[Tom Matthies]

Both are good ideas. Thanks!
Tom

PS Love the Kona3!

[Tom Matthies]

I’ll chime in here for a quick comment.
I have a couple of LaCie D2 drives at home and I’ve found that they are very heat sensitive. They tend to run hot normally but in the heat of summer they get very flaky indeed. Mine will give me a lot of problems after they have been on for an hour or so. I don’t have air conditioning in my house but I do have a window unit for my office. If I don’t run it this time of year, the drives become very unreliable as they heat up. As a normal condition I always run a small fan blowing across the drives. It helps disipate the heat and will usually smooth out the operation of these drives. You might want to try it in your situation. Can’t hurt anyway. This has been a hot summer up here in the upper midwest this year. Predicted temps here are in the 90’s for the next week. Before editing I HAVE to run the AC for an hour or so to cool the drives down before even turning the system on.I don’t know if this is a problem with external drives in general or with the LaCies specifically due to lack of cooling fans in the units. I just took delivery of a couple of FirmTek enclosures and will be transfering the data from the LaCies to the Firmtek raid over the weekend. Hopefully this will solve the dropped frame problems that occur when the LaCie drives overheat. We’ll see if the FirmTek units do better. Hopefully the run a little cooler. We’ll see.
I am firmly convinced that many times it is a heat issue with these LaCie drives. I will get dropped frame errors like crazy when the drives are hot. As soon as I get them cooled down, they run very well. It’s the heat. No doubt about it. New drives are cheaper than installing whole house AC I suppose. Normally it’s not that hot around here, but this year has been a hat one.
I guess it will be winter here soon enough and this won’t be an issue. Winter here in Wisconsin always means at least 8 months of good editing. I don’t even want to think about it. Brrrr… 🙂
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

I don’t have the proper sync generator for 23.98 so I’m letting the deck freerun on it’s own internal reference and I’m locking the Kona3’s reference to incoming video rather than house sync. It seems to work for now. After everything is in the computer, I’ll change the Kona reference back to house sync.
Hopefully this will work in the short term. Potential problems?
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Thanks Gary.
I’d kind of come to that conclusion as well this morning. After I finished getting the Kona 3 wired and checked out last night I looked at both the digital and down converted letterboxed output and it looked pretty darn good. I captured a few clips from the HDCam tape and all looks good.
I’m going to capture all of the raw footage pending approval of the ruff cut since we rent the deck and it needs to be out the door and sent to the next customer by end of day today. This way, if I need to make a change I have all of the footage available. I just hope they sign off on it quickly so I can clear the excess footage out ASAP. Then master back to HDCam and off to Digibeta at standard definition for tagging.
It’s a brave new HD world happening out there! Lots of gotchas to watch out for.
Thanks again,
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Thanks Peter.
Actually, that’s just what I did for the off-line edit. Now I’m working at getting the footage into the computer at full HD resolution for the online. Even though the spot is destined for SD delivery, the agency wants it cut at full HD resolution. The original footage was shot at 23.98 and I want to edit at 29.97 (or at least end up with an HD 29.97 master) I’m looking for the best workflow solution to achieve this. It’s a bit mentally weird doing the 23.98 to 29.97 conversions.
And, of course, the “Sales” department made a few promises that are putting everyone under the gun this week. This spot wasn’t due to be edited until a few weeks from now…after the HD suite was fully completed. However, when the agency guys wanted to see a cut of the spot much sooner than that…in HD. Well of course they were told “No problem!”.
I’m sitting here in a half finished, jury-rigged edit room trying to get enough stuff up and running to actually do the HD cut and hold off the clients for a week or two. Sigh…I need more coffee…
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

I have a pair of the SIIGs in my Quad G5 and they have had no problems at all. Plug ‘n Play!
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Really, really BIG earrings?
I just order a drive enclosure from firmtek today. It accepts SATA drives. They would work fine for a two disk mini raid.
tom

[Tom Matthies]

You don’t mention what deck you are playing back your footage from as you capture it, but I know that the 1200 &1200a have a menu setting that lets you output a center punch version of 16×9 footage for use in the 4×3 world. You mught try capturing that rather than the 16×9 video. Then you can just edit normally without any conversions or tricks at all. Simple.
Just a thought.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Do a Google search for the codec. I don’t remember exactly where I found it a while ago, but it is out there. I have it in my system and it works fine although, as Walter notes, the files will not play back well without rendering lacking the Avid hardware.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Soundtrack Pro has the ability to speed up/slow down tracks and will resample and maintain the proper pitch. It works great to fix those 31-1/2 second tracks cut by on-air radio guys that can’t work a stopwatch. 🙂
Tom