[Tom Matthies]

I’m looking at a pile of Big Disk drives on my work bench that have failed. The only thing that I wonder about when replacing the drives in a Big Disk unit is the fact that heat is most likely what caused the drives to fail in the first place and there isn’t much space inside that case. If the drives are replaced, won’t they simply burn up again, especially when putting bigger drives in the enclosure? Bigger drives usually mean more heat and heat is not good in this case.
Any track record on that rebuilt drive? Still working OK?

Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Yeah. Fortunatly…but still.
It’s too bad since these SATA enclosures and cards are rock solid on speed and reliability. No more Firewire 800 for this boy.
I talked to support at Firmtek and the cards (PCI-X) are NOT compatible in the MacPro. Currently they only offer a 2-channel eSATA solution for about $100. Looks like the actual SATA cables are different as well. I’d really like to stick with the 4-channel card, but it looks like this (2-channel) is the only solution for now.
Oh well, at least with the new MacPro, there is more room for internal SATA drives and in my older G5 DP. I’ll still be able to run 4 media drives ad two striped pairs right out of the gate.
Guess I’ll be ordering new hardware from Firmtek soon. The evolution continues…but it sure don’t like having to replace everything every few years. Ah, the price of progress, I guess.
tom

[Tom Matthies]

OK, now you have me thinking…it takes a while to get going on Mondays.
I haven’t messed with the innards of wither machine since I set them up. My home G5 is a 2.33DP. It’s going on three years old. The G5 Quad is a little over a year old now. Now that I think it over, I believe that the older machine did indeed have PCI-X slots and the G5 Quad has PCI-e slots. Is there an easy way to verify this? I’m at work so I don’t have access to the home machine. Anywhere to get information on older machines so I can determine just what changes I will need to do when upgrading? It looks like I might be OK on the Kona 3 and the Atto SCSI boards, but pretty much hosed on the SATA, Firewire800 and Firewire 400 PCI-X cards on the older G5. The cost of progress. 🙁
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Even though you were monitoring the sound and watching the meters, it’s easily possible to overdrive the recording on certain sounds. Many sounds which are short in nature or in the higher frequency ranges will over modulate a recording and cause distortion, espically with a digital format camera. These sounds can simply be too short in nature to give the meters a chance to react properly. Many camcorders will have the Vu meters damped a bit to show more of an average level, but they will not respond quickly enough to show the very short, but very “loud” peaks present in your material. Most professional field mixers will include both a “peak hold” option on the meters to indicate the loudest part of a sound and also a red (usually) peak indicator that has a very fast response time. I’ve actually recorded Native American dances locally here and I’ve seen my peak light on my mixer lighting up like a string of Christmas lights while the slower, averaging meter on the mixer showing levels in the normal range. Even though your waveforms look OK, clipping could have easily occured in the recording process. The waveforms in FCP while useful, are not terribly accurate and lack the detail that many professional sound processing programs can provide. Your recording was most likely over driven while recording and the waveforms lack sufficient details to show it clearly. In the future, use a good mixer (both electronic and human) and err on the side of bringing the audio down a little more. You can always bring it up and add a bit of compresser to it.
Once it’s clipped, there’s not a lot you can do to fix it.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Actually all pretty straightforward stuff here. The light rays would most likely be a preproduced movie such as a Jumpback. Add it below the layer of video (most likely) and play around with the composite mode. The feathering looks to be a slight vignette added to the video track. Look for the vignette filter included with FCP. Pretty simple.
In the second video, the titles are animated most likely with simple keyframes with a blur & fade added so that the timing results in the effects you see. Without know just what system the video was produced on and not knowing what plugins were involved it’s difficult to get more specific but most systems will do these effects.
With the exception of the moving light streams, all of this can be easily done in FCP.
Nice wedding videos BTW.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Blow up the frame ever so slightly until the black line is off the top of the screen.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

OK, a bit convoluted but:
Open iTunes. Change Import preference to .aiff. Export to iTunes from garage band. Reimport resulting iTunes file into Quicktime Pro. Export as .aiff at 48k.
It works but there’s gotta be an easier way…?
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

If most of the outdoor footage looks the same (same blue color) a fast way to correct your entire sequence (get it close anyway) would be to correct one scene just the way you like it. Then select all of the other clips you’d like to correct and drop the filter from the first scene onto the others. All of your scenes will be corrected and be pretty close to normal. A little fine tuning and you will be good to go.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

If you can still find it, Eureka had one called Vapor Across (I think) and it was a free download.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

And when I finally got through to tech support, I had multiple windows open on the screen but I couldn’t read them and listen to support at the same time since I didn’t know how to turn on the Dolby 5.1 speakerphone option. Damn PDF help menus anyhow. Give me a paper manual anytime…
Tom