If you have never been to one Michael Horton’s FCP SuperMeets, than you have not been to a FCP User Group Meeting.

They are held at various locations around the globe, but for the first time you can attend one of these meetings in Boston, and it’s not too late to get in for free (details below). What can you expect when you attend a SuperMeet?

Aside from seeing demonstrations from some serious talent and on occasion some product debuts, it’s a great place to socialize with creatives from around the country and build new relationships. I had planned to travel to Boston for this meeting until I was booked on a travel job that starts tomorrow.

To find out more about the Boston Meeting agenda, visit the official site.

For your free admission tickets, follow the instructions below.

1. Go to: http://supermeetbos10.eventbrite.com/

2. Click on the ENTER DISCOUNT CODE link.

3. Enter discount code: suitetakevip

4. Fill out registration with legitimate email and address for EACH name.

Last night I was a guest on the Digital Production Buzz with Larry Jordan and Michael Horton. We discussed my last blog post on growing your business.

If you don’t regularly listen to the Buzz it’s a great resource for post production professionals, and keeps you up to date on the latest news and what others are doing in the business.

Click here for the Interview Excerpt

Click here for the Full Show

When the economy tanked in late 2008, I was forced to look at my business and figure out how to best combat the severe downturn in revenue. We have primarily offered post production services since opening in 2004, but what happens when there’s not enough post work to keep the rooms busy? Aside from the obvious solution of trying to increase the client base, there is also the option of adding other services so that you get a bigger piece of the overall project pie. Think of it like being in the stock market. All of my “stock” has been invested in doing post work. That’s great during the good times, but being more diversified will help when things are slow.

So throughout 2009 we’ve added a few new services to help us retain a larger chunk of every project we do.

Production

The first thing added was production services by way of purchasing a Sony EX-1 camera package and lighting kit. This helped by landing a few new jobs that we would have normally only done the post on, but we now had the whole job start to finish. What made this possible was having an editor on staff that is also a great videographer with years of experience shooting. It was a natural addition, and the camera package has already paid for itself.

Motion Graphics

Next we decided to raise the bar on the kinds of graphics that we can offer. Most editors can create graphics using Motion, AE or the like, but I’m not sure I would call all of these editors Motion Graphics Artists. I know many great editors that are not very good at the graphic side of things. Our goal was to bring some of the work back in house that has typically been farmed out.The first step toward this goal was to block out time to focus on new training, tutorials and some very specific goals/milestones.

One of the big challenges for any editor today is the expectation that you need to learn MANY things, not just editing. As a result,  focus can be a bit scattershot  when you’re trying to build a skill. You may spend time in AE one day, Flash another and Photoshop the next, and  no single area shows any significant benefit.

To help remedy this, I officially declared 2009 “The Year of AfterEffects” and asked that any and all tutorials being done on company time be focused on AfterEffects and only AfterEffects. Period. The results were immediately evident in the work being done, and clients noticed. Within a few months we took on 2 new jobs in house that we would have previously lost to an outside artist.

3D Graphics

Building on that, we decided to start down the road of offering 3D Graphics. This is not as easy as sharpening your AE skills, since the learning curve and time investment can be quite large. But nonetheless we spent the last year training a staff member on 3D. While he’s not quite far enough along to do paying jobs, he’s getting closer every week now. He’s also done a great job on some internal projects and has really impressed me with the speed at which he has picked things up. I have some 3D experience in my past (dating back to the golden days of Electric Image) so I know what a challenge it can be. My estimate is that this effort will start to pay dividends later this year and be in full swing in 2011.

Live Production Services

Finally, starting this year we now offer Live Netcasting of corporate events, conventions and the like. This is a natural fit into our already popular travel editing packages. For example, this week I’m in Nashville to do onsite editing for the IGA 2010 Global Rally. It’s the usual job with events being shot, edited and played back onsite. But in addition, we are going to be live streaming the awards night banquet live to the web as it happens. This will allow people around the world who were unable to attend the conference to tune into it and even chat about it as it happens via live chat. The client can choose to charge for this access or to make it free to the viewer.

What makes this attractive to the client is that we offer it as a total turnkey solution. We bring all of the Netcast cameras and studio gear needed to  do a live switch with multiple cameras,  roll in pieces and lower thirds, and send it up to the web in high quality, even HD. We provide the hosting, web page design, and if needed handle the sales and access to the broadcast.  The added benefit is that sometimes there will be extra editing needed before the event to create extra roll in pieces or graphics as part of the show.

So this will be a very busy week for me, having both on-site editing and on-stie production of the net event. The schedule worked out that I could do both, but in most cases I would have somebody dedicated to take care of the netcast alone.

BTS Production Photography

One other thing that I started to offer clients, more out of my personal interest than for the sake of increased revenue, is doing production stills on jobs. This is a pretty easy up sell when I’m already on the job to edit. For example, this summer I’m booked to do a editing job in Sydney Australia. The client on that job asked if I could come out a few days early and take some production stills for a shoot that she’s doing in New Zealand. So I get to travel out a few days early and provide her with some great behind the scenes photos that she can use to update her professional blog as well as her website. And for me I’ll get some extra travel to a great location and have fun taking the photos.

The SuiteTake

If you find that you don’t have enough post work to keep yourself or your staff busy, it may be time to take a look at what other offerings you might be able to present to your clients. Ask yourself what else you might be good at, or what else you’re interested in doing. Do you have a passion that is untapped?  I would not recommend offering a service that you’re not interested in or not  very good at.  That would do nothing but hurt you in the long run and possibly degrade a good relationship. But most of us have diverse interests and skills, and could probably find at least one other thing that we would enjoy doing (and enjoy billing for).

Take the time to evaluate your interest and skills, and you may find a new revenue stream for yourself or your company.

It is with great excitement that I am finally able to make an announcement that has been eating at me for nearly a year now. In June of 2009 when the iPhone 3GS was released I had a flash of what the future could hold for editing, and it’s that moment of inspiration that gave birth to the product I’m announcing today.

Our new groundbreaking product, Final Cut Pro Mobile, is now available on the iPhone 3GS. It will also be available on the iPad later this year. You heard me right – the full suite of FCPS apps have been ported to the iPhone 3GS, and in some cases, we’ve been able to add additional features not found in the current offerings from Apple.

Much of our inspiration at SuiteTake.com to create this mobile suite was inspired by the growing interest in editing projects outside of the office. While the edit suite has been the traditional place to get your project done, technology no longer limits us to just a single location. And it was with that vision in mind that we marched forward with the project. Here is a quick overview of what the new suite includes.

Final Cut Pro M

Starting with the current version of Final Cut Pro 7 from 2009, we included all of the same new features as well as the under the hood improvements from Apple. But we’ve also added some features that are only possible on the iPhone.

For example, with a single swipe of your finger – you can save your project, duplicate it, or permanently delete it – all with the same gesture. Swiping at different speeds determines which of the functions is selected. Now that’s efficient!

Need a quick rough cut of the footage you’ve imported? Just shake your phone up and down 3 times and the built-in accelerometer will create a rough cut using the current ins and outs of each clip. The phone will use our patented Content Detection™ algorithm to analyze dialog, body language and facial expressions. It will then systematically assemble the clips in the most pleasing and logical way.

Motion M

Complete with Open GL acceleration, 3D shadows and real-time playback, you can create graphics at uncompressed 4K or HD resolution while browsing the iTunes store, surfing the web or taking a call from your client. And all of this while you’re outside of the standard ball-and-chain edit suite. Be inspired – be Mobile!

While the standard motion templates that you’re used to are included, we’ve also added the ability to buy templates through the App Store, right inside of Motion M. Using your iTunes account and 3G networking you can download the latest templates where you want, when you want.

Soundtrack Pro M

Using your iPhone earbuds you can mix your latest soundtrack while listening to your favorite iPod playlist, checking your messages with  Google Voice and browsing SFX from the SoundTrack library.  All while walking through the busy city traffic to catch your bus to the beach.

But it’s not just about multi-tasking. SoundTrack Pro M can mix up to 256 tracks of audio in real time, has new MIDI functions available through the dock connector and now includes a cool iTunes-like screen saver to help you  see your audio as you mix. This is part of our new SeeHearMix™ technology.

Color M

Who says you need a $10K monitor to color grade your latest film? Don’t let the monitor industry make a fool out of you any longer! Using the precision color LCD touch screen on the iPhone you can grade like a pro using just your fingertips.

What’s that? You don’t have time to do the grading yourself? Again we tied into the Apple App Store and you can now purchase and download preset looks based on the type of project you’re grading. Some of the categories include Corporate Training Video, Broadcast Reality Show, Broadcast Sitcom, Over Produced Documentary, Low Budget Film, B-Movie, Direct to DVD, Flip Cam to Film Look and Barely Good Enough For YouTube. Each preset will optimize the look and feel of your video based on your target audience.

DVD Studio Pro M

Apple may not have updated DVD Studio Pro, but we sure did.

Need a DVD and need it while on the go? No problem! Plug in your favorite DVD burner and create a Standard Def or Blu-ray DVD on the spot right from your iPhone using our patented USB-BlazeBurn™ technology.

Don’t have a DVD burner? That’s OK too. Master directly to our new SuiteTake.com Print-On-Demand DVD service. Most DVDs will upload over 3G in just 2-3 weeks, and you’ll receive your DVD copies within one calendar year. Let’s face it, you didn’t really need it that fast anyway.

iChat Theater M

Using the iPhone 3GS camera,  you can now chat with your client live while watching your latest cut. You can even conference in up to three other members of the “creative team” to watch and comment on the playback of your sequence while referencing a live timecode window. Getting unwanted needless feedback has never been so easy.

And Finally, Compressor M

Compressor is more then a compression engine – it’s a publishing factory. Set up automated processes that will convert your final video to the proper format and upload it to iTunes, YouTube, Vimeo, FaceBook or just a standard FTP site.

As an exclusive to the Mobile FCP Suite, you can even export directly to another iPhone no matter where they are in the world. And all of this over 3G. Take that AT&T!

Need more speed while compressing? Using iPhone QMaster integration you can cluster up to 50 iPhone 3GSs together to cut compression times by up to 8.9%. (Estimated, actual savings can vary. In some cases render times can actually increase up to 75% due to some unknown reason that we’re still baffled by. Due to the increased radiation output of the phones during the render process, women who are pregnant or are hoping to ever become pregnant should limit their exposure to FCPm Qmaster. Do not taunt Qmaster under any circumstances.)

And with our new Social Media plugin architecture, you can send custom notifications to Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace and even the Creative Cow Forums. Now all of your fellow editors will know just how frustrated you are by that request to make “one more small change”. Partner deals with Gowalla, FourSquare and DropBox are in the works for late 2010.

I am proud to say that I think we’ve really hit this one out of the park. And we’re just getting started. Since I started using FCP Mobile I’ve realized that having a full size computer is a thing of the past. I used to say I would never give up my Mac Pro. Now I’m starting to ask myself if it even makes sense to have an office. Since I started using FCPm I have barely bothered to show up to work at all.

Still not convinced?

Check out the cover story in the next issue of MacWorld magazine for a full hands on review or read our Press Release.

Can’t wait?

Head over to the App Store and download it now. We hope you’re as excited about it as we are.

I’ve been very fortunate in business. Since I first started Edit Creations in my basement in 2003 I’ve been blessed with having multiple clients follow me into business based on our work history together and friendships. And over those years, word of mouth has filled in the rest of the time. Within the first 5 years business grew from me working in my basement to having a 2000 sqft office with multiple edit rooms, vo booth, graphics, travel gear and 4 employees. Things were going great. Then, the fall of 2008 hit.

