Ron Shook
Forum Replies Created
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Brett,
[Brett Howe] “Wow…I’m feeling hostility. Just my opinion guys, of which I stated. Nothing wrong with a bit of healthy debate.”
OK, Let’s debate:
[Brett Howe] “At the end of the day, I’m a tight arse 🙂 I want to spend less and get more. This option doesn’t rock my boat. Then again, after the lack of storm support, I may just be jaded!”
I don’t understand? You wax lyrical about SDI I/O which is going the way of the dinosaurs along with the $20-100k decks that utilize it, as we move to an IT, file based workflow paradym. Yet you gripe about being left out in the cold by a $2k item that you’ve gotten years of service from. Canopus has to find their way into the new paradym and they won’t do it by devoting limited resources to someone else’s software, when their own software fills most bills. I assume your Storm paid for its piddling cost long ago. If it didn’t, then you have little use for increased capabilities until you can make use of what you already have.
While I’d like to see Matrox cut their RTx2/Axio prices by at least 25% to build market share, even at the current pricing these products give the best best price/performace on a PC in the industry, IMO. You aren’t just purchasing a hardware board from Matrox like you would if you were buying a Decklink, so you can’t use just the purchase price to analyze the value. The Matrox boards give you some hardware accelleration, connectivity, and particularly software enhancements to PPro and FX that aren’t even in the ballpark when it comes to Decklink.
Purchase the Decklink, then, oh oh, gotta purchase PPro. Then, oh oh, gotta purchase Ultra Magic to do excellent chroma keys(the Matrox intelligent keying is the best combo of quality and speed in the industry and PPro natively doesn’t do a good job). Then, oh oh, gotta buy a $10k array to do uncompressed HD (Matrox gives you visually lossless HD compression with $2-3k arrays.) Then, oh oh, my secondary color correction is hard to work with and takes forever (again Matrox CC is significantly superior to what’s in PPro.) Then, oh oh, I can’t control how audio is captured into the system (Matrox adds this functionality to PPro.) Then, oh oh, my Decklink doesn’t do a thing for me in editing HDV (Matrox does.) Then, oh oh, I can’t deal with DVCPro50/HD or any MXF file natively (Axio has handled DVCPro from the get-go and is about to deliver MXF native capability for Sony and Panasonic codecs, none of which Decklink w/PPro can do.)
With a little research I could probably go on and on. The point I’m making is that initial cost is only a small part of the value to the craft editor. Decklink is starting to look a lot more expensive or Matrox a lot less expensive, if you’re doing craft editing. As relatively dumb I/O cards for the AE artist, 3D animator, or broadcast ingest station, Decklink is the boss, but for craft editing the Decklink cards don’t come close to the Matrox products. This is why the Matrox products are worth what they are asking. You just have to decide which of the products meets your needs. If you’re editing just for fun, you don’t need any of them.
[Brett Howe] “I do appreciate that there is plenty of Analogue gear still in use, but we are talking about moving forward.”
No, most of us are talking about making a living. Move forward at your own peril of moving before it’s time.
Ron Shook
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Dave,
[Dave Friend] “The show-stopper for me is the lack of 24p or HDV 720p support.”
Me too! But then you knew that. (g)
Ron Shook
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Jeremy,
[JeremyG] “At lunch or at the end of the day or whenever is most convenient, transfer the contents of the P2 store to the cheap SATA 2 disk RAID that is striped RAID 1. This will essentially write two copies of the p2 files to two drives at the same time.”
This is something I’ve been thinking of myself. I’m pretty sure it would work. A friend of mine had an XP computer go down with a raid 1 Sata in it. He pulled one of the drives out and put it in another computer and found that he could access the drive just fine. This is the only kind of redundant hard drive backup that some clients are gonna accept, where you give them one and hold on to the other until the client has done whatever backup they will do. It’s a little more expensive than tape initially but can be used over and over once the workflow is established to everyone’s satisfaction.
Ron Shook
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Erik,
[Erik Lindahl] “I would, however do two things:
1. Try out Premier Pro 2.0
2. Wait after NAB and see what Apple + AVID has to offer (or perhaps something new from Adobe, however that seems very unlikely)”Good Advice!
