Todd Terry
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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Alrighty… as I said, whatever works for ya.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Bryce Moose] “I’m confused how you think I’m spreading the same project on multiple drives.”
Because you are.
You have, by your list above, a single project with assets such as photos, videos, etc., on one drive… exported files and masters on another… and renders on yet another. If that works for you, fine, but my question is “Why?”… I can’t think of any reason to spread project pieces over three different drives. To me it just increases the opportunity for some little orphan piece to get lost, makes archival/backup three times more complicated, and makes retrieving an old archived project three times more complicated.
When we archive a project to clear it off a RAID we just drag one single root folder to an external archive drive. To re-visit an old project, we just do the reverse… and every single element that ever went into a project (all assets, masters, renders, everything) is there back exactly as it was, in one mouse swipe.
But hey, that’s just me.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Ehh… maybe I’m a lone wolf, but I would personally never organize drives that way, in fact it’s pretty much the opposite of the way I would do it. But then again, if it works for you, it works for you.
Firstly, even in this day and age of big and fast drives no one is going to get the best video performance from a single video drive… all of our suites have 6TB RAIDSs for video (six 1TB drives in a RAID). If you are doing something data/render heavy like multiple HD or 4K streams, effects, layers, filters, etc., your performance is going to be infinitely better with a RAID.
I think all of our computers are set up pretty much the same way… there’s a “C” drive, and a “V” (video) drive (which is actually not a single drive but the RAID). All programs live on the “C” drive, and all projects are done in their entirety on the “V” drive.
What you are doing which would drive me crazy is spreading a single project out on multiple drives. Here, everything is together… The project is on the same drive along with the master, all the assets, footage, graphics, sound tracks, scratch disks, rendered files… everything. In fact, they are not only in the same drive, but in the same folder.
If I need to archive something it’s a snap… and if I need to reload something that has been archived from a month or week or year ago it is easy, just one folder to track down on one external storage drive.
In your case you are going to have lots of different pieces scattered lots of different places on various drives. Personally, I’d go nuts keeping track of everything, archiving would mean finding all the bits and pieces to save, and re-assembling a project would also require the same. I think you’d be better off keeping everything together… unless you are a lot more organized than I am.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Good to know. We’re in the same boat, almost all of our “big” traffic is going out, not coming in.
Mostly broadcast commercials here, so that means FTP’ing scads of spots to TV stations. Some days there are none, but there are often a few… and have been instances of a couple hundred uploads in a day, or more. We’re fine with the reasonably fast download speeds we have, but if we could get the outgoing stuff to scoot along a little (or a lot) faster that would help. Not life changing… but helpful.
Fingers crossed, there’s time to anticipate, though. Google Fiber isn’t set to launch here until early next year.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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That’s interesting. Competition would be a very good thing… although I haven’t heard any of the ISPs here boasting (or promising) anything that even approaches the 1 Gbit/s up/down speeds that Google says we’ll be getting here.
Right now we have two different ISPs at our company, the primary one is cable (through Knology or WOW or whatever they are calling themselves this week)… it has static IPs and is the pipe that goes straight to the servers (and then to all the other computers). We also have AT&T as a secondary ISP which we can use on occasion if the pipes are getting choked, or in the event that the cable has an interruption (which does happen on occasion). I will say the AT&T pipe is slow as molasses compared to cable.
I do remember fielding a cold-call phone call at home from an AT&T salesman hawking their service (I have the same cable ISP at home). The AT&T guy kept harping on the fact that their speeds are constant, whereas the cable speeds fluctuate a fair bit, depending on area usage. My response to him was that, yes, it fluctuates, but even at it’s slowest speed it’s still multiple times faster than AT&T. “Yes,” he said, “But our speed is constant.” I tried to explain to him that being able to drive anywhere from 50 to 75mph was better than a guaranteed 10mph… but he didn’t seem to get it. Seems like a tough sell to me, I wouldn’t want his job.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Yes Tom, this was all domestic US… enjoying the airports in Huntsville, Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, and Houston. Three full days of fun.
But at least there was no trouble with batteries.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I would take all of Mark’s very good advice to heart.