At the end of 2008 work dried up and 2009 was the most difficult year since the business was started. During this time a few things happened that changed the way I looked at my company.

First, I didn’t lose any clients. I still had the same clients that I’ve been working with for years, in some cases close to 15 years. The problem was that those clients were no longer getting the jobs they used to. Projects were being scaled back, rescheduled or flat our cancelled. In one case a job that was normally 4 weeks of editing in 2 suites (a job that we received every December running into January) just went away and has not yet returned.

Second, for the first time in my career I was faced with having to find new clients. Two years ago I would have said you were crazy if you told me to go out and find new clients. I was already working 10+ hours a day and the thought of looking for more work seemed like self abuse.

Third, I realized that you can’t count on jobs that are promised to you, even if you have a long standing relationship with those clients. For example, in 2009 there were no less then 3 major jobs (one a broadcast TV series) that were promised to us. In one case actually scheduled for the last half of 2009. “Great!” I thought, the year is covered! The pressure is off! And then, one by one the projects just went away, in large part due to the economy. So I was left with open edit suites and very little work to fill them, but the same overhead as if it was business as usual.

As this all started to unfold, the reality that I needed to go out and sell the business hit me, and hit me hard. But what also hit me was that I didn’t know where to start. I’m an editor, I’m a tech guy, I’m a creative and a Mac addict but not a salesman. That’s not to say I couldn’t sell, it’s just that I have never had to and don’t really have the knowhow. Yet.

Late in 2009 I was invited to attend a local business leaders meeting at a new store in Naperville IL. I thought this would be a good opportunity to meet other business owners and possibly make new connections with people that were in need of editorial and creative services. Hell, any reason to go to the Apple Store is a good one in my book!

So I went to the event that was scheduled before normal business hours, and there were about 30-40 other business professionals there, snacking on donuts and drinking free coffee. I very quickly realized that I had a problem. I was, at least in this setting, a social misfit. Instead of walking up to people and striking up a conversation, I found myself avoiding all eye contact and just taking interest in the machines on display. I was nervous and genuinely uncomfortable. Was it really this hard to talk to people? It’s not like I don’t have years of practice working with clients, meeting new people at the office and giving tours of the facility (both Edit Creations and previously at a much larger facility). Driving back to the office that morning it hit me. How was I going to meet new people and convince new clients to do business with me, if I couldn’t talk to people?  This is a problem, and I had a knot in my stomach just thinking about it. I could no longer rely on business just walking in the door, I had to go get it. Yet, I didn’t have the most basic skills needed to do so.

Over the next several weeks I did some deep soul searching and came to the following conclusion. I needed to develop my social skills, and in a big way. My goal, I decided, was to get to the point that I could walk into a room of strangers (business people or otherwise) and not only feel comfortable, but be able to approach people and have a meaningful conversation. As if that wasn’t enough, I wanted to improve my public speaking/presentation skills.

If you’re already good at all of these things you’re probably wondering what the big deal is. But if you’re not, you know what a tall order this is. Just the though of taking this on scared me deeply. But at the same time I thought if not now, then when?

What really got me over the hump was thinking about the hours and hours of training I do every year to improve my editing and graphics skills. I will easily dedicate myself to doing whatever is necessary to learn a new software program or take my skill set to a new level. I’ll read manuals, 3rd party books, PDF files on my iPhone and do tutorials on Lynda.com until I fall asleep on my laptop. But over all of these years, what have I actually done to improve my personal skills? My interactions with the people around me have not been “upgraded” for years. When I started to look at it from this angle it became clear that this was something I had to do.

In my opinion the best way to find new clients is to first create new relationships, without pushing any type of business angle. Sure you want people to know what you do and what you could offer them, but that should be secondary to developing a genuine relationship and interest in the person. What’s key in what I just said is creating a genuine relationship, not a superficial one. Look at it like this. If you were a producer and needed a editor for your project, would you rather call up somebody out of the creative directory, run an ad to interview new people, or call the person you’ve already developed a trusting relationship with and that you enjoy being around? People like to work with people they like. If you’re going to spend several weeks working on a job, don’t you want to like the person you’re working with? Dare I say, even have fun on the job?

So, it starts with creating relationships, which is one thing I need help with. At least when it’s from a cold start. So I started doing research on-line and after a few weeks there was a clear winner. The Dale Carnegie course. The overall objectives of the course are as follows.

• Build greater self-confidence
• Strengthen people skills
• Enhance communication skills
• Develop leadership skills
• Reduce stress and improve our attitude

It’s everything I was looking for in a single course. The class meets once per week for 4 hours in the evening, and the class I’m in has about 20 people in it.

If you have not read the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” I highly recommend it. I’ve read it twice over the years and this course builds on those basics. Here is a list of the 9 principals they teach in reference to building better relationships.

• Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.
• Give honest, sincere appreciation.
• Arouse in the other person an eager want.
• Become genuinely interested in other people.
• Smile.
• Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
• Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
• Talk in terms of the other person’s interest.
• Make the other person feel important, and do it sincerely.

While the thought of taking this class scared the hell out of me, that’s the idea of the course. They want to push you beyond your comfort zone and have you face your fears, but in a nurturing and positive environment.

While I have already started the class, I had to miss the first one due a petrie dish of disease at my house (aka 2 year old twins). So my first class (class 2) included me having to do a 2 minute speech. Nothing like jumping right in! While I was nervous all day before heading to the class, by the time the class was over I was feeling a lot more comfortable and could already see a difference after only 4 hours.

The idea behind the 8 week course is that they teach you certain skills and give you new tools every week, and then you have a week to implement what you’ve learned in your work environment. This allows you to really practice what you learn before moving onto other lessons. In fact, part of each class is reviewing how everybody did with their past week.

This week (class 3) includes having to do 2 speeches. One that’s 2 minutes, talking about how you used one of the 9 principals in the work place to change or influence a situation, and a 1 minute one explaining how to do something that’s related to your job that others in the class might be interested in. It’s an exercise in breaking things down in a very concise manner to quickly communicate your core message. So for my 1 minute speech, I’m going to teach the class how to create a 30 minute HD video in FCP using the Log and Transfer Window, standard transitions, 3rd party plugins, color correction with Color, audio mixing with Soundtrack, 3D graphics in Motion and how to repurpose the final edit for everything from BluRay DVD to YouTube. I’m just hoping I can fill the full 60 seconds.

The SuiteTake

My main idea behind doing this post was to get others thinking about their social skills, and to ask themselves if there was room for improvement. Some people are naturals at this kind of thing and could probably teach the class, but many of us are challenged in certain areas. A class like this can really give you an edge and create new opportunites for your business.

Over the upcoming weeks I’ll post an update or two and tell you how it’s going. At the very least I’ll do a post once the class is over to give you my full review.

With so many software programs and hardware only supported by the Intel based Mac computers, you might find that having that old Dual/Quad G5 around is becoming more and more problematic. And that may be true, especially as a production machine. More and more of the Apple and Adobe apps only support the newer processor, so upgrading starts to become difficult. Even Snow Leopard is only supported by Intel machines, so your G5 kind of gets stuck in time.

But I’m going to give you a few options to still make use of that older machine, and it will end up having more value to you than the few bucks you can fetch by selling it on eBay. Currently a Quad G5 (the last and fastest G5 made) is going for about $600, and that’s if you throw in a bunch of extra software/upgrades. And who wants to deal with shipping the beast anyway. My vote would be to keep the machine around and put it to work.

FileServer

One of the best things you can do is add more storage to the machine and have it as a file server. For example, in our office we have 3 main edit rooms, but there are many files that we use on jobs that are shared. We have a music library, stock footage, stock effects, some Editor Toolkit graphics, SFX, Custom Compressor Settings and many template items that we’ve created in house. We used to have all of these items installed on every computer in the office. Not a big deal, except when you make an update you have to make sure that every machine is updated with the same items or you quickly get out of sync. Having just one place to store it all is much more manageable.

Backup Server

Another option would be to add extra storage and make it a backup server that monitors the computers in your office and backups new files on a daily or weekly basis. You can do this using the new Retrospect 8 for the mac, or ChronoSync and Chrono Agent. Both packages work the same way, having a small client app running on your workstation, and the server software running on the backup machine. You select what you want to backup, when you want to back it up and where to. The nice part is that once it’s setup properly, you don’t have to keep remembering to back things up before you leave every night.

WIKI Server

Finally, you can install OSX Server (10.5) software and use it for workgroup management, contact files, file server and even a WIKI. We have a WIKI that we use for ECU (Edit Creations University) where we have all training materials, tips and tricks, job specific information, client FedEx numbers and even the employee manual. It’s all accessible to all employees whenever they need to reference anything, and any employee that has permission can add their own posts or revise posts that are there with new information. It becomes a very centralized location to store information, files, and video tutorials.

Creative Samples Database

Over the past 10 years I have slowly collected still images, QuickTime movies, DVD’s,  tv commercials, show opens, movie trailers and so on, of things that I found inspirational or creative. The main reason was that I wanted to have something to spark my creative juices when I was just dead in the water looking for a new idea. I don’t like to steal an idea directly, but there’s plenty you can take from any given example and than make it your own. Often just seeing something will spark an idea of your own.

I have so many samples now that I created a database called Creative Spark. Everything is processed into a friendly format and imported into the database. Once in there, it’s tagged for any number of attributes, from the type of video it is to what types of things is shows examples of (camera work, effects, text, graphics, etc.). This is the kind of thing that works great in a shared environment and it’s now accessible to any of the editors or producers in the office.

It also comes in handy when you’re trying to describe an effect or look to a client. It’s much more effective if you actually have the example right there to play for them.

TimeMachine Volume

Most people hook up an external drive for use with Apple’s TimeMachine. But by adding up to 6TB of internal space, you can do the same thing and take up no extra counter space. We have a TimeMachine volume on each edit computer that runs twice daily* to backup the active projects (and only the active projects). We’ve found this to be a very solid part of our overall backup strategy.

Whatever you decide to do with that G5, more storage is probably going to help. Today’s post will walk you through how to install more storage than you ever imagined in your aging G5 so that it’s up to snuff for you’re data needs.  Of the ideas I outlined above, all could be implemented on a single machine and play nicely, and in that case you would absolutely want to add more storage.

What You Will Need

A G5 Tower of any vintage (the photos here are from a Quad G5).

A Swift Data Kit for your model of G5. The kit includes…

Internal SATA card (you can purchase this with the kit as an add on option)

Up to 3 extra SATA drives (in addition to the 2 that your G5 normally holds)

One (1) open PCI, PCIX or PCI Express slot

Getting Started

Start by laying all of your parts out and making sure you have everything. I say this not only because it’s a good idea, but because I didn’t do this the first time and didn’t realize I was missing the SATA card until the machine was already stripped down. I was pretty bummed. TAKE 2!

Lay the mac on it’s side and take the side door off of your mac and remove the side cover and clear plastic internal cover.

Next, remove the fan assembly toward the front of the machine. It should just pull straight up.

Once the fan is out you will see a small metal screw in the near center of the bottom plate. This screw needs to be removed. Don’t worry, it’s not really holding anything in that you need to worry about.

Set the screw aside for now.

Next, it’s time to attach the brackets to your hard drives. In our case we went with 1TB Green Drives from Western Digital, but you can use larger 1.5 or 2TB drives if you wish.

The green drives are preferred for their lower power use, and it should be noted that Seagate drives are not supported, and I’ve personally had issues with Hitachi drives. To be safe, stick with WD greens. In my case I couldn’t get the computer to boot because the Hitachi drives were drawing too much power. With the WD drives this was not a issue.

Pay attention to how you connect the bracket. Your instinct may be to put the bracket on so that the bottom lip curls under the drive. However, the drive needs to curl away from the drive.

