Patrick Murphy
Forum Replies Created
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Interesting post Bill. He does bring up some good points.
Granted we live in a time where there’s been significant, even revolutionary developments in photography and motion pictures. There has been a tremendous broadening of the availability of powerful image making tools. With new tools come new approaches, techniques, and interpretations of how images are made and used in our society. Hurrah.
But there’s a downside too I think. If you look at some of the traditional visual media forms, such as drawing, painting, sculpture you can see how a stable palette of tools allowed approaches to become richer and deeper as one generation after another built upon the successes and innovations of those who preceded them. Young artists and craftspersons had a rich source existing work and values to use as a base to accept, modify, rebel against. It brought young and old into a continuing dialog.
Technological change tends to sever these connections and make the hardware a far more significant variable. Maybe the GoPro is a good example of what I’m driving at. That and many other similar tools open new doors but they also tend to isolate adopters from a larger context and tradition of image making. Their primary context is a contemporary one. Yes there are new opportunities for image making but the vast majority of it is derivative and fairly shallow. Moreover because everyone knows that the GoPro (or whatever) will be obsolete in a few years, the impulse to really delve into it’s possibilities is muted.
Changes in our technologies aren’t bad, and they will keep happening, maybe at an even faster pace, for the foreseeable future. But I think there’s definitely the argument to be made it’s a double edge sword.
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I’ve got a AF100 as well, and wanted something to record for the same reason, green screen.
I bought a Hyperdeck Shuttle II.It does capture time code on SDI.
It will trigger on record on SDI.
File system naming is a sequential number system, however unlike the AF100’s native files they are self-contained and can be either individually or batch renamed with no problem.
Internal battery lasts about an hour.
You can monitor the output on any 1080/1920 HDMI monitor.
Records ProRes 422 HD, Avid DNXHD, or raw.There are slicker recorders out there, but the Hyperdeck gets the job done, at the lowest price.
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I think you are on the right track in thinking that you could build a machine that would yield a dramatic improvement in performance but at the same time be quite robust and reliable. I’ve built around 20.
I would not recommend you build a hackintosh. Windows 7 & 8 are perfectly functional OS’s and not all that different really from OSX. I use both Mac and MS OS’s daily, and like both and have headaches with both. Apple seems to be leaving the professional media market behind, so switching to PC is something most people will be doing eventually anyhow.
There are many sites on the web with excellent suggestions for systems that would be make a good platform for an capable video editing platform. Most of them are designed for gaming, but all you really need to do is up the RAM to something more appropriate for AE and Premiere, I’d recommend 32 GB.
If you are mostly using Adobe products I’d recommend you stick with nVidia cards. Again there are plenty of places on the web that will give you great data on card performance. For what you are doing I see no need to buy a card that will require you apply for a second mortgage.
In order to manage budget I’d be pretty conservative in your build. Do get a mid range Asus or Gigabyte board. Good instructions, solid quality. Get the fastest CPU you can afford. SSD’s are still somewhat small and expensive and in my opinion, not really worth the premium. I’d urge you to consider putting a RAID in your machine, probably with a couple of Western Digital RED drives. Get a 1 TB drive for your system. I would not recommend you plan on overclocking your machine, it can be a little tricky and the payoff just isn’t that great.
Vendors? I like NewEgg. Lots of reviews, good prices, good service. They’ve been around awhile and they are good at what they do.
Last word: Use the web, there’s just scads of suggested systems, how to’s, forums, etc. etc. Maybe start with Tom’s Hardware, one of the oldest and biggest. Also there’s YouTube. Tons of trash there but more than a few gems buried among the litter.
Good luck.
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“But isn’t language underpinned by broadly held grammar rules? as opposed to arbitrary elements?”
I’d agree that grammar is partly derived from fundamental cognitive process, but there’s also a cultural dimension as well. In any case there’s plenty of evidence that humans are pretty good at absorbing more than one form and working comfortably within it.