But I would also be very very wary having the interviewees do absolutely anything on the technical side of things other than the very very bare minimum… even putting up a backdrop might be surprisingly out of the wheelhouse of a lot of people. I have found that asking non-industry people to anything higher than a “1” on a scale of 1-10 in the “production values” department will often yield shockingly disappointing results.
I don’t even know how we got this particular gig, but we do monthly audio podcasts for a government entity a couple hundred miles from us… just tagging them with intros and outros and making the right kinds of files. Their initial self-efforts were poor, so we tried to help them out. We bought and shipped them a Zoom recorder, gave lots of good advice on mic placement, how to pick the right recording environment, how to deaden a room, all the things that seem obvious to us. Their resulting recordings sound like they were recorded with the mic 10 feet away. In a bathroom. At Grand Central. Next to the loudest HVAC system they could find. And I think our repeated additional advice, if anything, only continues to make their results worse.
We also cast actors from all over the country… most auditions from talent agents, but some are self recorded by actors on their phones. Despite clear instructions, at least half of them come in having been shot portrait, not landscape. And frankly, the ones that come in from agents aren’t a lot better, on average.
So… do what you can, but don’t ask too much. Or any, if possible.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Just to give an update in case anyone is interested…
Just returned home… all gear was checked baggage in big Pelican cases, except the batteries. Myself and a crew member took pancake-sized bricks in carry-ons…
We sailed through six flights in four days with no trouble. Only one of the bags was even looked through once, which took about four seconds and they handed it back to me.
I guess in hindsight I was being concerned about nothing, but better safe than sorry I guess.
I don’t see how those of you who do it tons manage it without going crazy…flying has become soooo un-fun. Even biz class is a miserable experience. Good to be back home.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Hey Bob….
I probably didn’t “process the choices” very well or do exhaustive research. After a while I just decided it was time to stop thinking it to death and just pull trigger and buy one… thinking that I couldn’t go wrong with LitePanels (like they used to say, “No one ever got fired for buying Sony,” even if it wasn’t the very best choice).
I bought the bi-color because I’m simply often in lower-temp situations, and need to be able to mix with available light well. My old LEDs had slide-in tungsten-balance panels and while I didn’t use them tons and tons, I did use them enough to make a bi-color instrument worth it. Also, even in a pure daylight situation, I’ll often want to warm it up a little bit and turning on the tungsten bank just a bit does a nice job of that.
I don’t know the rating on the batts that lasted an hour, I don’t think they were very high. BUT… a colleague here in town called me a few days ago. In a city about an hour from us we have a big outfit called “Unclaimed Baggage,” and they buy literally all the unclaimed baggage lost on airlines (and you wouldn’t believe what all that includes). Anyway, he was there and there was a box of brand-new-looking goldmount batteries that he bought for $80 each. Weirdly, they were completely devoid of ANY markings or labeling… I could not tell the brand, the rating, or anything. They were a blank slate. So anywho, I tried a couple of those and they powered the light full blast for about three hours (about the equivalent output of a 575w HMI). Keep in mind that is FULL BLAST, if you turn the fan off it cuts the output in half (which is still a whole lot brighter than the previous generation of LitePanels), and even that amount is more than I would normally use for interiors. I’m guessing that at a more normal output level, a decent-sized Wh brick would go 8-10 hours or so.
I’ve also invented a diffusion system that seems to work really well, when I get a chance I’ll post a pic. I didn’t want to buy the softbox that goes with the light, I didn’t like the way it attached and the whole thing seemed kinda clunky… so I decided to come up with something else. It works well, was easy and cheap to make, attaches to the instrument in two seconds with no tools.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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The better question would be, can I pay a charter pilot to fly me?
I hate flying on biz with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns… even more with gear. Makes me wish I’d kept up with my piloting and had a Cessna Mustang in the driveway (MSRP, $2.7 million… so, relatively unlikely).
And Bill… kind of you as always, but sadly nowhere near Phoenix, unless plans change. This hopscotching trip seems to be changing by the minute. Right now we only know Denver and Houston for sure.
This afternoon the client said “We should know soon. Hopefully by tomorrow.” Ummmm…. hopefully by tomorrow? For a trip we’d have to leave on Sunday? I guess I should have told them, “Ok, let us know. We’ll be waiting in the car with the motor running.” Sheesh.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