Repeat these steps until all 3 drives are brackets securely attached.

With all 3 drives mounted to brackets, it’s time to attach each of the drives to the base mount. As shown in the photos, attach each drive to the base using the supplied screws from the kit. It’s important that the drives are oriented as shown.

It seems like an odd way to mount the drives, but it’s actually very solid and the parts are well machined.

Next it’s time to insert the SATA card. We chose the Tempo Sata E4i which is recommend for our G5 model.

Take the card out of the packaging and attach the bight red cables to each of the ports. Be sure to plug the FLAT ends of the cables into the card, not the L shaped ones.

With all of the cables attached, gently insert the card into your open slot and secure it with a screw into the back of the machine.

Just leave the cables hanging out of the side of the box for now.

Next you need to hook up the power cable harness. At one in there is a Y type adaptor. What you need to do is pull the power from one of the current machine drives, and plug that power into one end of the Y adaptor. The other end of the Y adaptor goes back into that drive and you route the cable down the back of the machine. It’s basically a way to split off the power supply and share it with the drives you’re adding.

Again, leave the power cable hanging out the side of the box, but only after routing it down below the top shelf of the machine.

Now the fun part. It’s time to slide the drive assembly in. With the drive assembly right next to the computer, work from back to front hooking up both the power and SATA connections. Don’t worry about the cables being a mess, we’ll fix that later.

With everything hooked up, slowly and carefully slide the drives into the machine as shown, with the lip/screw hole part of the base facing the back of the machine.

Once you get the drives part way in, start to route the cables up and above the fan assembly and above where the cards go.

Once you have the drives in the machine, push the assembly toward the front and line up the plate so that the screw holes are aligned. Once aligned, use the longer screw that came with your kit and secure the plate to the base of the machine.

Reinset the fan assembly, close up the case and you’re good to go!

It’s snug, but it’s a perfect fit.

Time to Power Up

With a little luck, if you did everything correctly and used the recommended drives the machine will power up. Let the machine boot and use Disk Utilites to format the new drives however you would like. They can be added as 3 separate drives if you prefer, or you can raid them together. We created a raid 0 strip of the 3 to add a single 3TB volume.

If the machine turns on and off right away, chances are the power supply is overloaded. Make sure you used the correct drives. In some cases, you can try a few times in a row and it will finally start, but then you’re living on the edge a bit. Try to disconnect the power from one of the drives and see if it will start up then. If so, you may need to stick with only a 2-drive upgrade.

Why Is There An Airplane In My Room?!

Now that you’ve done all of this, there is one little down side that we noticed. Aside from it obviously sucking more power to drive all of the new storage, the fans in the machine run a LOT more. If you have this computer in a back room as a server this might not matter, but if it’s your main edit machine it might start to annoy you. We did this upgrade on 2 machines, one is a server in the back room with a bunch of other equipment, and one was to a Quad G5 that we still edit on (the upgrade shown in this example), so that we could do local TimeMachine backups once daily. The edit machine fans are audibly running a lot more and a lot louder than before. This is no real surprise when you think about all of the extra heat that’s being generated, but you should be aware of it.

Otherwise, it’s a very sold upgrade. We didn’t do any official benchmarks on the drives but the speed is much faster than any single internal drive, and more than adequate for a TimeMachine volume, file server or even video capture for all but the most high end formats.

The SuiteTake

Before you get rid of that old G5 tower, ask yourself if there’s anyway it can make your life easier by automating something for you, acting as a server or just being a internal FTP or file server. There are many tasks that don’t really need Quad-Octo-Pecto-IntelAMD-SuperHyper-Threading chips, and will run just fine on a G5. The value that can be provided by keeping the machine can far exceed any small amount of cash you might get from selling it on eBay.

This week I have the good fortune of getting out of the cold Chicago weather and editing in sunny California. I’m was brought out to do some on-site editing for Fender at the NAMM convention in Anaheim.

Like every travel job that I do, there are unique needs that needed to be addressed. No two jobs are exactly the same.  The needs of this job resulted in me having the most sophicated travel setup I’ve had to date. Here are the details of the job.

NAMM is a convention that showcases manufactures of musical instruments and gear. It’s kind of the NAB of the music industry. Fender has one whole floor of the convention center, and my job is specific to what they’re doing here. There are 3 main areas of their venue. The Stage, where there will be live performances, both planned and as people walk up and just want to jam. There is the exhibit area where booths are setup for all of the separate companies that are under the Fender umbrella. And then there’s the “floor”, where people are just socializing and moving from one place to the other. All of these are being covered by video, and as quickly as possible edited down and posted to the web on the Fender website as well as many social media sites.

The stage area is being covered by another editor who is recording the line feed and 3 iso cameras to AJA KI recorders.

He then takes specific performances (just single songs), cuts them down, adds bumpers on both sides and compresses it for the web. He then hands it off to one of the 3 web guys that take care of the online distribution.

As for my job, I’m handling the show floor and the booths, which is being covered by 2 roaming cameras shooting DVCPro50 widescreen on P2 cards. There is an assistant that will be running cards to and from the cameras whenever they think they got something special to post. That might be a good interview, a really kick ass performance by somebody jamming out, or an unexpected moment with a real rock star. It’s rumored that Eddie Van Halen may be showing up at some point.

So, my job started out sounding pretty simple, but the more we talked it through in the pre-production meeting we realized that the big issue is going to be time. Time to get the cards, time to download and wipe them, time to edit, and especially, time to compress the final video to flash so it can be uploaded. While this can easily all be done on a single machine, it didn’t seem like the best idea. So what we ended up with was a multiple station setup, all being run by a single operator (me).

So from left to right, here’s what I have setup.

P2 Ingest Station

This machine is a MacBookPro laptop with Final Cut Pro doing nothing other then logging and importing p2 footage. The client provided the p2 reader, which is way overkill for what we’re doing. But it does hold multiple cards and connects via USB. It’s really designed to do a lot more then just read cards, but hey… it looks pretty awesome as part of my setup.

The footage is all ingested over the network to the edit station, where I continue editing as the footage comes in (everything is networked via Gigabit Ethernet and a small 5 port switch. This also keeps me from having to copy footage from one machine to the other. All of the machines are using the same drive. It’s local to one machine, and remote to the other 2.

Edit Station

The edit station is another MacBookPro running FCP. On this machine I have a small Raid 0 strip of 2 G-Raid drives, giving me 1 TB of raided space and connected via FW800. I also have a 2TB Western Digital “My Book” drive that I’m using to mirror all of my work and captured footage on-site. I’m a big believer of having a duplicate or triplicate of everything when editing on the road.

As I bring in the footage I’m first sorting it into different sequences (as opposed to bins), one for each of the companies. At some point the producer will come in and quickly tell me what footage goes up and what does not.  I will then edit down the clips with clean ins and outs, add the company logo bumper on the in and out and export it into a compression watch folder.

Compression Station

The final stage is a MacPro Tower running Episode Pro. I customized it just for this job, and it is also using the same raid drive that both the P2 ingest machine and edit machine are using. So as soon as a file shows up in the watch folder, it starts compressing it using the preset that was already created and tested with the client. The output folder is a shared folder that the web crew has access to on their end of the network (upstream of my 5-port switch).

Pulling It All Together

While it would not be too difficult to slide my chair from machine to machine, I had an idea as I was testing the system. Why not use Apple Remote Desktop to control all 3 machines from the one 23″ monitor!

So, that’s what I’m doing. From the edit station, which has a large LCD hooked up, I have access to both of the other stations, and switching is very fast and easy since it’s all the same mouse and keyboard. What an awesome way to work!

Ready to Rock n’ Roll

So at this point, I’m pretty much playing the waiting game. I’m set up, I’ve tested, retested and tested again and everything is working as expected. It all gets put to the test tomorrow.

Video compression has come a long way from the days of using Cinepak on a Quadra 950 tower and the old NuBus slots. For the most part, the wars between online formats has been settled with Flash leading the way. But behind that Flash Player is often H.264 encoded video, ever since it was introduced with Flash 9 in December of 2007. Even video powerhouse YouTube is pushing out H.264 video wrapped in a flash player. If that’s not enough, one of the officially supported video formats for Blu-ray is H.264.

So from on-line video (SD or HD) to high end Blu-ray DVD’s, h.264 is a huge player. It’s all good, right? Well, mostly. Have you ever compressed an h.264 video file? It can be unbearably long. We first started running into this bottleneck when we switched from doing mpeg-1 client web approvals (something that was very fast to compress and widely compatible) to h.264. We switched mainly because we wanted to post high resolution web approvals for our clients at higher quality, and MPEG-1 just wasn’t cutting it. H.264 really filled that need. But even a shorter video, say 10-15 minutes could take 60-90 minutes to compress on a Quad Intel MacPro, and some of our videos are more in the 30 minute range. If you have the time, leaving it running overnight is no big deal, but most of the time we’re doing these web approvals close to 5 or 6pm and they needed to be posted and sent to the client that same day. Waiting around just to finish a web post feels like a waste of time (although we did minimize this to some degree using LogMeIn as covered in my previous post).

After hearing others brag about how great it was, we finally decided to try the “to good to be true” Turbo.264 USB key from Elgato (the non-HD version). I really fought it because I had a hard time believing that a little USB key could do what my huge expensive multi-processor MacPro could not. But also because it did not integrate with Compressor, which is part of our workflow. For the price though, we decided to give it a try.

For what you end up paying, the Turbo.264 does a pretty good job. It is FAST for sure, and the output is not too bad, but it’s not perfect either. It gave us the speed that we wanted, but not the quality. One of the main reasons it’s able to do what it does so fast is that the very first thing that’s done is resize the video frame, and then pass it off to the USB key for processing. This is key, because the rest of the processing is done on a lower resolution frame instead of working with the original uncompressed frame. Great for speed, but not optimal for quality. But for many people, this might just do the trick depending on your needs and budget. You end up seeing compression artifacts in places that you wouldn’t when using compressor with similar settings, typically areas of fast movement, effects or dissolves. But it did take care of the time bottleneck that we were having. So we decided to sacrifice some quality for the sake of actually getting home on time but continued to look for other options.

Then I read a press release about a new product from Matrox called CompressHD, and I had a warm and fuzzy feeling all over. I contacted Matrox and asked them if it was possible to get a review unit and they were nice enough to send it out a week later. While it’s 4-5x the cost of the Turbo.264 USB key, (depending on which one you compare it to, the first SD key or the more recent HD version) it has some great benefits that make the cost worthwhile.  I’ve been using it for nearly 2 months now and it has taken the pain out of h.264 encoding.

Installation

Installation is easy, but for most editors the biggest problem may be finding an open card slot on your MacPro. We decided to sacrifice a SATA card to make way for the CompressHD card. All it needs is a PCIe slot. Once installed I started the computer and installed the software, and after a quick reboot it was good to go.

Integration with Compressor

The biggest selling point (aside from the speed)  is the seamless integration with compressor. Inside of compressor there is a new preset folder called “Matrox MAX H.264 Settings”. If you take a look at what’s inside, you’ll find that the presets are very similar to what you’re used to seeing in the Apple Settings.

If you’re used to using compressor, not much changes in your workflow for creating h.264 files. You pick one of the Matrox presets that fits your needs, apply it and submit just as you did in the past. However, much of the processing is now handed off to the CompressHD card. The only thing handled by compressor now is the decoding of the video frame, everything else is handled by the CompressHD card. The card has 2 processors that are optimized for different functions. One chip handles resizing/scaling, and the other handles the color space, compression and output. So what you end up with is this nice little video assembly line and each frame is passed from chip to chip to perform it’s designated function.

