[Walter Soyka]

[Dave Johnson] “plus QT just makes the most sense for pro video”

So much production infrastructure relies on Quicktime — it’s just too bad that you have to cross your fingers and hope for the best that the next element in the chain will interpret the gamma correctly! I keep hoping Apple will appoint a Chief Gamma Officer to sort it all out, but I think I’ll be waiting a long time.

Every now and then I wonder if my work wouldn’t be easier with an all-RGB DPX sequence workflow like Smoke uses.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

See Todd Kopriva’s blog on the alpha channel / ProRes 4444 bug and workaround:

ProRes 4444 and ProRes 422 in After Effects CS5

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Johnny Lyddon] “Drive 1 – System Drive (time machine backup to external drive)
Drive 2 + Drive 3 software RAID mirror to use as ‘work’ drive

…in the event of failure of drive 2 or 3, would it be possible to take out the other and just put it straight into another G5 to access the data? I heard that Apple Software RAIDs only work in the system they were created in or does that not apply if it’s a mirror RAID?”

Since I’ve mistakenly commented in this thread already, maybe I can try to be helpful. I don’t know the answer to your question, but if you’re looking for a live backup on a Mac, you might consider using Time Machine instead of a soft RAID.

Both would offer protection against the failure of the drive, but RAID will not offer protection against accidental data loss — like a file deletion or overwrite. Time Machine does.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

You might try asking this question in the Arrays and RAID Setup forum.

EDIT: Sorry, you are here already — it was me who was lost!

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Jason Tan] “As it is a 4×3 screen wall, these individual screens have Window XP embedded. I open up a composition of 4098×3072 pixel at 25 fps.This is a 2 minute video. When I render the video, i chose quicktime as output and compression as animation. It turns out to be a huge file. (approx. 15 gb).”

What is your deliverable? Do you have any information on the playback system?

From your description, it sounds like there are multiple players for multiple screens. If this is the case, you probably need to deliver media specifically for each screen — not just one large 4K comp.

[Jason Tan] “I tried using Xilisoft Video Converter to convert the file to WMV (Excellent Quality). After i play it, there are signs of ‘jerking’ sort of double image appearing on and off.”

If you’re trying this on 4K footage, that’s not surprising.

[Jason Tan] “My question is : Am I doing the correct thing? Did I miss out anything ? And what is the best video converter in the market ?”

We’d need more information about the playback system to comment.

[Jason Tan] “*I m on a Mac, I know there is no ‘Video for Windows’ output function for Mac*”

Telestream makes a couple compression products that can encode WMV on a Mac: Flip4Mac and Episode.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Chris Tarroza] “After reading some articles and browsing through the Creative Cow forums, Caldigit seems to get a lot of praise. I might have to look further into that Caldigit AV Drive.”

I haven’t used the AV Drive in particular, but I’m a huge CalDigit fan. Great products and great service.

[Chris Tarroza] “I’m not looking for a RAID or anything because it is out of my budget, just a good, stable, FW800 drive to work off of, as I am currently working off my internal startup drive for the past few days which is a no-no”

To get back to the question “Do good hard drives exist?” — all hard drives fail. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. With any luck, you will outgrow and replace your drives before this happens. Having only one copy of critical data is very risky.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Craig Sawchuk] “I got some MXF files that I want to open in FCP 7. They came via a card reader transferred to HD. The folder has a sub folder titled }CLP{ that contains the MXF files and a file }STT{. This doesn’t look like what I saw in the tutorials… “

That’s probably from a Convergent Design nanoFlash, so it’s probably some flavor of XDCAM.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[bslaybaugh] “I am working on a project with another AE artist and he is basically “rigging” the interface of this device for me and I don’t want to have to re-import his project and re-link everything any time he makes a change. Thoughts?”

Like Dave said, there’s no such thing as external reference in AE.

But given the rigging/animating split in your workflow, here’s a suggestion: have your rigger build all your controls as expression controls in a null object, and have him or her link the keyframeable properties to those controls.

Any time the underlying rig is tweaked, you’ll have to re-import into your own AE project, but you’ll be able to copy and paste the keyframes from your old controls properties onto the new ones.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Dave Johnson] “I know the more RAM the better for AE and that CS5 can use 4Gb per core so RAM needs depend on the processor(s)”

With CS5, any instance of AE can address all the RAM in your system. Per-core (really per-instance) thinking is still useful for setting a minimum amount of RAM, but with 64-bit CS5, the sky is the limit.

[Dave Johnson] “For example, I’ve read some recent posts that say 8Gb is still too little”

One of those posts was probably mine. You should plan on setting aside a couple gigabytes of RAM for the operating system and any other applications you want to have open. For example, on a 4-core system, 8 GB won’t really leave you my recommended minimum of 2 GB per core, because you can count on at least 2 GB being used by the OS.

[Dave Johnson] “yet our IT folks want to give me a main board that maxes out at 16Gb RAM … would you agree that 16Gb RAM is a decent initial setup amount, but would be a bad idea to max out at 16Gb RAM so I should push for a system that can handle more? I’m also trying to decide between two separate processors or one (two 4-core or one 6-core).”

I’ll group these two thoughts on RAM and processor count together, because they both relate to your motherboard. Your mileage may vary, but 6-core processors tend to come on single-socket motherboards, which tend to have fewer slots for RAM. Dual-socket motherboards tend to have more slots for RAM.

If it’s in the budget, I’d aim for 24 GB, which should accommodate either 6 ore 8 cores pretty nicely.

[Dave Johnson] “I understand the basic math says 8 cores is better than 6 so my question is really about the number of distinct processors versus just core total.”

Again, it depends which CPUs you’re looking at, but the 6-core workstations tend to have higher clock speeds than the 8-core workstations. That means that while the 8-cores will perform better at highly parallel, multi-threaded tasks, the 6-cores will perform better with less parallel, single-threaded tasks, because they’ll each run on a faster single core.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[sam baum] “Is this CC Particle World a free plugin? Unfortunately I’m not in the position t be buying anything new at the moment.”

It’s included with After Effects.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events