Walter Biscardi
Forum Replies Created
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We got a really sweet Dell machine in our shop for Windows testing and for the most part we liked it. The only real hangup we had was shooters sending us XDCAM QT files. There’s no native codec for this on Windows so we had to purchase the Calibrated Software plug-in to make the files work in Premiere Pro on Windows. But even with that, our 8 core, 48GB RAM machine would slow to a crawl when working with those files.
The editor who was working on that machine tried out our test 27″ iMac with the 32GB RAM and was absolutely floored by it. So we replaced his Dell with a second 27″ iMac. For straight editing, working with simple After Effects projects and Photoshop, it’s a killer machine.
For heavy rendering, heavy VFX, you still want a tower with lots of ram and dual nVidia cards. We have two Mac Pro 12 Core machines that do most of our heavy lifting. Edit on the iMac and when necessary do final render on the Mac Pro.
We have 5 edit suites currently running with 4 more possibly coming online in 2013 plus more field units, so I can’t spend $10,000 – $20,000 per edit workstation anymore, I have to get the most bang for the buck. The iMac is definitely the sweet spot for that. If you only are going to need one workstation for your job, then I would go with a tower. Mac or Windows is purely your own preference.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
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Go i7. We have with our current 27″ iMacs and they’re awesome.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
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I can’t say I’ve experience what you’re seeing other than I notice that audio is always louder in the Source monitor than when I drop it into the timeline. But it always seems to be the right levels as recorded originally.
I’m guessing an audio preference somewhere? Maybe Dennis will chime in with some thoughts.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
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Have you tried capturing from or laying back to tape……… Not a pretty sight yet.
For everything else about CS6 with AJA Kona / IoXT. Awesome.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
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For break-even you just do the math and see if you think you can hit that number.
Rent/Mortgage+Utilities+Loan+Insurance+any other expenditures+Your Salary(ies) is your overhead per month.
Can you hit that number reliably? Know that you WON’T hit that number every single month in this business. As Todd says perfectly, it’s all ebb and flow. All hands on deck to get these jobs done for the clients and then suddenly everyone disappears for a month or two and you’re all staring at each other waiting for the next gig to start. So when things are going crazy, you stock away some money for those months when you’re slow. Will those crazy months be enough to average out and hold you for the entire 12 months?
Our break-even has increased the past two years but that’s a product of a major expansion and just rising costs to do business. But in general we only have to keep two of our five edit suites running each month to easily pay the bills. That doesn’t even count our Resolve or ProTools suites. We’ve purposely kept the overhead low with the mindset of bringing in contracted employees when all hell breaks loose.
Next year, the “master plan” for our expansion will finally start taking shape. The main reason for the size of the expansion was not only to service our existing clients, but to start developing our own original projects for both traditional and new media. To that end I’ll be hiring our first sales person at the start of 2013. To date, I’ve done most of the marketing and sales myself, but to grow the company, we need to bite the bullet and bring in a new person, that’ll add to our “break-even” number, but a risk I have to take.
We’ve also formed a new Entertainment company whose sole purpose is to both develop and seek out original concepts and projects for development. For that I have an awesome friend of the company who is essentially acting as our agent lining up pitch meetings with various networks. That doesn’t really add a lot to the “break-even” number since that is heavily weighed on commission, but still adds to our monthly bottom line.
So is that break-even number changing for us? Yes, it’s going to increase in 2013, but we’re at the point in our company where we are prepared to take that risk for a much better reward.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
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Wow, that’s terrible. Glad we don’t use PluralEyes here…..
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
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[christopher tegg] “Um. I have 4X12tb pegasus drives, around 9tb per drive of media.
“Yikes! I would be terrified to have that many units tied together with all my media. I would prefer a single 48TB RAID to hold all of that media in one place. With Premiere Pro working natively it’s pulling dozens of files at a time and in your case, pulling them from four different locations and everything has to be in perfect sync for all of this to work perfectly. We run a 48TB SAN and we can expand that out to 128+ TB at any time. Big projects like yours really require big, beefy RAIDs to work reliably. I speak from experience on that one, we do primarily documentaries and episodics in our shop.
[christopher tegg] “Then I keep all of my caches/previews/projects on my HD2.”
So this is an internal drive? In our case, we run a single SAN and we keep all the cache/preview files in the same location as the original media. So raw media, graphics, previews, cache (peak files) are all located together in the same place.
Now you’re pulling media from 5 location. 4 media drives plus an internal drive so when you play in your timeline, Premiere Pro has to do quite the dance to make everything like up correctly.
As an experiment, you could switch out the Media Cache / Previews to one of your media arrays and see if that helps, but quite honestly, your media storage setup for a project that large just seems like it’s asking for trouble and poor performance.
I would recommend you look at Richard’s book and in particular his chapter on Media Management. We follow that pretty much to a “T” with some modifications for our particular workflow. I actually outlined everything in my latest article here on the Cow.
Yeah, that thunderbolt daisy chaining thing doesn’t really work well in reality. Sounds great in Apple’s marketing materials but reality is that it’s very limited.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
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[Brent Barnard] “” This project contained a sequence that could not be opened. No sequence preview preset file or codec could be associated with this sequence type”
“That is a bug in Premiere Pro that Adobe assures is being address.
Create a New Project.
Import the “corrupted” project into that new one. It’ll import into a single bin in your New Project.
Open that Bin and you should see all your original work and you should be good to go.
And like others said, use Encore for the DVD. We burn the files in AME first and then go into Encore, but you can go directly there as well.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
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1 – Project files should NOT be saved to an external drive. They should be saved to your primary system hard drive. You can backup your projects to an external drive, but you should be working daily from your main system drive.
2 – This is an ongoing problem with CS6 which Adobe is aware of and they assure me they are addressing the issue.
We simply create a “New Project” and import the “corrupted” project into that and keep going.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
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Generally hearing audio with no video means you don’t have the proper codec on your machine to see the video or the clips are corrupted.
Can you send one clip into Adobe Media Encoder and convert it to something else you absolutely know works on your machine? In my case I would convert it to Apple ProRes or H264 because I absolutely know those types of files work on my machine. Then take THAT clip into Premiere Pro and see if it works.
If it does, that means there is something about the original files that Premiere Pro doesn’t like. At that point, I would go ahead and convert all the files in AME and edit using the new files.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.