But what if you don’t want to use one of the presets included? What if you have specific needs of your own? No problem! You can create your own settings and still take advantage of that nice processing power. As an example, here is a setting that we created to use for web approvals.

What is the difference between the Apple h.264 presets and the Matrox ones? Nothing really. The Matrox folder was created for convenience and to streamline your experience. You can choose any of the Apple h.264 presets and they too will access the card.

If you want to compare performance with and without the card, there’s no need to pull the card out and then put it back in. Open up the control panel and you can turn the card on and off. This is what we did for the comparison tests. We’ve been running version 1.6 of the software, but the current version is 1.8 and is now Snow Leopard compatible. However, we’re still using Leopard and do not plan to upgrade until sometime late next summer.

Performance

Once we got this card in the machine, we just couldn’t wait to start compressing something… ANYTHING, just to try it out. It’s not that compression is all that interesting, but I really wanted to see how this baby performed. It was like dropping a new engine into a used car, we just wanted to hear the engine fire up. Here are the details on how we tested the card.

All tests were performed on a 3.o ghz Quad Core Intel MacPro with 12 gigs of RAM. We ran each compression twice. Once with the CompressHD card enabled, and once without. During these tests there were no other operations being performed on the machine, but only for the sake of making sure we were comparing apples to apples when we got the final numbers. One of the main reasons to use this card is that it handles so much of the work load, you can continue to work and even do processor intensive functions on the computer while having little or no effect on the compression times that the card puts out.

We used version 3.05 of compressor, that is part of Final Cut Studio 2. If you’re running the latest version of Final Cut Studio (we call it 3 because Apple forgot to give it a number) you will already have the ability to create Blu-ray movies within compressor. In our case, the card actually adds that ability to compressor, since this version of compressor does not directly support Blu-ray (only the now dead HD-DVD standard).

Our test video is 14:12 long and in 720p format using the ProRes 422 codec. The original file is 7.85 gigs in size, and we compressed it to 6 different formats as part of a single batch for each of the tests. We chose some of the most common presets that we might use, as well as one custom one that we use in house.

Here are the results.

As you can see, there is a significant difference with the card enabled.  There’s something very satisfying about watching it crank through the data so fast. It does however cut down on the coffee breaks and long walks on the beach.

One thing that I noticed is that the biggest benefit comes when you are changing resolution. This is where having the dedicated hardware really pays off. When you’re simply just converting from one format to another (say ProRes to h.264 with no other changes) the speed bump is less noticeable, but still there.

As an example, look at the Apple TV bar compared to the iPhone bar. Because the frame size for Apple TV does not need to be changed, the card just passes the frames through at the same resolution. But for the iPhone version it has to be scaled down a lot, something that the card does much faster and with better results then just using compressor.

*NOTE:  You might have noticed that the Blu-ray bar is the same on both passes. Because I was running Compressor 3 instead of the newer 3.5, Blu-ray is not supported natively. So on both passes, the CompressHD card was used. So kind of pointless for our purposes, but I left it in anyway.

Image Quality

The image quality is as good as anything coming out of compressor natively, but at a fraction of the time. In all of the tests that we did I couldn’t see a quality difference between using the card or not. Compared to video run through the Turbo.264 key, there was a noticeable difference. Again, I’m not totally knocking the Turbo.264 product, it does have its place. I use it all the time to convert movies/tv shows from the TiVo format to iPhone so that I can watch them while at the gym. But for trying to exceed the expectations of my clients the Turbo.264 key falls short. We’ve also had problems with it dealing with anamorphic footage properly without having weird scaling and cropping issues.

One thing to be aware of is that the CompressHD card will only do CBR compression, not VBR. Not a huge deal, but something to be aware of. This is also a limitation of the Turbo.264 usb key. VBR adds a much better quality to file size ratio then CBR, but in my experience this is not much of an issue. Disk space is abundant, the internet is fast and both SD DVD and Blu-ray can hold plenty of data. Not a huge deal.

Just to give you an idea, here are some file size differences based on the same source video.

Compatibility

One of my original concerns was that the card might interfere or conflict with other capture cards from AJA or BlackMagic, but it plays nicely. The codec’s that Matrox wrote are based on the Quicktime Component architecture built into QT, so any hardware or software that supports the implementation of QuickTime Component will work just fine.

Matrox Product Integration

It’s worth noting that you can get the CompressHD hardware (called the “MAX“) as part of some of the other Matrox products. For example, you can purchase a MXO2 and get it outfitted with the MAX card for just $400 more, saving you a $100 over buying the card separately. One of the great benefits of this is the ability to run this type of hardware on a laptop that has a Express34 slot, instead of just a tower. One of the down sides is that you can’t use both the MXO2 Max for editing/monitoring while the hardware is compressing. It’s an either/or situation. But for many that will be a small trade off for the ability to take this mobile.

The SuiteTake

At a street price of $499 the CompressHD is not exactly cheap, especially if you only occasionally need to compress to h.264, and time is not an issue for you. But if you encode as much as we do and don’t’ want to spend your whole week watching a progress bar, I would whole heartedly recommend getting the Matrox CompressHD. It’s a solid piece of hardware that integrates nicely with the FCP workflow so seamlessly you will forget it’s even there. That is, unless somebody takes it away from you.

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the A-Series LTO drives started by Quantum, and now licensed and sold by Cache-A. This review covers the newly released Prime-Cache from Cache-A. There are two other higher end models that offer more internal hard drive space and the option of multiple LTO drives, but for most small to medium size post houses the Prime-Cache model will do just fine, and it’s the least expensive.

This review is more of an overview of some of the functions, and does not cover every feature, option or workflow, and only gives a general overview on setup. My goal is to give you a good taste of what it can do for you and your post house and leave you with an idea of the kind of value it can offer your company, both in security as well as a new revenue stream.

If you have not already done so, you may want to give my last post a quick review, as it gives a history of how we ended up here after having lots of issues with our shelved HD backup system. I know that many people use hard drives for long term archival, and it’s understandable why. It’s cheap and space is plentiful. However, learn from our mistakes and be aware of the pitfalls of going that route.

There’s also a post by Scott Roberts that covers the workflow of the A-Series drives in his own special style.

Location of Device and Setup

When picking a location for the drive, you might be tempted to place it inside your edit bay. It’s a good looking box, small and sits on the desktop nicely. For testing purposes this is what I did, just because I knew I would want more interactivity with the device while reviewing it. But while the device is virtually silent when powered on, once the tape in the drive starts to shuttle during operation it makes more noise then you, or more likely your clients, will want while editing. It’s not terrible, but considering this device is controlled over the network from anywhere in your office, it makes sense to put it somewhere else. For us that was the machine room where we keep the multiple raid drives that sound like an airplane taking off.

Setup could not be easier. It’s pretty close to a zero configuration unit. You plug the unit into a power source, add a Gigabit Ethernet connection and power it on.

By default the unit will start up in DHCP mode which should work with most networks. If you want to assign a static IP (like we eventually did) you can easily do so through the web interface to the device.

At this point a quick check of the manual will tell you how to log in using the default user name and password and a web browser. Safari and Firefox are supported, but Windows Internet Explore is not due to some incompatibilities. This is what the default screen looks like.

While the Quantum drive relied on the web interface for almost everything, that’s no longer the case. You can actually perform your archive duties without having to visit here at all. I will cover this later when I discuss workflow.

One of the great things about this device is that through the web interface, Cache-A can send your unit software updates as they’re released. This makes upgrades pretty painless. While this is pretty much expected for Macs and PC’s these days, dedicated appliances like this don’t usually make upgrades so painless. We went through several small upgrades during beta testing and it was seamless. They would tell us a new version was out, and we would use the web interface to initiate the download. It would automatically download the software, install it and then reboot the computer.

The Hardware
The hardware is a combination of LTO-4 tape drive, internal hard drive, FTP server and computer all wrapped in one. It’s basically a archive appliance built around a PC running Linux. If you’re a linux nerd it’s Fedora Core10, specifically 2.6.27.5-117.fc10. While it is possible to hook up a monitor and keyboard and use the device directly, as you would any other PC, the real strength in this device is that it’s designed to be used over a network with multiple clients at the same time. You don’t need to be anywhere near the box (Except for tape exchanges obviously. I’m told they’re working on a way to change tapes via mind control but that’s probably a 2.0 software feature).

The case itself is relatively small, measuring just 11″H x 10.25″D x 4.5″W,  and it’s designed to sit on a tabletop. It’s all in black except for the Cache-A logo and power button on the front. While it’s designed to run upright to save on desk space, you can also use it horizontally, as long as the drive is right side up (the door will flip up if it is). This works well if you would prefer a rack or shelf for the unit.

On the front is access to the LTO-4 drive, a dual USB port for connecting a memory stick or external storage device and a big power button that glows blue when the unit is on. There are also a few activity lights that monitor the tape drive and hard drive usage. The LTO-4 drive will only write to LTO-4 tapes, but it is backward compatible and will read LTO-3 tapes from the Quantum A-Series drives.

TECH NOTE: This backwards compatibility is not part of the current software release but it expected in a future release. Hopefully a near future release. So if you have one of the Quantum A-Series drives, don’t let go of it just yet or you will not be able to read any of your old tapes.

The back is where you really get the idea that this is a PC. You’ll find all of the standard inputs and outputs, and a network status light that verifies it’s connected.

The appliance is designed to run over Gigabit Ethernet (1000 Bt), and at least in my tests I couldn’t get it to show up on the network even at 100BT. This shouldn’t be an issue for most post houses since you probably already have a fast network. And truthfully, if you’re going to use this device you really need a Gigabit connection.

The Workflow
In the previous version of the A-Series drives that Quantum came out with, the web interface to the unit was where you did nearly everything. Cache-A has taken a different approach. The Prime Cache creates a volume (they call this the vtape) that can be mounted directly on the desktop of the Mac, Windows or Linux. In fact on the Mac desktop you can see both the Mac share as well as the Windows Share.

So here is a simple example of how you might archive your projects.

Organize your projects/files that you want to archive on your hard drive. In our case, we have a “Projects to Archive” folder that each editor uses once he/she determines that a project is ready to be taken off line. Each project is prepped for archival by making sure there is not only a master export of the final video, but we also media manage the final sequence into a folder called “media”. This way when we come back for revisions we at least have an editable sequence that’s easy to modify.

We then create a dated folder in the form of YEAR-MONTHDAY. For example, September 21st 2009 would be represented as 2009-0921. If there is more then one folder for that same day, we just append a letter at the end – 2009-0921a.

We then organize the jobs into the folder in a way that gets each folder as close to 800 gigs without going over (yes, just like the price is right).

With each folder at around 800 gigs or less, it’s time to move some bits. There are two options here. Before we move on let me explain more about the vtape that i mentioned earlier.

The main purpose of the vtape is to be an intermediate between you and the tape drive. As the name implies (Linear Tape Open) the tape records in a linear manner. That means that unlike using a hard drive that reads and writes randomly as needed, a LTO tape is recorded from the start to the end. You can’t go back and remove a file or folder and then reclaim that space.

So help comes via the vtape.

The vtape is the name of the internal drive on the Prime Cache. It allows you to copy files from your computer to the Prime Cache and organize them however you like, and then copy them to the tape in one shot. You can even have the vtape mounted on multiple computers and have them all copying files to the vtape at the same time. This is how the device allows for multiple users simultaneously.

In our example we have chosen to do this organization locally prior to copying the files over, just because we prefer doing it that way and that’s been our work flow since getting the first A-Series drive (which had no vtape).

So back to our example…

Over your local network, mount the shared drive. If you’re on a Mac it’s under your network browser, and on Windows it’s under your Network Neighborhood. (Forgive me for not having tested this with a Windows machine, but I would have had to buy a PC to do that. I wasn’t willing to go that far for the review.)

