[Rich Rubasch]

If you don’t plan on moving the computer around it would be fine. Not a bad idea either. The ATA bus that has the usual Zip and DVD drive is a second bus. Take out the zip drive and you could install a second ATA drive without a card. I don’t use zips much anymore and I do have a G4 with a zip drive so this would be an option for me as well.

Basically any hard drive needs airflow around it…if you can find a way to mount it in the zip carriage that would be fine.

If I was to buy a PCI card, I would suggest getting two ATA drives and stripe them into a RAID…much better performance and twice the storage.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

The Pipe card is very good at handling either 486 or 480 material, uncompressed 8 and 10 bit, regular DV and DVCPro 50. All I do is select how I want the footage to come in and it does the rest, regardless of source. My project was going to be all regular DV and I had a mix of DVCAM and Beta. Again, Pipe does the heavy lifting.

My preset for capture is Aurora’s NTSC DV via component (I use the NTSC DV via SDI if I come off DVCAM). Sequence setting is DV NTSC 48k Lower field etc. I’m going to delete a few preference files and see what happens, but this is an odd one if no one else is having the same issue.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

It might be because Apple has a tendancy to fallback on Apple Script to do repetitive tasks…you could create one that opened all the files in a folder and after setting up an output setting, use that one to do the conversion. I always used cleaner to do batching, much like I used Debabelizer on stills long ago. Compressor just doesn’t have a friendly interface IMO. Same with iTunes…seems Apple could have built in an export module for that rather than use the playlist model. But them it might look like they were encouraging us to use iTunes to make copies and make the exporting easier.

Not sure, but QT is still pretty robust with the Pro options, and if you don’t have too many files you can open one, start an export, open another and start another export and so on. Not quite batching, but multitasking!

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

If you can, record a bunch of big national spots. Import them and listen to the dynamics…look for spots that have more VO than music, but it doesn’t matter much. Now take the 3-way EQ and the dynamics processor and start tweaking settings until you start to shape the sound to match the “big boys.”

Worked for me on a recent stubborn VO record and it ended up sounding great.

[Rich Rubasch]

I’m with Dean on this as well. If I am on the box tweaking and being careful with the footage I’m charging a rate. but I also charge for the crunch time if it starts to add up.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

Cleaner 6.5 upgrade is $125 and has a decent Flash Video exporter. You can batch and use cleaner for all that other batching stuff you might do. Works for me…has a decent interface (don’t like Squeeze or Compressor’s interface) was familiar to me, and basically added the Flash exporter to the new version.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

I recall reading that the DSR-11 has the same transport as the Sony AIT drives and it is based more on a backup tape drive mechanism…the 1500 deck has a more responsive deck and quicker. i have little experience with the DSR-11 but own a DSR-1500 which has been flawless.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

I got the cleaner upgrade because it was $125 and I got the FLV encoder. I am familiar with the interface and it can set up a bunch of batches with many different settings to the same clip. Compressor is good for MPEG-2, but I don’t like the interface. I thought Sorenson Squeeze had a worse interface and looked like a 1.0 piece of software. Sorenson makes great codecs, but a clunky interface.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

Boris Continuum Complete, and Motion has an excellent Snow Generator…Use the search feature on the Cow and you WILL find it.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

In Wisconsin, payments made to an LLC have to bee accounted for at the end of the year with a 1099. Sub-S Corporations have their own tax withholding and do not require a 1099 from the client. This is one of the biggest differences I can think of. some corporations don’t like generating and accounting for all those 1099’s and the Sub-S corp is a “cleaner” relationship from a tax standpoint.

Get the Book “Inc. Yourself” off of Amazon.com and it will explain everything…even has state to state laws…it is a great book.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media