But I was thinking here more about vocabulary, which has much less attachment to absolutes and is subject to geographic and ethnic variables.
Mostly I’m trying to think clearly about editing by dividing into two spheres, the first concerns the editing application itself, which is an artifact created by an engineer. The second is the message itself, a far more complex product.
In terms of editing applications, I think we’re still in a pretty early, possibly primitive, stage. The timeline makes sense to me, but I’m not ready to be particularly dogmatic about it. My point is simply that anyone starting out today, with maybe 50 years of productive work ahead of them, should resist commitment to a single approach, and should preserve their capacity to adapt.
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An interesting question. I’ve always thought high-end software, like NLE’s, have at least a passing similarity to language. In both mastery begins by essentially memorizing a variety of arbitrary elements and also submitting to a overall logical construct to create and finish a coherent statement. The key variable of course remains the editor’s insight, creativity, and commitment to doing the work necessary to a good job.
Like language, mastery of one specific form tends to lead to undue confidence that the path chosen is superior to alternate approaches. I think the psychologists call this “cognitive dissonance”. It’s a pretty rampant phenomenon in the technical arts.
Ultimately, I’d advise you to teach whatever application you personally know and like the best. But at the same time caution your students that they are not learning the key to editing, just one path that works. Whatever you teach them will not necessarily be immediately commercially useful, and in any case it’ll probably be obsolete in 5 years, certainly in 10. So please also advise them that the best thing they’ll get from your course isn’t the ability to make application “X” jump through hoops, rather it’s the skill, perseverance, and confidence necessary to absorb a relatively complex piece of software and use it for art or commerce. That’s something that they’ll need to do over and over if they expect to make a career in the field.
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Many thanks for your clarification. I get it.
Your statement on camera delay is also most interesting.
It’s not a factor I had considered before, but upon reflection it seems totally reasonable.
I’m working with Panasonics (AF100/AC160’s), clearly some real world testing is in order. -
So just to make sure I understand what you are saying…
One unsynced camera through the TVS is delayed 1 frame.
Additional unsynced cameras or other inputs will increase that delay. The amount of increase is directly proportional to the number of unsynced inputs.
In addition I’m guessing the following is true…
This only applies to AUX audio inputs.
Audio input as part of a SDI or HDMI input will stay synced with the video output of the device. -
True.
But many Mac users just bought Clipwrap. PC users have less in the way of viable options. However it says something when nobody goes to the trouble of fashioning a AVCHD utility that allows quick and easy manipulation or organization of these files without necessarily transcoding them. So I get your point.
Maybe everybody is out creating phone apps.
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Yeah, I understand that life isn’t a bowl of cherries.
Good organizational skills are a fundamental requisite for any editor.But unlike Red who is just beginning to face serious competition in their niche, Panasonic is very experienced in marketing cameras to a much larger market with a variety of able competitors. Many of these competitors have cameras that do create clips in a format that is easier to manipulate and track. I’m just surprised that they don’t bother to provide either more options for clip naming in their firmware, or at least supply a disc management/transfer utility that is robust and focused on real world post production processes.
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Right.
One must devise clear and relevantly named containers for each card. It’s a regular discipline that I’ve incorporated into my workflow. Using it permits keeping track of all the identically named clips. But from time to time I get media from EX1’s or EX3’s. And seeing each clip/shot with a unique numerical identifier makes me green with envy. I can’t imagine that programming camera firmware to execute this apparently simple protocol could be all that complicated. Sony has mastered it. I believe Canon has too. But for reasons I don’t understand Panasonic seems oblivious to the simple utility of such a fundamental step. Panasonic is making great cameras, and I’ve pitched them to more than a few colleagues and friends, but on this single issue I’m flumoxed.If there’s a philosophical rationale behind this approach I’d love to hear it. But as a shooter/editor I find it an annoying and persistant thorn on the rose.