Sean Oneil
Forum Replies Created
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John,
I had this same exact problem. We use Cat-5 video extenders to connect the computer monitors (edit bays) to the Macs (machine room). I was getting video glitches that I assumed were the fault of the extenders. Countless hours were spent troubleshooting, and I even purchased expensive shielded Cat-6 hoping to solve the problem.
Turns out it was that layer of dust. I’ll never buy an ATI product again. The Nvidia 8800GT is cheaper and more powerful.
Sean
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Good to know, thanks.
Sean
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Bob,
Believe me I’m aware of all the storage options. I already have plenty of non-SAN external storage units. The thing is, having a SAN isn’t crucial to my business. It’s just a convenience for the 3 editors that works here. We’re a creative shop and the editors (who are on salary) work independently, so we don’t have clients coming in being billed by the half-hour.
Hence, my desire to make something with what I have rather than buy something I don’t need. I’m the first to get rid of old equipment. I ditched our 3/4″ years ago. But these SATA cards and server equipment I have are still potentially very useful and can be very powerful with the right software.
You should try FreeNAS yourself just to see what it’s all about. It supports AFP, iSCSI target, Link Aggregation and Jumbo Frames. I think you’d be impressed with it.
Sean
Sean
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Bob,
I wish it were that simple, but the problem with FreeNAS (which provides actual AFP service, google “Netatalk”) is in the software. Just the way the TCP is configured. No amount of link aggregation or jumbo frames will help (in fact it only makes it worse). I’ve actually been using LACP for 3 years now with our iSCSI server (which I had to retire when MetaSAN and ATTO XtendSAN refused to work with Leopard unless I bought an upgrade). The thing is, TCP/IP is a very complicated animal. Doesn’t matter if it’s AFP, SMB, or FTP. There are a bajillion ways to tune it. I don’t pretend to fully understand it myself, but essentially there’s a reason why Small Tree provides special drivers for their NICs.
Obviously I could use an actual Mac w/ Small Tree cards as an AFP server and have good performance as you’re suggesting. But there are reasons why I find that unappealing. A Mac desktop can only hold a handful of disks internally. It’s big, noisy, sucks up a lot of juice in addition to whatever external drive enclosure I’d have to tether it to. And I’m honestly not about to fork over money on another expensive Mac RAID card. FreeNAS 7 provide ZFS with software RAID-Z, which I’ll take over hardware RAID any day of the week. Snow Leopard Server is going to support ZFS, but that will only run on an Intel Mac. I wouldn’t even consider doing this unless the server was one of my old G5s.
The thing is, I have a massive graveyard of old SATA cards, Fibre cards, multi-port Intel NIC cards, and hard drives (much came from my old iSCSI box). All of this hardware works in Unix and Linux systems. And it’s all PCI-X, which has been totally replaced by PCIe so I can’t use them in new edit stations. I just want to take advantage and make use of this old stuff, not purchase more stuff.
Sean
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You can hire Andreas Kiel to write a custom app. I did this and it’s been an amazing tool for our business. Here’s his site:
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools/
Sean
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My guess is that Final Cut is the problem, not CT. When you import any A/V quicktime into Final Cut, the current Easy Setup dictates what sample rate the audio is interpreted as. Doesn’t matter what your sequence settings are. If you import something with NTSC timecode into a project and your Easy Setup is one that uses 24.00, it will resample any 23.98 audio accordingly. This is not a filter or anything that can be changed. It’s evident by a colored line in the audio track when you drag it into a sequence. This works the opposite way as well (importing 24.00 media when the Easy Setup is 23.98), and it also does this with PAL.
The trick is to change your Easy Setup to the rate your audio is supposed to be, quit FCP and relaunch a new project. Then import the audio into the new project.
I don’t know if this is related to your problem, but I suspect it is. Another important tool to help you troubleshoot this is the “Modify->Timecode” option in Final Cut. You may wish to change the TC format of your media clips to 29.97 Drop Frame. Then quit FCP and re-import.
Sean
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You don’t necessarily need to purchase another monitor if you know how to calibrate that one and color grading is not super critical. But if you want to view a real broadcast video signal, you absolutely need a Kona or Decklink or the Matrox thing.
The graphics card on the Mac will only output 4:4:4 RGB, non-interlaced signals using VESA timing formats. The gamma is wrong, the color space is wrong, and Cinema Display Mode in Final Cut doesn’t handle interlacing properly. In other words, it is not going to show your HDV video properly no matter what you do.
I’d consider the Blackmagic Intensity which has a true broadcast 4:2:2 HDMI output. Probably the cheapest solution.
Sean
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That doesn’t explain why a single project is 400MB, while all the same content (sequences, bins, clips) separated into different projects creates a grand total of only 9MB all together. I’ve always been suspect of large FCP projects myself.
Bob asks a very good question. I’d love it if someone knew the answer. Maybe Andreas Kiel will read this.
Sean
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[Rafael Amador] “QT files have no Vertical Blanking.
In QT the TC is not any more Longitudinal, neither Vertical, is just a TC track.”I’m with Rafael on this. VITC is for tapes.
Sean
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Unless you’re mastering back to HDV tape later on, you should actually convert it to ProRes and not HDV. You’ll get an orange bar but you won’t get the “Unrendered” red bar.
Sean