[Richard Martz]

Thanks Mat. This is exactly what I’m looking for. I thought the 1.25 terabyte capacity was ideal for what I’m doing. I noticed that when you stripe for RAID 0 only 4 drives can be used. I assume that the effect of that is a 20% reduction in storage capacity. Can the remaining drive be striped and used for something else? What happens if I format for RAID 5? That should give me the benefits of RAID 0 with the Redundancy of RAID 0. Is my thinking skewed?

ANd the most important question of all…when will these drives become available?

[Richard Martz]

Isn’t it great to be able to spend money? Sure beats other way.

I just looked at the Apple 30″ Cinema display and while it really does have a nice picture I was thinking the whole time that maybe what I should do is just go to projection. No matter what you do you are going to have problems getting colors to match exactly from display to display. Obviously if you have an attentive engineering staff who can use color comparators on your monitor displays and adjust those on a daily basis then you’ll have no problems finding a display that you like.

For the rest of us however the choices are somewhat more limiting. I used to work for Crawford Communications. They’re huge! 27 acres of the best toys, 20 Editing suites, great people. When they built their new high-end editing suites they put in video projectors and that is what the clients view. They have changed them out a couple of times to get something that really works well. You can contact Ron Heidt at 678-421-6600 or by email rheidt@crawford.com to ask him what they have now.

The problem with showing clients HDTV on a small monitor is that (according to studies) it really doesn’t look like HD until the monitor size approaches 36″ or larger in diagional measure. The clients can’t tell it is HDTV or not!!! So even the Apple 30″ cinema display does not really look that much like HDTV. So bigger is better at least when it comes to HDTV display for clients.

The tried and true method of getting correct color is to use a CRT monitor and keep it in adjustment. However some of the new plasma screens are pretty good and have very fine detail. The problem is your budget. To get a really great HDTV that has a true resolution of 1080i you will probably have to spend double your budget for a true reference monitor. You can also expect to spend another $2500 on test equipment to keep it in adjustment if you son’t already own that equipment.

Sony has their BVM-D monitors but to get a 20″ set you’ll have to spend around $12K. And even if you do spend that much you’ll only get around 700 lines of resolution. Panasonic has a much cheaper line of monitors but you can’t beat them at their own game. You will get what you pay for.

So what do you do for $6600? Pick out a monitor (either CRT, LCD, or plasma) that you just love and adjust it for the best picture. If you do that you might just have enough cash left to buy a nice couch for the clients as well. Or if that doesn’t work for you I suggest that you use a High Resolution Video Projector and enjoy a truly LARGE FORMAT picture.

Thoughts from others?

[Richard Martz]

I’m about to embark on the same adventure and just wondering what graphics card you recommend? I’m planning on getting the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT DDL w/256 MB SDRAM. Would this be a good choice?

[Richard Martz]

Dear John:

I also need to display to an SDI monitor or a component video monitor so I really do need a card to do that. Got one in mind?

[Richard Martz]

Well that is a problem. Obviously one of the things you should always do is to underexpose slightly and then color correct to bring out the elements that you desire. Once a scene has been overexposed there is little you can do to correct the sky except to partially replace it.

Here is an idea I’ve used before. Use a good luminance keyer and create a travelling matte for the sky background. Shoot a new scene of the sky. key in the new scene with transparency. Don’t do a full key or the scene will not look natural (as if there is anything natural about television). I’ve done this before and the result was pretty convincing – certainly better than an overexposed scene.