The device shows up with the name “Archive” followed by a number. The number is the last 2 digits of your serial number. So in my case, the drive comes up as “Archive04″. You will need to type in the default user name and password as outlined in the manual (you can change this) and then you will see the volume called “vtape”. Double click to mount this to mount the hard drive on your desktop.

Here you will see two things. A file called “Eject” and a folder that represents the tape you inserted. By default, it’s a serial number that matches the tape itself. But this is easily changed to something more useful. (The serial number as a default is actually VERY useful if you have a high end system with a automatic barcode reader. It allows the drive to find tapes for you based on the barcode/tape name).

In the finder, just click on the name of the tape (the folder) and name it to whatever you like, keeping in mind good naming conventions. You wouldn’t want to call it…

“My-Really_AwesomeProject!!!!&Other%stuff***that’sImPOR$$tant”.

If you keep your names to alpha/numeric you’ll be fine.

Changing this to a more intuitive name now will help later when we get to catalog it. Once you change the name, you will hear the tape drive shuttle the tape as it changes the name on the tape itself.

As a side note, the Eject file will allow you to eject the tape  but in a somewhat confusing way. What you do is drag the file (named Eject) to the trash (you do not need to empty the trash) and the following dialog appears.

As you scan see, the dialog is a bit confusing. But if you do hit the “Delete” button, it does not erase the tape or delete anything, but in fact just ejects the tape. If this freaks you out and threatens to raise your blood pressure, just use the manual eject button on the face of the device itself. I would imagine this is a fix at some point.

With the tape inserted and renamed (you could have also renamed it after you copied files to it) you are ready to copy files over. You can copy files to the vtape itself for further organization, or to combine them with files from another machine.  Or, you can drag them directly to the tape.

If you drag them to the vtape, they are copied to the internal drive of the Prime-Cache, but not to the tape. This becomes a staging area as I mentioned. When you’re ready you can drag your vtape files directly onto the tape icon and the files will transfer. Another benefit to using this method is that you can make multiple copies of the same tape. Once one tape is done, you put a new one in and drag the files over again. In doing this you can have one on-site and one off-site copy of your data.

In our example I decided to just drag my flies directly to the tape icon, thus I went directly to the tape and bypassed the vtape drive. Well, that’s not totally true. The device still uses the drive to cache files and make sure there is always a steady stream of data for the LTO as it’s recording. But this is more of a rotating cache that once it’s done will not occupy any space on the vtape.

In our example I copied 5 gigs of files directly to the tape, in about 5 minutes. Not too shabby for coping files over a network. And remember, this tape holds 160x more data!

Remember those old Avid drives that were about 50lbs a piece and held only 9 gigs of data and cost $5,000 each!? Now you can fit 800 gigs on a tape that’s roughly the size of a wallet (albeit a fat wallet).

On the vtape you will now see a text file called TransferLog. This file has a list of every file transferred as well as a final status. This is the most important part of the log, found at the end. It confirms that your transfer was successful. If it was not, it will give you details as to what files were the problem and in most cases what the problem seemed to be.

Your file transfer can be monitored more actively through the web interface to the Prime-Cache drive. The list at the bottom will scroll as files are copied.

Now that the tape is completed, the next step is to create a catalog of what’s on it. By doing so you will have the option of later searching for files that you may want to retrieve without having the tape loaded. Once you find what you want, you just insert the proper tape and copy it back to your computer. While the Prime Cache does keep a catalog file of it’s own so that you can do this same function internally, I prefer to keep that information under my own control and accessible even if the drive is off-line. There’s also the added benefit of getting a lot more then a file list in your catalog, as you’ll see next. Other metadata is key.

For this part we use a program called CDFinder. Don’t let the name throw you, it’s not for just CD’s, it’s for any mountable disk, volume or folder – attached locally or over the network. We started using this when we backed everything up to hard drives and it has always served us well. We keep the CDFinder catalog file network accessible, so no matter where the program is launched it’s reading and writing to the same file.

This is the easy part. With your vtape mounted and the tape that you just copied to visible, you can either drag and drop the tape to the CDFinder icon, or from within the program select the tape directly.

During the catalog process, you have options as to how deep to catalog, what file types to skip, the ability to create thumbnail previews of images and so on. By default we scan everything and create thumbnails of images.

This 5 gig backup only took 2-3 minutes to catalog, and that includes making all of the thumbnail images. If you turn off some of those options it goes even faster.

Here is what you end up with when you’re done.

The new catalog, by default, will assume the name of the tape. This is where having your own naming convention is important. You are able to change the name though if needed.

Here you can see some of the icons that were created. These are actually part of the catalog file, and not being read form the tape itself. In fact, when this screen shot was taken the tape was no longer in the drive. It’s one of the advantages of using CDFinder over the Prime Cache internal Catalog.

You also have the ability to sort your catalogs into different folders. As shown here we have a few different client folders, as well as folders for our current tape library and our older hard drive library.

Now with the catalog complete, you can put your tape on the shelf and start your own archive library. Make sure to properly name the tape to reflect the same name that it had in the finder.

Performance

So for me there are two big questions in regards to performance. By far the first one is can I rely on The Prime-Cache to safely protect my data. The second question is, how long does it take to fill an 800 gig tape.

For the first question I can tell you based on my own experience that it’s virtually fail-safe. Not only is the LTO standard very robust with a 30 year shelf life, but it has a great track record and really strong road-map for the future. I also appreciate the fact that the standard is “open”, and not owned by any single company.

As to the second question, in our experience it takes roughly a minute per gig during backup. The number of files and sizes do make a difference. A single file that’s 1 gig in size will transfer a lot faster then 100 smaller files that total 1 gig in size. To fill a tape it usually takes anywhere from 6-9 hours. Obviously the speed of your machine, hard drive system and network will also play into this. We’re pretty fast on all 3 of those so I’m guessing we’re close to best case scenario.

The Prime Cache hardware/software is very solid as well. Even going back to when Quantum was making the device, the engineering team has always been very open to feedback and have worked hard to make changes that users have requested. This really shows in the maturity of this product. While it is a first release from Cache-A, they learned a lot from the early problems that Quantum had and avoided the same pitfalls. The code for the Cache-A device is rewritten from the ground up and only uses the Quantum code necessary to read the LTO-3 tapes. Cache-A has really taken this product from being some weekend hobby at Quantum to making it their flagship product, front and center.

Cost of Ownership
This is not a cheap device, but it’s also not a “dumb” LTO drive. With a standard LTO you have to not only buy the drive but also have a compute host and software to manage your backups. With the Cache-A line of archive appliances, you get all of this in a single box and more. There’s also something very nice about not having to call different companies if you have a problem, and then have them each point to the other. Cache-A makes the hardware and software, and supports it well.

One of the best reasons to choose this device is that it’s available to every computer on your network. With just a LTO drive, you may find yourself moving it from machine to machine as you need to do backups, and it because it’s such a pain you’re less likely to stay current maintaining your archive library.

So all things considered, the $7,999 price tag is not so bad for what you get. Especially if you factor in piece of mind.

Tape prices are really cheap. A 800 gig tape is going for $49.29 at Amazon.com. While that’s only slightly cheaper then a 1TB hard drive, what you’re really paying for is long-term peace of mind. You won’t get that from your dusty hard drives much past 5 years.

But even with the cost involved, the drive could be a money maker for you. How?

We have managed to turn this into a new stream of revenue. Since purchasing the drive nearly 2 years ago we’ve been charging for every project backed up. The result is over time the drive is slowly being paid for, and in about 6-12 more months it will be making us a profit. So it’s safe to say that buying this device has tuned out to be a good investment, that’s about to start paying dividends.

But it’s no longer just editing projects that need to get backed up. Now it’s P2 media, XDCam and RED footage as well. Once the project is over we also offer to create a library tape of all of the original footage. In some cases we will make more then one copy so that not only will our client have the footage, but their client as well.

Before buying any piece of gear for my business I always ask myself if it will be considered overhead, or money generating. The Cache-A Archive Appliance can definitely make you money. If it’s not, you might be leaving money on the table.

The Manual
The 75 page PDF manual is very detailed and easy to read. It does a good job of explaining how the device works, what a typical work flow might be, explaining what the vtape is in detail, use of the web interface and so on. I found that while it wasn’t exactly a page turner, I did enjoy reading it. But then again, I’m a bit of a manual geek. There’s just something about a new manual that makes me excited. I know, very sad. So I’ve been told.

One of the interesting features that I did not cover is the ability to hook up external devices (think USB hard drives or memory sticks) and also backup those devices through the web interface. I played around with it a bit, but did not use it enough to include in this review.

Changes Still Needed
As much as I like this device, it’s not perfect. But the small issues I have with it can be fixed over time with software upgrades. I have to admit it took me pouring through my review notes to even come up with these.

In the web interface there is a button called “Item”. Intuitively it’s hard to know what it’s for exactly. It’s actually a contextual menu based on whatever is selected to the right of it (Current Tape, VTAPE, or Catalog). But it doesn’t make immediate sense and I’m sure there’s a better way to do this, or at least a better name for it.

In that contextual menu, two of the options are Eject and Erase. But does Eject need to be right next to Erase? This just seems like a bad idea.

Erasing the vtape can take an unusually long time. You can erase it in the finder or through the web interface, but in both cases it just takes a long time (in one case it was several hours for just under 800 gigs of files). If you choose to perform this function in the web browser, there’s no way to tell if/when it’s done since there is no status. You just assume that it’s running in the background.

To be fair, I have not tested this since the last software upgrade so it’s possible that it’s better now. I know they were aware of it and working on it.

By default the system ships with a DHCP network setup, meaning you should be able to just plug it in and let it find an open space on the network. They recommend that you leave it in this mode, but we found it was better to just give it a hard IP address. There were a few times that it picked a IP address that was already in use, thus causing a network conflict. I can not say for sure that it was the fault of the Prime-Cache, only that we’ve never had this issue before. Using the web interface we easily give it a static number and all was fine after that. Generally speaking, anything that can be thought of as a “server” is something I like to have on a locked down IP anyway.

My biggest complaint is that the backwards support for LTO-3 (reading previous archive tapes) is not yet implemented in the software (thus untested). For anybody that already has a history with the device this makes upgrading pointless until this is corrected. We have nearly 100 tapes that will not work with the new drive, which means we can’t let go of our current drive until this feature is implemented. They hope to get it out before the end of this year, but there’s no guarantee. If you’re totally new to this device, then you won’t really care about this feature.

And as I already mentioned, the eject dialog is a bit confusing. Having the word “Delete” appear does grab your attention, but since the dialog presents a conflicting message it’s a bit unnerving, even if it is harmless. But again, an easy fix that I would expect to see in a future release.

The SuiteTake
At the risk of repeating myself yet again, you can not underestimate the importance of a solid reliable archive. If it’s important enough to save, it’s important enough to do it right. Especially if you’re thinking about billing your clients for this service. For all the years that we did HD backups we never charged clients for one main reason. I didn’t want the responsibility of dealing with files that were lost due to a drive failure. So we did it as a courtesy and guaranteed nothing.

New features are due to be added in October with their 1.1 software release. Some of the major features include Tape Spanning, Automatic VTAPE file removal option, Pro-Cache RAID 0/1, and Pro-Cache ExpressCard Support.

With the Cache-A series of Archive Appliances based on the LTO standard, you can reliably backup all of your files and know that they’re safe. Period. And with the new devices from Cache-A your data can be read back from a Standard LTO-4 drive as well, so you’re not locked into the A-Series drives for retrieval.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This post was updated on Wednesday; November 4, 2009 with new information regarding resizing partitions on the Drobo using iPartition.

