Oliver Peters
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Forum Replies Created
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[Walter Biscardi] “You had them striped together and both running off the single FW card? That will result in pretty slow performance vs. one drive connected to the Mac FW800 Port and the second connected to the FW card.”
Walter,
You are correct in your configuration. This isn’t my installation so I agree that running both drives from a single 2-ch. card isn’t much of an advantage. In fact the LaCie folks told the owner that he should really get 2 single-channel cards and run each drive off of a separate card and stripe them that way. Nevertheless, they have had success with uncompressed 8-bit SD, 1080/23.98 DVCProHD and 720/59.94 DVCProHD. Personally I wouldn’t guarantee it – and maybe they just happen to have a better set of LaCies – but it did seem to work flawlessly in my working with it.
On the other hand, I saw a few posts about SATAs and I would highly caution against them. So far from everything I saw at NAB, it is still a moving target and most of the early solutions I’ve seen appear to be low budget crap (connections, power supply, etc.). Wait a few months for some more solid offerings from G-Tech, Medea, Huge and others.
Sincerely,
OliverOliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
PM,
So I would surmise from your post that smoke or eQ would be the correct purchase?
Sincerely,
OliverOliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
I’ve had mixed experiences with the LaCies. The best results are with a separate FW card and two of the 500GB drives striped together with the card. When these are under 50% full, they seem to pass even 1080/23.98 DVDProHD without problems. I have had considerable problems with dropped frames under these conditions: a) close to full, 2) sharing FW devices on the bus, 3) working with 60P and 30i HD media, and 4) having a marginally performing LaCie in the chain. Supposedly the G-Tech drives have better performance, but I don’t have first hand knowledge.
Sincerely,
OliverOliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Chris,
I totally know where you are coming from and I was there too expessing my concerns about the newest development. I was merely trying to point out that there is a substantial difference in the Nitris hardware than the Adrenaline hardware and this was a hopeful sign. I can only go by what I know of the hardware and from what I’ve been told by people inside and now outside of Avid about the capabilities. Yes, Avid has a very bad track record of blowing smoke and delivering features but not fixes in future releases, so I understand your mistrust. Quite frankly what I saw at NAB was at best pre-alpha, assembled for the show, so I would hope that version 1.0 (or whatever the number is) will be better. We will have to see.
Sincerely,
OliverOliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[grinner] “They did release a new Symphony product. To confuse things, they called it Symphony Nitris. To make things even more confusing, it basically an Adrenaline. While it houses Nitris hardware the nasty old aliased DVD lives and HDV is not supported natively. It?s price tag makes me think someone at Avid is smokin? crack. 80-90 grand? WTF? I?d just get a real Nitris for that. (uh? that?s DS Nitris not the new BS Nitris). “
Grin,
Although I agree with your assessment on the price, I think you have the details wrong. The Nitris hardware is a boardset and BOB originally designed to replace Meridien. It is nothing like Adrenaline DNA, which is mainly I/O and hardware codecs. Nitris gear is the same on DS or Symphony, so it is Avid DS Nitris or Avid Symphony Nitris. This includes the same hardware DVE. Since it is a different structure than Meridien, there are three types of effects: software-only, hardware-only, combo hardware/software. Right now Avid is in the mode of just getting all the same Symphony effects to work as we know them. This isn’t necessarily going to be an exact 1-1 match, since it isn’t exactly the same hardware. For instance, you have SprectaMatte instead of the hardware Ultimatte chips. You have the Nitris DVE instead of the Pinnacle card.
I went through a demo where Greg Staten went through a fair amount of hard questions and things like the aliasing came up. This is a result of not yet being optimized for the system. This IS the new DVE and it is VERY clean. I think you’ll see a version 1.0 that is basically similar to the current Symphony’s feature set and then later a version 2.0 that has new and improved features. There are true hardware effects which basically means 2 streams of video each with CC and DVE plus transitions and titles. This is HD. You get more streams in SD.
Remember the $90K is a turnkey system – computer, boards, software, monitors and storage (maybe 800GB-TBD). Autodesk Discreet Smoke on Linux (now SD/HD) is $80K without storage and Quantel eQ is more.
Sincerely,
OliverOliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Actually the Aeron might not be as expensive as you think. Check out:
http://www.sitforless.comSincerely,
OliverOliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Not with DVCProHD in safe/high. Also no quarantee that your drive array will play it if there isn’t enough buffer. Yes it will work. Is it reliable like EVERY hardware system. No way. The bottom line is that individual effects can run in RT to a point, but not in the real world, where you typically have a few filters, or CC on both sides of a dissolve, or DVE moves with drop shadows, etc.
Sincerely,
OliverOliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Walter Biscardi] “Interesting, because in both AE and FCP the formats show up as Square Pixel formats.”
Walter,
I believe DVCProHD is recorded to tape – and treated in the codec – as 960×720 rectangular pixels. The codec is decoded to the screen as 1280×720 square pixels. This is part of the “magic” Apple is doing in how the codec is treated natively inside QT. If you open a file natively in QT Player it shows it as 1280 wide. If you export aTIFF from FCP on the other hand, it is 960 and squeezed. You are correct that the full-bandwidth version (1280×720) is square pixels and that the FCP canvas displays DVCProHD as square pixels. On the other hand, turn off “view as square pixels” and it will be 4×3 squeezed. BTW, I don’t think that Motion corrects for the aspect ratio issues in the right way.
Sincerely,
OliverOliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Yes, one stream sounds about right. 60fps is pretty taxing. Remember this is FRAMES not FIELDS. Most of the 720p demos you see are with 23.98 media with the pulldown frames removed. Far less taxing and more streams as a result. Change your setting to unlimited/medium while working. You have to render before you go to tape anyway because there’s no such thing as TRUE real-time in a software-based system when you have to go to tape.
Sincerely,
OliverOliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
John,
You should be able to create a 1280×720 TIFF in Photoshop. This is without any sort of pixel aspect ratio turned on in Photoshop. Drop it on the timeline and it should be the correct size. You will have to render, of course, to make the material match the codec to playback. The actual camera image from a Varicam, for instance, is 960×720 anamorphic. The codec takes care of correcting that to 1280 wide, but your media statistics inside FCP will still read the frame size as 960 wide.
Sincerely,
OliverOliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com