As far as anything new from Adobe, as you say, “That seems very unlikely.” However…, what we need to have delivered, or hear about delivery, from Adobe at NAB is a patch to correct the things that were broken in 2.0 and to deliver the proxy files and MXF native support for DVCPro codecs, XDCam & IMX codecs, and other MXF codecs. If PPro is gonna deliver as a pro NLE application, we can’t wait another year or 2 for those features. If some of this comes from a 3rd party, like Matrox, at extra cost, so be it, but immediate needs and broken features can’t be left to fester between major upgrades in a professional application.
Ron Shook
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Brett,
[Brett Nelson] “You can now split tracks as you would like, but you have to do it in the Project window on a clip by clip basis.”
I know that this statement isn’t accurate. There is a way to split multiple selected clips (that share the same audio properties) simultaneously in the bin. I don’t remember just what the procedure is, but someone should chime in.
[Brett Nelson] “So let’s say you build 3 sequences using the same clip and decide later you want Shotgun track rather than Lav or a combination of the two rather than the one you chose…you have to go find and remove all of those clips first, change the audio and then place them back where they belong.”
Maybe I’m not following, but knowing what you do, what is to prevent you from installing both tracks on the timeline and zeroing out the one you don’t want to use? If you change your mind later, simply adjust the audio on the tracks separately. Am I missing something?
Ron Shook
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Richie,
[Richiedude] “Is it possible to convert AC3 to wav files?”
Yes, but you don’t need to if you simply want to chop up, accurately and with no loss, MPEG2 encoded with AC3 from a DVD for later re-authoring. Get yourself a low cost MPEG editor. It’s a very handy tool to have around. The best on the block right now seems to be VideoReDo Plus:
https://www.videoredo.com/ProductPlusSpecifications.htm
It costs $50, can be downloaded for a free trial, will rip your non copy protected DVD (even from DVD-RAM if your DVD-ROM drive supports it) and allows you to smart edit the files to frame accuracy with the only lossiness from re-encoding being around the cut points. It’s AC3 capable so the AC3 stays with the file, or you can alternately, if you wish, transcode the audio to WAV or MPEG1 Layer 2.
TMPGEnc ($77) and Womble ($100) also make MPEG editors but they are more expensive and I don’t think quite as capable as VideoReDo.
Ron Shook
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Walter,
[Walter Graff] “To speak authentically would mean yo have used it and know it artifacts, etc. If not then all you are doing is creating rumor.”
Ain’t it the truth. I talked recently with someone who’s done extensive testing with the 350, comparing it to 900 footage and to their in-house Varicam. I probably shouldn’t say any more at this time other than that extra 10Mbps seems to be magic.
Ron Shook
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Aanarav & Mr. Hawley,
[Aanarav Sareen] “I would go with the Matrox then. Although, the rendering time difference is not substantial between the Matrox and any other card, you may benifit from the real-time color correction functionality.”
Although I can’t say why, I would counsel waiting until after NAB to make any final decisions. Whether you go with hardware or not in the slightly longer run, a very grunty computer is gonna be essential, ala Axio. No manufacturer of hardware cards is ignoring the CPUs anymore even when the hardware cards are more than just dumb I/O.
Ron Shook
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Mike,
[Mike Cohen] “is it true that low burn speeds are not required when copying from disk to disc, such as in a disc-to-disc duplicator?
what about from a disc image in one of those hard-disk based duplicators?”I don’t know. I just proceed under the assumption that it is always best to not push the envelope too hard.
???
Ron Shook
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pjoconnell,
[pjoconnell] “What I’d like to find out is if buying
a newer burner (mine is two-plus years old) would help, and which
burners are currently considered the best.”I’ve been hearing intimations that some or all of these problems may be more related to using current high quality, high speed media in older burners which were designed for slower media.
You should do some experimenting. Identify as many set top players as possible that are having problems, so that you’ll be able to identify when you’ve solved your issues.
First check for a firmware update for your burner and install if available.
If you’ve got a 4X burner try to find quality 4X media and burn at 2X. Finding that media is getting hard to do. You may have to settle for 8X and still burn at 2X.
By this time you’re thinking, “Why don’t I just replace the burner?” Good idea! (g) Most experts still swear by Pioneer and you can get ’em OEM for $50US. Seems like a no-brainer. All the burners are now 16X. Get some top quality 16X and 8X media and experiment some more. Burn at 1/2 the rated speed of the media, i.e., at 8X with 16X media and 4X with 8X media. And by all means use a sub 7mbps data rate. See what works best on these problem players.
Let us know what you find out.
Ron Shook