As brought to my attention by reader Bradley Davidson (thanks Bradley), iPartition does not actually support the method that I mentioned, and neither does drobo directly.

In my testing, I performed the resizing operation on a newly formatted drive that didn’t have any data (since I had just lost all of my data that was on the drobo). If you try to resize a partition as outlined in this post, you WILL LOSE YOUR DATA. So don’t try it. In theory it was a great idea, but apparently this too will cause problems.

You can find more information on the iPartition website, as well as from Drobo. Like we’ve pointed out many times, we’re also learning here at SuiteTake so thanks for the feedback.

Before I start, let me just say that I am a Drobo fan. I have 2 of them (an original USB and a newer FW version) and plan to purchase more Drobo’s in the not too distant future. Overall I’ve had a great experience with the units and when I needed assistance their tech support was very helpful.

All of that being said, there is a dirty little secret that they don’t warn you about and if you’re not careful you can have your Drobo crash beyond recovery, which is what happened to me this past week. I lost nearly 4 TB of files and there was nothing I could do to get them back. If you own a Drobo, this is a must read.

Here’s what the main issue boils down to. One of the ways that the Drobo is able to expand over time is by presenting the OS with a virtualized volume of its total achievable space. So if you format your drobo drive as a 16 TB drive, (the current maximum except for on the Drobo Pro which is 32 TB) the OS thinks that it has 16TB of storage available. Thus, every program you use also sees the drive as a 16TB volume. This is true even if you have a single 250 gig drive in the drobo.

When you’re manually adding files to the drobo, this is not too big of a deal. You’re interacting with the drive and if you start to get close to filling the Drobo it will start to warn you both through the lights on the drive as well as the Drobo Dashboard software. It’s kind of hard to miss, and can actually get kind of annoying if you just try to ignore the warnings.

However, in our case we don’t often interact with the Drobo directly. It’s used as a backup drive for one of our edit suites and sits in a back room attached to a server. Every 3 hours our Retrospect server runs a script to clone all active projects to the drobo. In doing this we’re protected against any failures and at most would only lose 3 hours of work (which could still be a lot, but better than 3 months of work).

We just finished a good long stretch of having projects back to back without time to offload the complete ones, so the “active projects” folder started to grow beyond the size of the Drobo’s capacity. Because Retrospect thought there was 16TB of space, it just kept trying to pile the files onto the drive until the drobo finally crashed. It unmounted itself from the computer and no amount of restarting of the server and/or Drobo would bring it back.

In this case the Drobo volume gets so overloaded with files that it has no “work space” left to do it’s own housekeeping to keep track of used and unused space, as well as file redundancy. It needs a small amount of it’s own space to do this..

You might think that since it’s a space issue you can just replace one of the drives with a larger one and let it rebuild. Nope, that doesn’t work either. I was on the phone with Tech Support for about 20 minutes as we walked through the situation and finally he informed me that if I was sure that the drive had been filled beyond its capacity than there was nothing to do other than to start over and reformat the drives.

Wow! The drive system that’s touted as the safe way to store all of your most important files has one major flaw, and most people are not even aware of it!

While on my tech support call I asked the engineer how frequently he received calls about this particular problem. After a big sigh he admitted that it was nearly every day.

For us, losing the drive was not a huge issue. It was only a clone of one of the edit rooms and could be rebuilt overnight by just re-running the backup (with fewer files selected this time). But what if this was your primary repository for something important? What if it’s the one place you keep all of your work files, photos, music or something else that’s of great importance to you? I have a Drobo at home that I use as my primary holding tank for all digital video that I shoot of my twin boys, which is all tapeless media. If it had been that drive that went down in this same way I’m pretty sure I would not have been so easy going on the phone.

When to be Scared
How do you know if this has happened to you? To be totally sure you should go through Drobo tech support, but I’ll explain what usually happens.

You’ll find that the drive is not mounted on the desktop and doesn’t show up in the drobo dashboard. Even after a restart of the computer and the drobo it will not show up.

To verify it’s not the Drobo hardware, power down the unit, take out all of the hard drives and then plug it back in (with it connected tot he computer). If with all of the drives out it is able to be seen by the Drobo Dashboard software, then you’ve verified that the Drobo itself is working fine.

Next, with the cover off the front of the drive, unplug the drive (reinstall the drives if you have pulled them out) and plug it back in while watching the lights on the front (the lights along the bottom of the Drobo). There are two sequences of lights as the Drobo first powers up. It starts by building lights from left to right, until the row of blue dots are all lit. This is the boot up sequence of the drobo (which is actually running a version of linix, so yes it really is a mini-computer).

Next, all of the blue lights along the bottom will go out and then start to build from right to left. During this process the Drobo is evaluating the drives and determining where the extra space is on each drive and reading other information that it needs. This process normally completes and the Drobo mounts. In my case, the lights never finished building and it would hang every time, 3 lights before completing. Even after leaving it on for a few days it didn’t make any more progress. This is almost surly a bad sign.

So, what to do?

If this has already happened to you, there’s not much you can do (again, make sure you go through Drobo tech support to be 100% sure). The usual procedure is to power up while holding in the reset button in the back with a paperclip. This will reset the Drobo back to it’s “out of the box” state and allow you to format the drives again.

The good thing is that since you’re now aware of this problem there are a few ways to avoid the problem in the first place.

The Easy Answer

When the drobo dashboard tells you to replace a drive, or you see a yellow or red light flashing next to one of the drives, REPLACE THE DRIVE! Don’t mess around! I know I’ll take this warning a lot more serious in the future.

The Easy Answer, But With A Trade Off
When you first start to build your drobo, format it through the drobo dashboard but instead of just going to 16TB, set the size to the size your drive will be after formatted with the you plan to use. To figure out the total formatted size, you can use the online Drobolator.

The down side? Remember how you loved just adding drives without formatting and just expanding your storage space? You can’t do that anymore. Every time that you install a new drive you will need to reformat the drive to realize the additional space.

The Pain In The Ass Answer.

Format the drive as you would normally do using the Drobo Dashboard software, and go to the maximum of 16TB.

Once this is done, you need to open the drive in Apple’s Disk Utility program and repartition the drive to create a volume that is just slightly LESS than the available space that you see in the drobo dashboard.

For example, in my case I have (2) 2 TB drives, and (2) 1 TB drives installed. Once formatted it gives me a total available space of 3.6 TB

But in the finder this drive is showing up as having almost 16TB of space. Remember, this is what causes the problem.

Inside of Disk Utility you need to change this drive from one partition to 2 as shown here.

Set the first partition to just smaller than the maximum amount of free space that you have. In my case it said I had 3.6 TB, so I have made this volume 3.5 TB. In doing so I’ve just prevented the drive from being able to be overloaded. The Finder/OS will now know what the proper amount of space available is.

On the extra partition, just set it as “Free Space”. This will allow you to still expand your drive later as you upgrade the drives on your Drobo.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This post was updated on Wednesday; November 4, 2009 with new information regarding resizing partitions on the Drobo using iPartition.

As brought to my attention by reader Bradley Davidson (thanks Bradley), iPartition does not actually support the method that I mentioned, and neither does drobo directly.

In my testing, I performed the resizing operation on a newly formatted drive that didn’t have any data (since I had just lost all of my data that was on the drobo). If you try to resize a partition as outlined in this post, you WILL LOSE YOUR DATA. So don’t try it. In theory it was a great idea, but apparently this too will cause problems.

You can find more information on the iPartition website, as well as from Drobo. Like we’ve pointed out many times, we’re also learning here at SuiteTake so thanks for the feedback.

Just for the record I have NOT used disk utility to do this step (I use iPartition) but it should work in theory. Test at your own risk!

SIDE NOTE
While the official word from Drobo is that pretty much any SATA drive will work, in my experience using Hitachi drives can cause heat issues once you get 4 drives in the case. My Drobo at home is a original USB version and I’m constantly having issues with it shutting down due to overheating, even though the ambient temperature is only upper 60’s to mid 70’s. I’ve been told by tech support that Hitachi drives are known to run a bit hotter. I guess I wouldn’t disagree with that.

The better choice would be the Western Digital Green drives. They’re a good balance of performance, energy usage and heat, and they’ve never given me a problem. The latest 2TB versions of these drives have really come down to a nice price and are well worth it.

The SuiteTake?
Even with the Drobo, it’s still a good idea to have more than one copy of your data. As a rule of thumb I try to always have 2 on-site copies and one off site “cloud” copy of anything that I can’t bear to lose. In this digital age it seems we have fewer and fewer tangible objects, and it doesn’t take much to lose a great deal.

The Drobo is a great technology and offers expandability and protection that other consumer drives just can’t match. But make sure you’re aware of the downside of not tending to the drives needs in a timely manner, or next thing you know you’ll be looking for a paperclip to push in that little reset button while holding back the tears.

While it’s not the most sexy topic, in my opinion it’s one of the most important if you want to be a true video professional. That topic is organization. From the moment you launch FCP to the time you output the final file or DVD, there are things you can do at every turn that will make you faster, more organized and keep you from being the enemy of any editor that has to pick up your project.

In a nutshell, the main focus of this post is to keep your project and media organized in a way that allows any editor to pickup your project and have a pretty good sense of what’s going on. By following these steps you’ll also be more efficient, save yourself time and be more likely to avoid costly mistakes

This is part 1 of 2 parts and I’ll focus on pre-editing organization and proper setup of your edit system and project. Part 2 will cover editing media management, proper use of timeline tracks and exporting/final output and long term archival.

Use of Project numbers
Everything we do at Edit Creations, from the very start of the project until the media is removed from the system, and even invoicing, is based on the project number. And every project has it’s own unique number. We use a simple FMP (FileMaker Pro) database to create and keep track of our jobs so that we know what numbers are used for what jobs. This same database is where we track the project name as well (more on that later). While we do this with a FMP database, you can do it with a spreadsheet, or even a “New Jobs” notebook. What’s important is that you do it and have a way to track what the next unused number is.

What we’ve chosen to do is use a format of ECJ-XX-XXXX, where ECJ = Edit Creations Job, XX = the current year, and XXXX is a sequential number that continues to increment by 1 every time a new job is created. For example, a current job number as of this writing is ECJ-09-0591. So at a glance we can tell that it’s a 2009 job, and that it’s more recent then say 09-0590. We can also tell that the job is for Edit Creations, our main company. We also have a sister company called Timeline Creative, and if it was a job for that company it would start with TLC to differentiate it.

You can append any amount of information that you like. For example if you had jobs for shooting vs editing, you could add a designation of “PROD” and POST” to your system. So a job number could be 2009-0591-PROD for the production, and 2009-0591-POST for the post production. In doing this you could keep track of different stages of the same job with ease.

If you were working on a broadcast series you might use the season and episode codes, instead of having a number that sequences like we do, you could have a number that was a date based code (for example 09-0342 would tell you that the job was created on the 342 day of 2009).

The point is, come up with a system that is helpful to YOU and YOUR workflow based on the information that is important to you. One size does not fit all here and there is no right or wrong.

Using a database gives us the option to do nifty things like create the project folder/FCP project file name from the information that is typed in when the job is created, and then format it properly so that it can be pasted into the finder where needed. New job information is transferred both to the project folder, and to the FCP project file for every job.

Project Names

Project names should have some consistency and formatting as well. It’s a balance between making the project name descriptive enough that there’s value in the name, but not making it a paragraph long.

For us that means starting with the END client (not our direct client), a short descriptive name that describes the project, and if it makes sense the year, episode number or some other time based info. This is important because we have some reoccurring jobs that have the same title every year, so the date is the only information that differentiates each project.

