[Tom Matthies]

I had to spend the day shooting on location while I had the flu. Felt like crap warmed over. The ironic thing was, I was shooting doctor interviews at a local hospital. Everyone of the doctors noted that I didn’t look too good but NOT ONE of then offered to help out in any way.
The flu came on so suddenly that I didn’t even have the time to schedule a doctor visit and since I was scheduled to do the shoot and it was too late to change the crew (5am call, mind you) I showed up. Of course everyone else on the crew didn’t want to catch it. My sound guy ran long cables and sat in another room to monitor the interviews.”Uh, it’s quieter in here” was the reason.
I finally had someone offer to take a look later in the day. Ironically, it was a PA that heard me hacking up a lung from another room and told me to get my butt into the examining room-NOW! and sit down. She got one of the docs to finally take a look, so I got treated while on break and then went right back to shooting a half hour an later. Made it to the end of the shoot at around 8pm in the evening. That’s about all I can remember about that day. I was toasted by the time I got home. Drink lots of fluids…
So far, so good this year. Knock on wood…
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

For what it’s worth, Automator can do batch conversions of photos. I just used it to scale about 100 photos that were about 3000×2000 at 300dpi down to a smaller size for use in FCP. It was very easy and it ran in the background while I continued to work. Went pretty fast as well. Check it out.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Hi Guys.
For what it’s worth, I just placed the order for the 2.8 Octo MacPro, 6GB RAM with the 2600 video card. Also added an eSATA card, a Firewire800 card (for that pile of legacy FW drives I still need every now and then)and a spare 750Gb “utility” drive. I’m planning on taking the two 1Tb drives out of one of my two-disk eSATA enclosures and mounting them internally in the MacPro itself and so filling up all of the available drive bays. The other 2Tb eSATA enclosure will remain perched on top of the new computer case. That’ll give me 4Tb of media drive space in addition to the 750Gb “utility” drive. Not too bad. Also splurged on a wireless mouse and an After Effects upgrade. I already have Studio 2 so I should be good to go. Not bad for a home setup.

Thanks for all of the advice above. I was actually planning on the nvidia 8800 until reading the posts above and looking at the Barefeats article on video cards. Went with the 2600 instead. I put the $$$ saved on the video card into the After Effects upgrade.
Thanks again.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Interesting.
I just assumed, like most people, that bigger (more expensive) must be better. Looks like I have a little more research to do on this one.
Thanks,
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

I was planning on ordering the system, either way, with the Nvidia 8800 card.I will be using Motion and of course Color on this system and I figured that this card would make things run a bit smoother and faster. It seems that more and more processing is being off loaded to the video card these days so I figured that the bigger, the better.
What card are most of you running in new systems these days?
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Perhaps taking the Y/C output from the deck thru a converter to SDI could improve it a bit. AJA makes one. It should look a little better than composite. I don’t remember whether the 800 has a Y/C output or just a dub output. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a BVU-800 in working condition.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Can’t help with the distance to the deck problem ( I feel your pain-all of uou decks are in a central machine room a good 100 feet from my edit room as well) but I can help with the remote problem. Go into the menu on the PVW and change the remote enable setting to Enable all. This will at least allow you (or someone via phone?) to “arm” the two audio insert buttons to do an insert while the deck in remote.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Try doing an Audio Mixdown of your sequence before sending it out. The number of tracks isn’t the only issue affecting playback. Any filters added to a track will reduce your ability to playback in realtime. Also make sure that all of your audio sources are samples at 48k. It can cause all kinds of problems if you are mixing sample rates.
Baring any hardware problems or software weirdness, I’m betting that this should solve most of your playback issues.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Just checking. Your RAID is formatted for Mac OS and not something like FAT-32? Sounds like it might be breaking your exported movie up into smaller pieces to fit on the drive.
Just a thought.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

As a workaround, what happens if you manually enable the audio insert buttons on the deck while it is prerolling to do a video edit? As it prerolls, just hit the buttons on the PVW and enable the audio insert. Does it work then? I regularly control a PVW series BetaSP for analog work and it works OK.
If you have an Aja Io, try seting your VTR control protocol to Aja Io-422. I don’t change the VTR protocol when using the Kona 3 for output. I just leave it on the Aja Io setting and it works every time. You might go to Aja web site and download the drivers for the Io and give that a try.
Works here at least.
Tom