Steve Covello
Forum Replies Created
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Let’s see: all computers, AJA, decks and drives, Xserve RAID and ethernet within 6 feet of each other in one location with clean power and a/c; all fw ports connected to fw patch bay; all SDI and analog A/V connections connected to patch with ‘efficient’ use of normalizing frequent connections (insert Sigma router here for Tier 1 service); all VGA, USB repeater and A/V reference cables extended to rooms. On some projects, there are dedicated FW800 drives connected directly to G5.
Music, stock video and sfx libraries on dedicated drives patchable to either room regardless of which editing system being used. Each room can be either Avid or FCP as needed — room 1 has Avid Meridien G4 on D-sub A, and FCP-HD Kona 2/AfterEffects G5 on D-sub B, KVM hot key to switch kybd, wacom, mouse to either system; room 2 has FCP-HD via AJA or DV on one partition, and Avid DV on the other of the same G5, separate media drives for each. Although let the record show that I HATE Avid DV.
No machine noise in any rooms, no moving decks around, no machines overheating the rooms, no crawling around patching fw cables.
Bob, I don’t quite get it. What am I doing wrong here? This works like a dream, even if it’s only two edit rooms. If it were 4 rooms, what’s the diff? 8 rooms? OK, there will be clamoring for equipment use sometimes, but that is surely an inconvenience of success I would gladly live with and would rent accordingly.
If were running 8 rooms, maybe I would go with a SAN solution of some sort. But with editors wanting to work off site and FW drives so cheap, I think I’m better off with a simpler more flexible setup for offline and keep the K2 room dedicated for finishing and ‘big’ client sessions.
Any other suggestions?
steve covello
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Sorry to burst your bubble, Bob, but with all due respect, I am running a (small) broadcast editing facility which includes both SDI and FW patchability according to the workflow covered in this topic, with SD and HD. granted, I don’t have to send a FW signal 100 meters up from two floors below, but with centralizing media drives, CPUs and decks in a single machine room makes the feasability of working within the 1394 pathway when appropriate entirely ..um… feasable. The only things that ‘stretch’ are high quality VGA and USB extender cables from machine room to edit room.
I’m sure I don’t have the volume or scale of work that most of you guys here seem to be enjoying, but I’m managing just fine, and I could easily imagine a scaled up version of what I do working equally as well. I just don’t know why most people in a similar boutique environment don’t ‘go’ patchbay with their firewire. It’s a no brainer, and cheap! No muss, no fuss!
steve covello
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Surprise! It does work. SD 8-bit UC.
steve covello
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Can I chime in here an whine a little bit? Nothing personal to you, seriously, but as a business owner and video editing professional for the past 15 years, I have grown more and more frustrated by the loss of business due to in-house setups that clients are building to bypass having to go to an outside professional. But then suddenly, these companies realize that operating an editing system ain’t the same as having a dubbing rack in the corner and get pissed off because they spent ‘all this money’ [you could’ve had a fully online capable editing system for about $25k instead of $200k, but that’s another topic] and ‘it doesn’t work’ or it’s too complicated. This is happening even at some of the biggest corporations in the world, like Viacom and their numerous TV channels.
The system you describe is about two steps short of the finish line and you should bring in a consultant a la Bob Zelin to get you squared away. And depending on freelance editors/interns to know how to engineer your system is a high risk I would not be willing to take — the talent pool on that varies greatly. And frankly, it’s a little bit insulting to me as professional to think that someone bought a rather complex editing system and just simply expected an intern or freelancer to be able to drive it. What am I, a monkey?!! Doesn’t anyone value professional video services?
I don’t know when this happened but somehow hiring an outside professional video editing editing is curiously not considered as vital as hiring a good plumber, electrician, surgeon, dentist, whatever when those services are needed. Is it because you CAN buy this equipment right off the shelf from one of the dozens of duplicate catalogs I’m sure you get in the mail every week? I would bet a nickel that most in-house editing systems are bloody mess that no one wants to deal with and are mostly in a technical shamble with old project junk piling up in every corner and hard drive, and that no one wants to take responsibility for it.
Well call me a sourpuss but I have no sympathy. For $250k plus all the freelance fees you’ve spent, you could’ve probably sustained one or two or more small editing businesses in your area without the headache or overhead costs. The work would be better {presumably} and you would’ve helped sustain a viable professional lifestyle for a few people. But now you have to spend MORE money and you STILL reluctantly have figure out how to use the system. Again, this is not a personal criticism, but a comment on a trend that I see more often these past few years and it’s killing the industry, and I’m using your situation merely as an example.
