[Neil Myers]

Alex:

You don’t need to buy an expensive NVidia card to get MPE. Lesser cards also work if you do the “hack”. We are using a GTX 285 and it is running MPE without issue.

Search this forum for Mercury Playback Engine Hack and you’ll find it.

Neil Myers
Connect Public Relations
CS4 Master Suite, 3DS

[Neil Myers]

Vince:

I came to that same conclusion. We built one in 3DS Max:

Neil Myers
Connect Public Relations
CS4 Master Suite, 3DS

[Neil Myers]

Thank you for the recommendation. We ordered their TowerRaid 8-bay system with a 4-channel eSATA PCI-E card. We’re going to run RAID 10. The speed tests I have seen are really good … 334MB/sec … and we still have good data protection.

Neil Myers
Connect Public Relations
CS4 Master Suite, 3DS

[Neil Myers]

I’ll use After Effects and see. One advantage as I thought about is that if I wanted to PIP the Premiere corner pin doesn’t really work, whereas it would if I fixed first in After Effects and then just PIP-ed the corrected footage.

Neil Myers
Connect Public Relations
CS4 Master Suite, 3DS

[Neil Myers]

Yep … it was a Codec issue. I bought the MainConcept plugin and it fixed it.

Thanks!

Neil Myers
Connect Public Relations
CS4 Master Suite, 3DS

[Neil Myers]

Good idea. I just tried it with VideoLAN (which seems to always play everything) and it works perfectly.

Neil Myers
Connect Public Relations
CS4 Master Suite, 3DS

[Neil Myers]

I had the same problem and Mac Drive fixed it. Excellent software.

The problem, for those who are interested, is that there are 3 file system standards between the Mac and the PC: FAT and NTFS are the Windows systems and HFS is the Mac system (lots of variations of each).

The native Mac file system is HFS. Windows cannot read or write HFS. Mac can read NTFS, but not write to it. Too bad — that would solve a lot of problems. Mac can read and write FAT and FAT32, but those come with a limitation of 4GB file sizes. Many video files routinely exceed that size.

By installing Mac Drive you allow your Windows PC to read and write HFS files. That solves the problem.

*I am sure I have bastardized this explanation — feel free to correct me. When this problem hit me last year it took me a week to solve. Hopefully this info will help somebody avoid that delay!

Neil Myers
Connect Public Relations
CS4 Master Suite, 3DS

[Neil Myers]

Todd:

Thanks, excellent information. That helps me. I had wondered what the difference in RAM would mean. Since I work in 1080p or 720p so it looks like 1GB will be plenty.

Neil Myers
Connect Public Relations
CS4 Master Suite, 3DS

[Neil Myers]

Thanks, I’ll research those type of lights. We aren’t going for any audio … this is just b-roll to cut away to.

Neil Myers
Connect Public Relations
CS4 Master Suite, 3DS

[Neil Myers]

All:

Thanks — a ton of food for thought. I loved the suggestion of renting experience from a real pro grip. Unfortunately, I am doing this gratis as a favor for a friend. He is a good friend, but digging into my own pocket to finance outside talent is a bit too far for me. [grin]

I look at this as an opportunity to gain some of the experience other posters have alluded to. I am a pilot and we have a saying — you start with two buckets: A luck bucket (which starts full) and an experience bucket (which starts empty). The trick is to fill the experience bucket before you empty the luck bucket.

I will try some of these ideas and post my results for critique.

Thanks again!

Neil Myers
Connect Public Relations
CS4 Master Suite, 3DS