So for us, the format looks like this.

Job Number – End Client – Descriptive Title – Time Information.

Or more specifically,

ECJ-09-0420- Kmart, Making The Sale – Episode 007

or

EJC-09-0452 – Lions Quarterly – Fall 2009

This is about as long as we would make a project title. Again, think about what works for you and come up with your own system.

Proper setup of FCP scratch disk
Ask 10 different editors how to properly setup the scratch disk and you’ll get 10 different answers, possibly some very heated opinions. I will admit that based on your workflow one way may work better then another, but in my personal experience there is only one way that avoids all of the common headaches and pitfalls.

Set it and Forget it (yes, just like the informercial)

FCP does a pretty good job of keeping things organized if you just let it do its job, and if you are consistent with your use of project names and numbers, there’s no reason not to let FCP do this job for you.

Note – this screen shot includes jobs that were created before we added the “ECJ” prefix. Without it, on occasion we had problems with folders that were not part of a job being selected during the deleting process, because a dated folder may be the same number as a job number, yet have no association with that project.

When you create a new project, the name you choose for that project is what determines the name of your capture scratch folder, along with the associated render files and auto-save folders. If you always keep your capture scratch set to the same folder, FCP will keep everything organized by project. The files will be where FCP expects to find them and you’ll avoid the dreaded “Media Off Line” screen or having to re-link all of your media.

The biggest benefit (to me anyway) is how this streamlines the removal of projects from the system. Do a search for the job number or project name, and all files and folders associated with that job show up in a single window so that you can review and delete them. You can even do this over the network with multiple machines if more then one computer was working on a project. This will save you having to hunt down every file associated with a job across various drives or computers.

One special note about this way of searching for files. In the Tiger OS you could create a restrictive search right in the finder using “custom locations”. I would narrow the search to the Final Cut Pro Documents folder on each machine I wanted to search for and get a very narrowed down list of files that I knew were in locations that were safe to delete.

It appears that this feature was removed in Leopard (correct me if I’m wrong but I can’t find it to save my life). There is no way to add custom locations, so for this process I use a program called Path Finder. It gives me the option of doing what I used to do in Tiger and is a bit more elegant at it as well.

For me personally, I just can’t come up with a reason not to lock down the location of the capture scratch folder, but I can think of some problems you’ll have if you don’t.

The biggest issue is nesting. I’ve seen it time and time again when the capture scratch folder is moved around to different folders, different drives and so on. At some point, because the same folder is not always being chosen, you end up with a capture scratch folder, inside a capture scratch folder, inside a capture scratch folder and so on.

Another down side is changing the capture scratch to a location that is not a permanent location on the machine, like an external or removable drive. Maybe you’re running low on space and hook up an extra FW drive to capture to, but later somebody takes that drive to another location to do other work and it’s no longer available the next time you open your project. Then you’re stuck trying to track down that drive only to find out that the other editor or a producer took it home so that they could screen footage! Ahh!

The cost of a decent drive is very reasonable these days and the cost per gigabyte continues to drop year to year. So if you’re running low on space, add another drive! But make sure it’s a fixture on that system, just as if it were an internal drive. Throw a label on the drive if you have to warning others to not disconnect the drive.

Proper Setup For Your Project
It wasn’t all that long ago that everything was more or less edited in a single format. For me, everything came to me on Beta SP or DigiBeta, we digitized it to uncompressed SD, and edited it 4×3 uncompressed (usually 8-bit to save a little space). It was simple, 4×3, 720×486, 29.97 fps.

Now, you not only have many possible sources of footage with different resolutions, frame format and time base, but what you master/output to is a whole other decision.

As an example, I recently did a project that had all of the following.

• Beta SP, 4×3
• DigiBeta, 16×9 Anamorphic
• Panasonic DVCProHD 720p30 (and a few 1080i shots)
• Panasonic AVCHD 1080i
• DVCam 4×3
• DVD Footage imported form a PAL DVD

Based on the source footage, there is no obvious choice as to what your sequence settings should be. So after asking the producer questions about the final distribution, expected shelf life of the project and so on, I decided to edit 16×9 HD at 720, 29.97 fps, with ProRes as the codec.

One thing that’s overlooked by many editors is that you do not have to edit in the same format that your source footage is, and you don’t have to transcode everything to a common format. You can do these things, but you don’t have to. We’ve had really good results using FCP’s multi-format timeline and working in ProRes. Yes, you will be rendering more then if everything was native, but with a fast enough machine you can continue to work in real-time even with the footage unrendered.

The point I’m trying to make is, every time you start a new project it’s critical to know the answers to several questions.

• What formats do you anticipate using as source footage?
• Roughly, what percentages of each format?
• What is our final delivery (tape, on-line, DVD, portable devices)?
• Will the video have a life elsewhere other then it’s intended delivery?
• Do you have PAL footage (or other formats that you don’t usually work with)?
• Do you have any graphic elements that are already in one format or another?

One thing I want to stress is to not only ask about the intended use, but any other possible uses outside of that down the road.

For example, I had a client once that insisted that the video would only be used for the web, and thus they told us to use the full image raster for graphics and text. When I really pushed the question and asked “So you don’t think you’ll ever do any DVD’s of this?”, they answered “Well, yes we’ll probably do DVD’s down the road for distribution and for any press requests”. Well, that changes things – a lot.

If I had not asked that question, we would have had all sorts of title and video safe problems down the road when they sprung it on us to make the DVD version. As it turned out, we just kept everything broadcast safe and it was OK for both purposes. It’s because of this one experience that I push to never use full raster unless it’s for a specific event and has no life after that (for example, Watchout videos which are very targeted and have a short shelf life).

Once you have all of the information you need to make an informed decision, it’s time to setup your FCP project file with the proper settings. Using the Easy Setup feature of FCP, this is pretty simple.

The bulk of our work these days is done in 720p, 29.79, ProRes. Unless we have ALL 4×3 material, we’ve had great success pillar boxing 4×3 video, blowing it up or just coming up with a creative treatment to make it play nice inside the 16×9 frame. Once you get used to editing in 16×9 it’s really hard to go back. I can’t say the opposite is true.

Once the project is formatted, we make it a point to always note the master sequence settings as one of the first folders in the project (this is actually part of our template). This way as we switch from job to job, or if another editor has to continue with a job that he/she didn’t start it’s obvious how to properly setup the project.

Importing or digitizing media (camera originals)

DIGITIZING
Time spent organizing your footage on import/capture is time well spent. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen people digitize tapes with the clip name “untitled”. In one case, I had a freelance editor that captured 2 hours of footage broken into about 150 clips, and it was all named “untitled_01, untitled_02…”. His idea was to go back and name the clips inside of FCP later so that they made sense. But back then (using FCP 5) there was not a way to rename the files on the hard drive to match the clip names. So your clip names had no obvious or logical connection to the file names. What a pain! This is a sure sign of inexperience and lack of professionalism. Just do it right from the start!

I understand there are times that you may not log and capture with super detailed names, but there are better ways then just “untitled”. If you have to capture a whole tape, or multiple clips from a tape, at least use something that gives you even the slightest amount of info.

Here are some examples.

• WaterPark_shoot_01, 02, 03…
• CameraA_Day1_01, 02, 03…
• Camera_Dan_ConventionCenter_01,02,03…

When you use a title in this way FCP will automatically increment up the number while retaining the original name, thus giving you some information to go on with a very minimal amount of effort on your part.

IMPORTING
For importing tapeless camera originals the work flow is different for different producers. And they’re both on opposite extremes.

Some producers will take the time to log the shots they need and provide just those clips, carefully named and organized. Others will give me the 10 hours of footage that they shot and ask me to import everything. From there they just write the timecode notes into the script, more like the old days of working in a tape based on-line room. I always try to stay flexible and adapt to how the producer prefers to work, instead of asking them to adapt to my way of working.

OTHER MEDIA FILES
(non camera originals)

While FCP handles the organization of tapeless media and digitizing tapes, what about other elements? You might get photos off of a CD, download some music or VO files, create some PS files along the way or other motion graphic elements. They might come from various locations on your system, the network, removable drive, USB key or optical media. Where does all of this go?

Again, this is where having the template really helps (if you have not read my post about using a project folder, check it out). Our system is to have any media that did not automatically go to the Capture Scratch folder, located inside of the project folder. There are no exceptions. That means files from any source are first copied into the project folder, and then imported into FCP so that they are properly referenced under the umbrella of that job.

There is never cross pollination of elements between projects, because if something is used in a project is should be part of that job folder. Even if that means duplicating some assets so that they’re in two locations. It’s not uncommon for a client to want to steal a shot or two from one of their other projects that’s still on the system. That’s not a problem, but whatever is “stolen” must first be copied to the current project, and then imported.

Why so strict? Getting burned, that’s why.

In the past before we established this rule, shots from several projects would be shared. On multiple occasions we would clean off a few long finished projects only to find out the next day that the “media off line” screen plagued several other projects that were using some of the deleted media and not yet done. That’s no longer a problem.

What’s in Part 2?
In the next installment of this epic post I’ll cover proper use of timeline tracks, versioning, nesting and why I never use it, exporting and finally proper long term archival using the new LTO drive from Cache~A.

Check Out the Popular Shane Ross DVD.
For a more in-depth look at keeping your workflow organized, check out Shane Ross’s DVD. It covers everything here and more in great detail, and is a bit more visual then reading a blog post.

Order It Now

Hard drives the single most important piece of tech we use as digital media professionals. When you think about it, every bit of work you do is saved to these mechanical/magnetic devices spinning at thousands of RPMs. You may spend hours, days, weeks or even months on a project – and all the time you’re trusting that the drives do not fail you. If you really let your mind dwell on it you may actually start to lose sleep!

Having regular backups is important enough (that’s for another day, another post) but how about starting with a quality drive system? I’ve seen too many people buy drives for their edit systems based on price and price alone, only to be burned and burned bad. It’s like shopping around for a heart surgeon and going with the cheapest guy.

“Hi everybody!” “Hi Dr. Nick!”

I was told a story about an editor that was working on a big show for the Discovery channel for over 3 months, and 5 days before he was to master the show his drive system went down and all was lost. Every bit. There was no way to recover 3 months of work in time to make the broadcast date so they not only lost the job and all future work from Discovery, but 3 months of revenue that they had already worked for. Just pause and think about that. That’s the kind of thing that some companies can never recover from.

At Edit Creations we have a job that we do every year that lasts from January through the end of June (2 rooms, 5 days a week), creating multiple videos and various programs that all play at a show in July. Whenever we start to come down that home stretch I remember that story and start to get a bit nervous. I’m always making sure that our backups are in good shape.

This post is all about making sure the drives you buy are worthy of the work that you’re doing. Or more importanly, that you avoid the drives that are not.

Before I start, let me break it down a bit more. There are hard drive manufactures that create the raw hard drives (like Hatachi, Seagate and Maxtor to name a few) and then there are the companies that take those hard drives and create products that incorporate them. I will be discussing is the second group.

I have always been somebody that gravitates to people and companies that take pride in what they do. Having a passion for whatever you do means that you’ll turn out something better then the guy who looks at something as “just a job” or “just a way to make a buck”. There are companies like Apple and Jet Blue that provide quality products and service, because they take pride in what they do and what they put out there. They may not always be perfect or make the right decisions, but they do their best to right their wrongs. It’s evident from the moment you pick up a MBP and feel it in your hands. It’s a beautiful piece of hardware, and you can’t deny that, even if you are a lover of the PC. The same with Jet Blue. Take a flight with them and it’s very clear that they’re all about making your experience with them second to none.

The two companies I’m going to outline here do not fit this model in my opinion, and I have plenty of personal experience to back it up in both cases.

