[Steve Tharp]

Chris,

Dave’s technique is spot on. Another way to do it would be to pre-comp the text and apply the ramp to the text layer inside that pre-comp.

Thanks,
Steve

Steve Tharp
Art Director
Point7West
https://point7west.com

[Steve Tharp]

George,

The performance difference between DOF and a gaussian blur can be pretty substantial, and completely depends on your systems’ specs. If you’re really concerned about render times I would suggest using Fast Blur instead of the gaussian blur plugin.

Thanks,

Steve Tharp
Art Director
Point7West
https://point7west.com

[Steve Tharp]

Hi justin,

From what you’re saying it sounds like your filesystem on whatever disk this media resides on is corrupted. Good thing is most likely all your footage is still there and intact but the ‘directory information’ is pointing to the wrong location on disk for any given file name.

I recommend running Disk Warrior from Alsoft. There are some other free alternatives out there but if you’re not comfortable using the command line then I highly recommend Disk Warrior.

When you run Disk Warrior you’ll want to select the option that resembles ‘Repair Filesystem’ on the drive that has this media. The excellent thing about Disk Warrior is that it will allow you to confirm your filesystem is actually fixed before committing any changes. For example you can make sure clip #35 is actually displaying the intended footage.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Steve Tharp
Art Director
Point7West
https://point7west.com

[Steve Tharp]

Sascha,

I’d suggest looking at your clip’s interpretation settings in AE. (Select the clip in your asset bin, then go to file -> Interpret Footage -> Main) Sometimes depending on the clip, AE’s interpretation will get a little funky. Frame rates could be off, pixel aspect ratio could be wrong, and interlacing could be set to something weird. That’s the first place I’d check.

Thanks,

Steve Tharp
Art Director
Point7West
https://point7west.com

[Steve Tharp]

Kasper,

You ~100% correct. If you have two identical MD5 hashes then it is safe to say that both files are identical. (Excluding the possibility of the pseudo-collision bug found in the MD5 compression function).

If you’re copying file ‘X’ from server ‘A’ to server ‘B’ chances are the MD5 hash from file ‘X’ on server ‘B’ will not match file ‘X’ on server ‘A’ because you are not doing a true byte-for-byte copy. Now that doesn’t mean for all intensive purposes that those two files are not identical, it simply means that at a minimum a single bit (header, timestamp, ACL, etc) was modified. Having said that – there wasn’t technically any data lost in that transmission it just means that server ‘B’ modified a single bit on the file.

Thanks,

Steve Tharp
Art Director
Point7West
https://point7west.com

[Steve Tharp]

Thomas, I have a couple different solutions for you.

Solution 1: It sounds like you’re not needing any permissions based management at all (eg. I am Person X and I want to delete Person Y’s files / folders.) If this is the case simply have everyone log onto that storage / server as the same user and have that user take ownership of the entire volume. This would eliminate the permissions issue (definitely not the most secure, but for a 3 bay shop, completely doable.)

Solution 2: Use OpenDirectory / ActiveDirectory to manage your users and permissions. You can then create a user group that has Read/Write/Delete privileges on a volume and then assign users to that group. (This would involve more complexity than a 3 bay shop needs in my opinion)

Thanks,

Steve Tharp
Art Director
Point7West
https://point7west.com

[Steve Tharp]

Hi John,

You question is a very common one that I see asked a lot. In my experience the cheap portable hard drives will fail much more frequently than any tape based backup / archival solution. It’s not so much that the physical drives themselves fail, but the interface goes bad (ie. Firewire, USB, eSata, etc) and will prevent you from mounting the drive.

I think a good question to ask yourself is ‘Do I need a backup solution OR a archival solution?’ Tapes make for a great ARCHIVAL solution. One that you may / may not need to access frequently and can be stored off-site. A loaded Drobo-FS makes for a great BACKUP solution. Something in-house that you can access extremely easily and has loads of storage to keep multiple versions of a file and is not crazy expensive. The Drobo also has an extra safety feature in that the data is spread over multiple drives in a Raid-5 configuration so you ‘somewhat’ negate the single drive failure scenario.

The storage is only part of the equation. Next is software. I’ve been using Retrospect for years and find it extremely valuable in searching / restoring projects from a backup or archive. The great thing about it is it doesn’t care which medium you’re using. It can be anything, tape, removable disk, ftp, DVD, etc. Another program to look at is CrashPlan by Code42. It’s a great app that will let you backup to disk (any type of disk, in any configuration) or to the ‘cloud’ (it doesn’t support tape based systems yet)

Hope this helps you in finding a backup / archival solution. If you have any questions feel to ask.

Thanks,

Steve Tharp
Art Director
Point7West
https://point7west.com