[Oliver Peters]

[uncompressed] “my point is the desktop portion is ready to go today. for people doing SD, a kona, fast drive and fibre/scsi cards w/a G5 is not entirely out of reach. so, in context, my guess would be this guy is already doing SD since he has been on the boards he likely has FCP–so he would have fcp with a free upgrade to FCPHD……
…..so for around $9k you can do short form…even according to your own figures which are list and assuming you own nothing which will make to to your new suite and that you get nothing from ebaying or tax free donation of your previous system. i…..”

I totally get your point. The Cinema display was for some type of computer monitor. Your original post implied total cost, rather than as an add-on to what he already had. My assumptions were different and based on starting from scratch, so I have a single display, when really my own preference was for 2×20.

I don’t disagree that it is within reach, but my point is that it is rather misleading to say you can do a quality job of uncompressed for $7-8K (total). I’ve recently participated in the installation of at least two brand new HD systems using Kona2/G5/FCP and I see what the “real world” costs are in doing this in a way that, a) gets the job done successfully and, b) won’t leave you with all your hair pulled out and left on the floor – because the system didn’t work.

Yes, you can save money in some areas. The biggest right now is what sort of drive array works and here, SATA arrays look very promising. I’m not trying to nit-pick. It just seems to me to be very flip to say it can be done so cheaply when that just doesn’t pan out in actual practice. You can certainly rent decks and will most likely have to, but a Sony deck that records and plays 24P will rent at around $1K per day and you will need it for quite a few days when you factor ingest for offline, ingest (again) for “online” and output back to tape.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Oliver Peters]

[uncompressed] “LIST PRICES-
Dual 2.0 G5-$2499
Kona 2 & Kbox $2789
Atto UL4S-$249
HUGE HMV 320 S600M-$2349
$7886 USD–“

From the Apple store online:
• Dual 2.5GHz PowerPC G5
• 2GB DDR400 SDRAM (PC3200) – 4×512
• 160GB Serial ATA – 7200rpm
• ATI Radeon 9600 XT w/128MB DDR SDRAM
• Apple Cinema HD Display (23″ flat panel)
Subtotal $5,248.00

Plus $1K for FCP and we are at $6248 approx. before adding storage, Kona2, etc.
This machine is the minimum if you intend to reliably edit uncompressed long-form HD shows.

Plus, if this is a concert – 90 min. ? – 600 GB isn’t enough storage for uncompressed 8-bit if you have any sort of handles, effects, render files, etc.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Oliver Peters]

[Ran] “As someone who works with both applications on a daily bases
I can tell you that Edition 6.1 has more to offer than xpress pro HD”

Ran,

I think that’s in the eye of the beholder. Specifically Edition offers these technologies over XproHD:
– HDV support
– Instant Save
– Background rendering
– Long-GOP editing
– Surround support
– Integrated DVD authoring

All of these are valid, but I think that the only part of this that Avid might value and may not be able to quickly duplicate is the Long-GOP and HDV support.

On the other hand, mixed resolution editing, such as HD with SD, feel far more responsive on XProHD than Edition. If you deviate from the timeline format in Edition, the responsiveness of the media that’s in the “other” format is extremely slow when you try to scrub through it. So technology is one thing, but effective implementation of it is entirely something else.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Oliver Peters]

[uncompressed] “the reality is that for $8k you can edit uncompressed HD on FCP using name brand products with real warranties….for $13-15K (USD) you can edit long for uncompressed HD.”

I’m not so sure about your figures. Consider:

G5 properly configured – $4-6K
Kona2 $2-3K (yes BMD is less)
2×20″ or 23″ monitors – $3-6K
Storage – XRAID or SATA raid – $3K-$10K
FCP software – $1K
Decent HD monitor with converter – $2K – $20K
HD tape deck with accessories $30K – $120K
Plus scopes, cables, patch bays, mixer, speakers, etc.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Oliver Peters]

[oakmozart] “Betcha an ice-cream Sundae that Liquid Edition gets killed-off, with its best features that are missing in XPro being added to XPro!”

Probably correct, although Edition also falls into the consumer side of Pinnacle which is part of why Avid says they want Pinnacle. My guess is that Liquid (blue, chrome) goes away and that Edition gets an Avid-ized interface which gets sold in consumer channels. Just of SWAG, of course.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Oliver Peters]

[KingCut] “Anyhow, I’d love some real world feedback on HDCAM to Qrez, and spitting back out to HDCAM. They shot 108O @ 24fps. Will we start getting compression artifacts to master? what about noise in the blacks (it’s a rock show). Any major pitfalls or redflags”

Currently Q-Res is not enabled, so not applicable. The best workflow would be to capture 1080/23.98 with DVCProHD via K2. Use this for offline, including color-correction. The offline editing could be done on a fast software-only system and can be done with FW800 drives. Then re-digitize the sequence as uncompressed media (array needed), render and record back to HDCAM. I wouldn’t recommend DVCProHD for online, since it will have artifacts that may or may not be objectionable depending on the video and how large and high-resolution of a display you are watching it on.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Oliver Peters]

Susan,

It sounds like the reason the chapter buttons didn’t work was because you didn’t set the button navigation. On a set-top DVD player the only menu controls you have for moving from one button to another are the North/South/East/West arrows on the remote control, so the up/down/left/right navigation has to be set for each menu button when you author the disc. If your only check during simulation is to mouse over the buttons instead of actually only using the arrows on the simulated remote control, then you will miss this. In the future this can be done without checking on a set-top unit. You should, however, check your DVD on a set-top unit (any cheap one will do) in order to make sure you don’t have problems with the compression, interlacing, a bit rate that’s too high and so on. Playback on a computer will not show you this.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Oliver Peters]

Remember that the acquistion doesn’t begin to get final until summer. Until then it will be business as usual – including competition – for both.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com