Walter Biscardi
Forum Replies Created
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[Yurii Hydrick] “The things I’m most concerned about are a good capture card (I know Kona used to be good), a respectable monitor for good color reproduction, and the best approach to a storage solution.”
AJA Kona is still the best in the business.
Good low cost monitor is the Flanders Scientific 1760 or 1770W. Their banners are right here in this forum.
A really nice storage solution is the WeibeTech RTX series. These are trayless enclosures of 1 to 8 drives. You can literally go down to an electronics store and purchase whatever 1 or 2TB Drives you want, put them in the array, format and start editing. https://www.weibetech.com
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.
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The cheapest solution I would recommend would be the 24″ iMac, (if that still exists) or better yet, the 27″ iMac. That’s well powered for the entire Studio Suite.
Then pick up an external FW 800 Media array with at least 4 drives in it. WeibeTech RTX series is sweet because you can swap out the internal drives easily. Buy the box, then just go down to Best Buy or Fry’s or whatever electronics store is in your are to pick up four 1TB or 2TB drives. You can also purchase the box fully populated with the drives.
https://www.wiebetech.com/products/RTX400.php
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.
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[Lux Elliott] “I am brand new to this group and have been commissioned by a friend to help set up his FCP workstation. He has three NEC PA271W with SpectrView monitors and is looking for the best video card for each of them.”
These are graphics cards. Video Cards for NLE systems are the ones that capture and / or play back video onto television monitors.
I’m partial to the ATI cards.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.
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[matthew rivlin] ” Say all on drive X. FCP won’t allow me to set up multiple scratch locations (specific folders all on drive x) saying that there is already a scratch set to that drive. No way to set multiple scratch folders within the same drive? Also, any way to capture directly into the selected folder and not to a folder FCP makes and labels?”
That is correct, FCP will now allow multiple capture locations on a single scratch disk.
FCP will always pre-set the Capture Scratch, Render and Audio folders on the Scratch Disk.
I would highly, HIGHLY, recommend your shop getting a copy of Shane Ross’ Getting Organized in Final Cut Pro. It’s an outstanding product on the organization within FCP along with many strategies for planning and executing a project.
https://store.creativecow.net/p/63/getting_organized_in_final_cut_pro
We keep a copy here and refer to it often.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.
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You can choose to ignore the chapter markers if you’re going to a DVD authoring program and re-do the chapters manually there.
Probably easier to simply move them in FCP and re-export.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.
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[Rob Tinworth] “Aperture 3 in the app store for $120 less than the real store? Like it or not, Apple is going to force us into that app store.”
Considering Apple is only about 5 years late to the software download party, I’d say it’s about time. I can purchase just about all the software for my company via download except Apple’s.
For a supposedly “green company” it sure took them a long time to drop the printed manuals from the pro apps and now they don’t have to manufacture 8 DVDs or whatever it is just to install the suite.
The one thing I wonder is if they will break apart the Studio Suite now so you can actually just purchase FCP or DVD Studio Pro if that’s all you want.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.
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[Mike Alexander] “I have an external 2TB drive connected with Firewire 800 cable. I do not do any regular system maintenance other than clearing out old/unused media. I’d love to know what kind of maintenance I could do we are without IT support for the system. When I have trouble, I usually delete FC preferences and user data. That sometimes fixes certain problems.”
A single hard drive will definitely cause you to slow down if you are using a lot of data on that drive. The more full the drive is, the slower it will get.
Simply deleting old media from a hard drive will actually cause more issues as well. You need to complete ERASE that hard drive from time to time to completely clean it up. When you simply delete and re-write, you still have fragmentation all over that hard drive.
How you set up your Capture Scratch also affects performance. If you over manage the project rather than letting FCP manage your data, you can create all sorts of issues. For the Capture Scratch I simply select the hard drive and let FCP put all the folders in place. I’ve seen people create a folder for each project, each element of a project and so forth. If you create too many directory paths for your data, that can severely slow down FCP.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.
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Can you connect the DVCAM deck directly to a monitor and speakers?
Does the audio dropout play there?
You said you have 7 year old DVCAM tapes. DV / DVCAM has some of the worst dropout issues of all the tape formats out there as they grow older.
Also, have you had your DV machine cleaned recently? I have all my VTRs cleaned once a year at least.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.
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If you have a head cleaning tape, run it through the deck. Sounds like you might have dirty heads.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.
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As Bouke says, you want wired headphones if you’re going to use them professionally.
BUT, know that headphones are terrible for audio mixing. You will rarely get a mix that sounds the same when played back on amplified speakers if you do the mix on headphones.
That’s why pros never use headphones unless they are in a situation where it’s required, such as editing in a remote location where speakers are impractical.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.