Todd Terry
1
COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
-
Thanks for the thoughts, Brendan… yes, something to think about…
[Brendan Coots] “Everything is trouble-free until it isn’t.”
Ain’t that the truth.
[Brendan Coots] “Unless you have a specific email setup using third party relays, you will lose any emails that come in while the server is down”
Yeah, fortunately that is covered. Before stuff gets to us it actually funnels through our IT guy’s nameservers back at his place… so in the instances that we’ve had the occasional power outage or problem with our ISP at least all the incoming emails are cached and flow back in as soon as we’re back up and running. That’s the one part that doesn’t worry me much.
[Brendan Coots] “we were also using the same server/RAID system to serve files to all of our FCP suites etc.”
Fortunately in our case we’re not trying to do that… the servers are only used for minimal storage (Quickbooks backups, database backups, etc.). It’s really only used for email and web hosting. Still….
[Brendan Coots] “Just one visit from an IT professional costs more 2-5 years of outside web hosting”
In a normal world, that’s probably very true. Our IT guy happens to be a friend of our company and I don’t think he has ever sent us a bill even once, even though I’ve begged him to. We’re small potatoes to him, probably not worth invoicing. And he does tons of big boring corporate work, so I think when he comes here he feels like he’s visiting one of the “glamour industries”… ha.
We’re still mulling it over…
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
[Chris Blair] “We recently looked at setting up our own server and hosting our website…Bottom line, it’s way cheaper and much less of a headache to outsource.”
Thanks Chris…
Yeah, I can appreciate that would be the situation if one were starting from the ground up. Right now though, it’s not really costing us hardly anything. Our servers are already here and have been cooking 24/7 for quite a while… I must say they are pretty much trouble free, I think our IT guy has had to come in only maybe once or twice to tweak something, and that’s over the last several years. By today’s standards their processors aren’t very fast and their drives aren’t very big, but for simple hosting and handling email they are still more than adequate. But I just know that eventually (who knows when?) they will have to be replaced… and wondering if we should keep everything in-house or go to outside hosting.
If we go out of house we will probably go with our existing ISP. They are a fairly big outfit, and their server farms and data center is only about two blocks from our studio… plus they are a commercial client of ours… like to keep our clients happy, when possible.
I’m leaning toward keeping it all in house, provided it stays as cheap and trouble free as it has been in the past… although that seems unlikely.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
I believe Bob is indeed right.
Agree with his suggestion to ask Letus directly… get the right answer straight from the horse’s mouth.
And lastly, I want that chair in the second pic.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
Thanks David…
Yeah, I just learned of Lyn last night. Even though I’m a Matrox user I don’t usually haunt the Matrox forum, so I wasn’t familiar with him. Two or three fellow COWs have now mentioned him to me, and that’s a pretty darn good sign.
We’ll give him a shout… thanks…
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
[walter biscardi] “but have you contacted Matrox directly for a VAR recommendation?”
Thanks Walter…
No, actually we haven’t… this time.
We’ve done that in the past though, trying to get recommendations of VARs from various OEMs (not just Matrox). We’ve surprisingly found that not to be a super-reliable way to get advice. In the past often some of them were hesitant to recommend a particular VAR, obviously for fear of distressing the other resellers they also work with. And in a couple of instances I got the very distinct impression that the recommendations were simply for the VAR that they were most aggressively/financially in bed with, rather than the ones that delivered the technically best and supported systems.
Might be worth trying again, though…
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
Hey Jack…
You might be asking too much of your little HV30. Then again, you might be asking too much of any camera.
The thing is, “sharp” images with “smooth motion” and “as little shutter action as possible” are a little bit of mutually exclusive items. It’s not quite like saying “I like to sleep in a perfectly pitch black room, but with lots and lots of light,” but somewhat akin to that.
Smooth motion looks smooth and fluid because there is motion blur. Take footage with perfectly fluid action and look at a single frame… and it’s going to be blurry (quite blurry if the action is fast). But take footage that was shot with a high shutter speed and while an individual frame might look razor sharp, watching it in motion will look quite juddery and stuttery. It’s a bit of an either/or situation.
The best you can really do is to find a shutter speed that is a good compromise for you that has an acceptable sharpness to the image, and an acceptable fluidity to the motion.
