I expected to hear that Avid was taking over, but surprisingly people mainly said they were still using FCP7. Some were starting to use FCX and many had purchased Premiere as a “Swiss knife” hub. Some had Avid, but most hated it, due to it’s input/output, which has always been limited in it’s capabilities towards talking to other software. I think Quantel was worse than Avid, but the really struggled to get that price.

Personally I’ve edited a lot in FCX, and after a rather difficult birth of the software, I have to say I like it a lot. There are still a few things missing, but the timeline is amazing, and it’s blazingly fast compared to anything else I’ve seen so far.

Before you think that I’m “just one of those new kids with an iToy”: I’ve been working with film and TV for 25 years, as a 3D animator, Inferno/Nuke compositor, VFX supervisor and the last seven years mainly as a colorist.

Thanks for your replies

Best regards

Morten 🙂

[Morten Balling]

Thanks 🙂

[Morten Balling]

That is the funniest video I have seen for a long time! 🙂

[Morten Balling]

Use Disk Util! Dragging files and folders wont copy everything.

Method: Open Disk Util. Select disk to clone. Click “New Image” icon at the top menu bar. Easy as that!

🙂

[Morten Balling]

Time Machine is an excellent method for backing up. As you mentioned, it does one complete backup, and then incremental backups. It’s extremely easy to set up (like most things Apple), and you can exclude things you wont backup like cache etc. I back up everything using TM. There are a few things you might want to be aware of:

As far as I know, you can only backup to one drive (raid or whatever). This means all your data will be backed up to the “TM Drive”. I backup both my system drive, and a software raid0 to another software raid0, via SATA at 500MB/s (according to Activity Monitor). The important thing to remember is that if you want to restore your system drive, it can’t be done from anything else, than drives connected via Network, FW, USB og internal SATA. Aka if you use an external raid for backup of your sytem drive, make sure you can access the raid when booting from the OSX DVD! In my case, all my external drives for the TM raid, have FW800 connectors I can use in case of an emergency. Hope this makes sense. It is important to understand this issue before using a raid as your TM drive!!!

Time Machine needs some overhead to index files etc. This means you cannot backup 6TB data to an 6TB raid. Since TM does incremental backups, your backup size will increase over time. A trick is to disable backup of some directories, during initial backup, and then enable them again, for incremental backup afterward.

All in all, once you’ve setup TM, it pretty much just does the job, without headaches and with a history of your drives, in one hour increments. Nice 😉

My setup:

Mac Pro 2008 8-core.

Macintosh HD: 2x 120 GB OCZ Vertex2’s in Raid0

Media raid: 6x 1TB Samsung F3 in raid0. 2 drives in internal drive bays and the rest on a Sonnet E4P eSata contr. (770 MB/s sustained RW from a cheap software raid!)

TM Drive: 4x 1TB Samsung F3 in raid0 on another Sonnet E4P.

Storage: 3x 4TB WD Mybook Studio, each mirrored down to 2TB with WD Drive manager, and striped in Disk Util (Raid10), connected via FW800. (No TM backup).

Hope this helps 🙂

EDBBOB