Alright, I’m done. That was one ugly rant that I’m not proud of but I felt breached a taboo subject that needs to be voiced.
steve covello
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Dude, it ain’t the codec. It’s the way you are manipulating it after you digitize.
DV video recorded via FW is a data transfer and the codec process is absolutely not involved. The Apple QT is merely a wrapper. Secondly, when you capture in a non-native codec such as SDI 4:2:2 10-bit via Sony, the DV data on tape gets encoded from 4:1:1 to 4:2:2, and 8-bit gets re-quantized to 10-bit (the only system that allows the Sony SDI 4:2:2 codec to be read as a pure data transfer from tape is the Sony Vegas. Sony does not share their codec with FCP like Panasonic does). This is an impure process, though the results could still be fine looking. It’s just not what is actually on tape — see below (goto ‘which codec is better’):
https://www.adamwilt.com/DV-FAQ-editing.html#codecs
See test #2 comparison and conclusion at bottom:
https://www.nattress.com/Chroma_Investigation/chromasampling.htm
Again, the proof is in the results as you see it. However, everything I have read on this issue points to two conclusions, AFAIC: 1) the difference appears to be inconsequential enough unless you are doing multi-generational graphix, 2) the disk drive space trade-off is generally not worth the expenditure.
It could be (though unlikely) that you have a lousy FW cable that could be introducing artifacts, or that the DV transfer is actually showing you MORE than the SDI transfer, which accounts for the extra crap you see. Although I have never bought it, I have read that there are special 4:1:1 8-bit DV specific chroma key plugins that supposedly do a darn good job, for DV. Maybe the ‘stock’ keyer just isn’t cutting it? Found this a moment ago:
https://www.dvgarage.com/prod/prod.php?prod=dvmattefcp
steve covello
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Dumb question but is the record pin popped in or out on the tape? As Billy Bob Thornton in Slingblade once said when asked why a mower wouldn’t start, “T’aint got no gas in it! Hmmmm…”
I have foregone the AJA IO RS422 deck control for using a Keyspan USB to Serial deck control setup. This is partly because my early experiences with IO’s deck ccontrol were sketchy, and also because my system is set to work in Kona2 and would rather have one way of using deck control for everything. So far, the Keyspan has been rock solid.
steve covello
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Dumb question but is the record pin popped in or out on the tape?
I have foregone the AJA IO RS422 deck control for using a Keyspan USB to Serial deck control setup. This is partly because my early experiences with IO’s deck ccontrol were sketchy, and also because my system is set to work in Kona2 and would rather have one way of using deck control for everything. So far, the Keyspan has been rock solid.
steve covello
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Interesting solution. How ’bout this: if you have a FW800 media drive, try connecting it to your mac via 800 cable, and the IO via the 400 connection. They are two different channels as far as the mac is concerned. Jack the DSR-11 to the 400 port on the back of the 800 drive. See if it works. I have the same equpiment and will try it out myself. [I’m sure someone will chime in saying it won’t work…]. If you only have 400 drives, forget it. Go 800 next time. Worth it.
About DV footage in 10-bit: DV is a native 8-bit format and is recorded on tape as a 4:1:1 sample. D-1 601 SDI 10-bit is 4:2:2. Your setup — going from FW to 10-bit SDI — is somewhat the same as going from vhs to D-Beta. You gain nothing in the process. Secondly, from what I have read in various posts here that taking DV out of its native 8-bit 4:1:1 state introduces luminance shifts and chroma shifts which changes [for better or worse] what you originally acquired. A strong case for going 10-bit might be if you were planning on doing multiple effect passes. The proof, for you, is invariably the end result. If you’re happy with it, all is well.
One other thing you will be sacrificing is drive space. 1hour of DV versus 1 hour of 10bit SDI uncompressed is a HUGE difference in media space. A FW transfer from a DV tape to a DV editing system is a transparent transfer, meaning there is no change in the data or picture/sound in the process. So it’s a trade-off one way or the other IMO.
steve covello
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Didja do Panther [Tiger] Cache Cleaner? Try it out — goto Versiontracker.com and get the DL. If you are still on Panther, you may have to track down the previous version. I use Medium Cleaning for all three user, system, etc. choices. See what happens. No risk of messing anything up AFAIK.
Also, check the obvious things like Viewer/Canvas in Fit to Window, timeline playback settings set to Safe RT, and check to see if any weird motion parameters got accidentally changed. It happened once where I all my clips scaled down to 98% when it pasted it from a 720 x 486 seq to a DV 720 x 480 seq and I never even knew about it. Something like that. Do a select all for bideo clips then Control + click and select remove Attributes. See what comes up.
steve covello
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To add my 2