That being said, I’m not sure if you can get that out of the HV30. I’ve not used one, but I have one of the HV20’s that we bought as a crash cam and I think it’s pretty much the same (someone correct me if I’m wrong). While it is a phenomenal camera for the money, its biggest challenge is anything much resembling a “manual” mode. There are ways to trick it into a more-or-less manual mode to help control exposure and keep gain from riding up, really good controllable shutter speed is probably going to be tough to come by.
For the “occasional slo-mo” that you want, normally you’d want to shoot 60i footage with about a 1/160th shutter. With those settings, you can slo-mo footage to 40% and still get footage that will cut fairly nicely into 24p footage. But you probably wouldn’t want to shoot regular-speed footage with a shutter that high or it will indeed look stuttery.
If you just need this now and then, you might find some acceptable combos that get what you need out of the HV30. But if you plan to do a lot of this kind of shooting, I think you’ll want to move up to a camera that has a more easily precisely-controllable shutter.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
[Bob Cole] “Is it just that we tend to position them closer to the subject, resulting in a greater fall-off?”
Yup.
You’d get exactly the same falloff with a fresnel as a key if you positioned it just like you would a flo… say, two feet from your subject’s head…which no one in practicality would ever do. But if you did, the intensity of the spill onto a background would be exactly the same falloff ratio as a Kino (except, you’d get harder-edged shadows in the spill which would probably lead to the illusion that the falloff is not as great).
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
Well, just my 2¢ worth….
We were a Sony house forever, but for the last two years we’ve been shooting almost exclusively with the Canon XLH1 (the big brother to the XH-A1).
In a nutshell, it is my favorite camera. Ever.
I’ve never bought, borrowed, or rented a camera that performed as well, was as full-featured, or delivered as beautiful a picture… especially for the money.
The camera body itself is great, robust, full featured, and with two-dozen different parameters that you can adjust to tweak and fine-tune the image. I’m not sure of any other cameras in this price range that allow you to paint the image so precisely.
The stock lens is pretty good, too. I can’t give it much of a full review, because we never really use it (I almost always shoot with primes and a P+S Technik Mini35). But on the few occasions that I have used it, it performed very well, very sharp.
We hardly ever shoot 35mm anymore (and I used to shoot quite a bit of it) because the camera combined with prime lenses looks so darn good. Especially footage captured via its HD-SDI port looks great.
One thing that I really like about the Canon is that although there is an extensive on-screen menu for many things… there are still lots of real knobs, buttons, and switches on the body for adjusting the most often used things like color temp (which you can dial in exactly), frame rate, mode, shutter speed, audio levels, phantom power, presets, and a bunch of other things. It drives me crazy on some cameras that have countless features but you have to drill through lots of menu pages to access the controls and make adjustments. I almost never have to do that with the Canon.
The only downside that I have found with the Canons is the somewhat proprietary 24p method, which they call 24f (and 30f). In HDV mode, 24f footage can only be read/captured by a Canon camera that supports 24f, or by a Sony M35 deck (in standard-def mode, any deck will work even for 24f). In HDV mode 24f footage actually imports as true 23.976 footage, which I really love (in SD mode footage imports in a 60i wrapper).
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
[David Roth Weiss] “3D Impact Pro will not load on Vista 64 machines…. I’m heartbroken that it’s finally a dead app.”
WOW David… I didn’t know anyone else used that! I use it all the time… occasionally for simple 3D, but mostly because it can be used as such an easy/fast/good character generator. Of course, we use it on XP machines… I’ll keep it clear of Vista.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
-
[walter biscardi] “We’re supposed to put our best foot forward in any promotional materials we put forth.”
Great theory… but I think a lot of people are like us, sort of the cobbler whose own children have shabby shoes.
We went for years with a crappy demo reel, simply because we didn’t have time to do a good one (I know, I know, baaaad). Finally, we produced a really good one… nice and slick, great content, had Peter Thomas narrate it… really good stuff. But I just looked at it, and now it seems terribly out of date (and the last version is less than a year old).
However, in the case of your colleagues the Bears, I seriously doubt their spots are a lot better than the reel.
Unless they are making spots for less than $200, I’m not sure how they can get business… because they look exactly like $200 cable-produced spots to me.
Then again, my early work is probably on the weak side, too…..
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com