Offender #1 – Lacie
Products – Any of the “Quadra” drives

Back in 2003-2004 I invested in some of the then popular Lacie drives (they were just called Lacie drives, no quadra model name back then). The drives seemed nice on the surface. They came in multiple capacities, they were FW400, and later 800, the enclosures were a nice solid metal and if you were to hold one in your hand it felt nice and solid.

I started buying them when I noticed other editors were using them, and even started to see them during product demos and I figured if they were using them they must be good. I started to recommend them to my clients as well. I should have done my research though.

Over the next 2 years I purchased more and more drives, and eventually ended up with around 12 of them of varying sizes. Some with single drives, some with dual and one with 4 drives in a single case.

Over the next few years I started having a few issues. First, some of the dual drive systems would literally unmount themselves while editing. Our usual setup was to have one of them for the video drive and one for the project files (we were only doing DV25/DV50 at the time), and while you were editing one would just drop off from time to time. All of the media would suddenly go “off line” and we usually had to reboot to get it all working again.

The drives had their own dedicated FW800 card so they were not on the internal bus system, and thus there was no other overhead, just 2 drives hooked into a 3-port FW800 card.

Then we noticed that when doing long copies from one drive to the next (cloning a drive) we would be hard pressed to get it to finish. The drive would at some point stop copying the data, and the blue light on the front would just flash on and off while emitted a steady and slow tapping sound.

The final clincher was when the drives would just fail. The internal HD’s just started to crap out and we actually lost data (however we did have backups of everything). A quick search on google turned out tons of people having the same issue. The general consensus was that the drives were overheating. The drives are very tightly packed into an enclosure that has no fans and no air flow, thus no real way to drop the temperature aside from it transferring the heat through the metal case. Apparently, that wasn’t enough.

At the Chicago Final Cut Pro User Group I started talking to people and found out other editors had had the same problem. In one case a drive was only 6 weeks old when it died, and the editor lost all of the captured footage. I also had one client call me in a panic because I had previously recommended that he buy Lacie for his backup drive, but his drive was dead (in his case the power supply blew so we were able to save the data by taking the enclosure apart and putting the drive in a new case).

I happened to be going to NAB that year (2006) so I went right up to the Lacie booth and told them some of my stories, told them how it was all over the web and asked what they were doing to address it. Mind you, I did this in a very professional manner, since at that point I still assumed it was a problem they were working on. His reply was that “As far as we know there is no problem, so there are no plans to make any changes”. There was no interest in getting additional information from me or looking into the issue any further.

So there they were at NAB, selling drives to media professionals who make their living on keeping their data safe, pushing a product with a higher then normal failure rate.

At that point I made the decision to get all of our drives replaced regardless of cost. When I got back from NAB we listed all of our LaCie drives on eBay (the working ones anyway) and bought brand new G-Raid drives to replace them – but only after doing several weeks of research. That was probably one of the smartest business decisions I made that year. Suddenly we didn’t have any of the issues we had before, the drives generally ran faster and there were no more heat issues. Zero problems, even now. We have since moved up from the G-Raid drives to getting 2 G-SpeedXL Fibre Raids, and those too work flawlessly. The older G-Raid drives are used for travel jobs and a few are on our internal backup server running 24/7.

The difference in my opinion is that the people at G-Technology (now owned by Hatachi) only put out the best products they can. They test their drives rigorously and guarantee the number of streams you can get in real time while editing.

I remember before I decided to go with them I called their office and asked to speak to an engineer (not a sales guy). I explained my situation, told him the other vendors I was considering and asked him why I should choose their drives over the others. Their drives were more expensive then the other ones I was looking at.

He explained to me that they are constantly testing the different hard drives that they put into the units because not all drives are equal, and that from their testing the only drives that consistently lived up to their performance benchmarks were Hatachi drives (at that time there were not part of Hitachi so they could use any drives at all). He said that while they were more expensive drives, they wanted to be sure what they sent out reached the standards they had set, and that other vendors could just take whatever drives they could get the best deal on that month and toss them in.

He also mentioned how they were big on keeping the drives cool so that they would last. For me he pushed all of the right buttons, and I bought 2 drives right over the phone for testing, and later purchased several more.

One more note about Lacie. Not that long ago I ran into a past employee of Lacie. As soon as I realized he used to work there I asked him about the heat/drive failure issue. He admitted that they were aware of it, and that internally there were people who wanted to address the problem, but that it was ultimately ignored by the higher ups. He said that one of the reasons he ultimately left had to do with quality issues that he felt were not getting addressed.

To be fair, Lacie does make other drives and some are probably very good. I have one of their rugged mini drives and I do like it. It’s well made and is priced right. I don’t use the drive for mission critical tasks so I felt OK giving it a try. But in general, a company that does not respond to their customers complaints is not a company I want to do business with.

Offender #2 – Granite Digital
Products – Swappable Drive Bays

As I’ve mentioned in some previous posts about archiving, up until the last year or so we’ve used a system of hard drives as our long term archive. We used a removable drive system and trays that allowed us to buy off the shelf IDE (now SATA) drives and backup entire projects with ease. We would then keep a catalog of every drive (using a great program called CD Finder. Don’t let the name fool you it does a lot more then CD’s. We still use it to keep track of our LTO tapes.) so that pulling things up later would be quick and easy. It was cost effective, efficient, and at least for a time it worked out great. Until we started to pull things off the drives.

We had purchased 3 FireVue drives from a company called Granite Digital and the products were a bit disappointing right from the beginning. Again, I didn’t do the research that I should have.

To make a very long story short, what we realized as time went on was that the drives had some sort of error transferring data and would, on occasion, prevent files from properly backing up or in some cases they were backed up fine but would not restore. Files would be too corrupt to open at all, or in the case of QT files there would be both audio in video “digital hits” that made the movies useless. We started using ChrnoSync to try to retrieve files from the drives without any errors using the “verify” option, but what we ended up with was a list of errors, which confirmed the problem. If we repeatedly tried to get the files we could get some of them successfully, but there were some that just wouldn’t transfer and were lost.

Sample QT Movie

To their credit tech support was very helpful, at least to the point of telling us all of the things on our end it might be. From OS problems, cables, software and on and on. We have 3 different units on 3 different machines and they all had the same exact issue, but somehow they were able to say with absolute confidence, that the problem could not be their drives. This is a quote from one of my exchanges from tech support.

“I can appreciate your concerns but would have to totally disagree as to the reliability of our hardware. That’s not to say you don’t have a bad component that could create problems but rather to say our stuff works as good if not better than most.”

Well, I disagreed then and still do.

Companies that take a defensive attitude when confronted with potential problems are doomed to fail. Nobody is perfect and no company is perfect. Most people know and accept this, but then it all comes down to how the company responds to mistakes. In this case every solution offered had to do with my system being flawed, which in the end it was not.

Their tech support finally wore me down and I stopped asking for their help. I sometimes wonder if that’s part of the plan.

We are currently in the progress of migrating all of our drives to LTO tapes using the Series-A Backup Drive from Cache~A. The only way we can even get some of that data off the old hard drives is to remove the drives from the trays and create a direct connection with a IDE to USB adaptor. Then it all comes off smoothly.

On top of this issue, one of their rack mountable units was $600 and when I received it it was made of very cheap bendable metal (it felt like it was cut out of a single piece of tin and bent into a case using pliers), it didn’t fit right in the rack, no cables were included and on the back was a single FW port, meaning you couldn’t even loop anything else off of it. Except for the smallest portable devices where space is an issue this is unacceptable in my book.

I emailed the company and never received a reply, but instead received a package a few weeks later with a cable and a new back plate to replace the one built into the unit. OK, not bad – but why wasn’t it right in the first place?

The SuiteTake

I’ve singled out 2 companies that I’ve had bad experiences with. The good news is there are a lot more good then bad companies out there.

I would suggest you deal with companies that specialize in creating drives for media professionals, and have a good, accessible tech support staff. Don’t be afraid to call them on the phone and ask the hard questions before you buy. When you’re having trouble nothing beats being able to pick up the phone and get immediate help. This has been my experience with G-Technology and AJA specifically. Two companies with first rate tech support and really great people.

Remember, if you’re a media professional the hard drives you use are the fort knox of your data. Everything that you do comes down to those files be safe and accessible on your hard drive. This is no place to cheap out, and a little extra money spent here can go a long way towards avoiding much more costly disasters.

So while it’s true that I am in fact a Mac Addict, I also consider myself a well rounded computer nerd. So it shouldn’t be too surprising that I’ve been using the beta version of Windows 7 almost since it came out. While most of what I do is on the Mac, there’s no avoiding using the accounting computer when I do invoicing and receivables (yes I know there is QB for the Mac but there are many issues with it and that’s a whole different conversation). And I can tell you from personal experience that Visa has been pretty slow and buggy for me.

Another way we use Windows is to check WMV files. While you can check them using Flip4Mac, VLC Player and the really outdated Windows Media Player for Mac, there are technical issues with all of all of these when it comes to doing a 100% QC check. In recent weeks we’ve had to watch over 100 VMV files, start to finish, to check them before sending them out for a huge Wachout presentation. The only true method we found of checking them, with confidence, was installing Boot Camp onto one of our machines and booting into Windows natively. It’s amazing how much better the files looked, and how much more smoothly they would play in that environment.

So when the free beta version of Windows came out a few months ago and I started hearing good things about it, I decided to give it a try. I installed it as both a virtual machine on my MBP, as well as a Boot Camp volume natively. What really struck me was that running Windows 7 under virtualation inside the Mac OS was actually faster than running Vista natively on our accounting PC (a 2 year old laptop).

When running in under Boot Camp, it screams and feels very fast and fluid.

I wasn’t planning on sharing this on the blog but recently Microsoft did something they’ve never done before. They lowered the price for all pre-orders to $50 for a upgrade version of Windows Home Premium. That means if you have a copy of XP or Vista, you can upgrade for $50 for a limited time. Once the software is released on October, the price goes up to $119. Full versions are $199 and up.

So if you have a PC in your life, this is worth buying. If you’re not sure, download the Public Beta of it now and run it using Boot Camp or Sun VirtualBox. Both are free! If you like it, get on board and buy it before the price more then doubles. It’s what Vista always wanted to be. I purchased 2 copies, one to run on my laptop in virtual mode, and one for our QC Boot Camp machine.

And don’t hate me because I use a PC. I’m still a Mac at heart.

Click here to buy it on Amazon.com

While posts have been a bit hit or miss lately due to our heavy work load, that doesn’t mean that we’re not getting some work done under the hood! I wanted to do a quick post to let you know some of the not so obvious changes we’ve made.

Videos
Because of the increasing demand on our server, videos are now hosted by Blip.tv. One of the new advantages is that you can now more easily play the video within the post, or watch it full screen. All video is also available in multiple formats so you can also download clips to your computer.

iTunes
We now have a SuiteTake.com podcast on iTunes. For now the feed includes videos that we post in their original h.264 format, but in the not so distant future it will also include the new SuiteTake.com podcast. More on that later this summer.

iPhone
Most of our videos are now formatted to play on the iPhone as well. There are a few that still need to be updated, but most of the older ones have already been converted.

Speaking of the iPhone, we also have a new iPhone interface that makes viewing the site simple, clean and easy on your phone.

A Comment about Comments
As we say in most of the posts, we welcome comments. And we mean it, good and bad. We don’t claim to be the experts on everything, we do make mistakes and we too are learning new things all the time. We expect to learn from your experiences as well, not just share our own. I can’t tell you the number of times that I learn something by reading a post that one of the other contributers wrote – and I work with these people all the time.

Recommended reading for the less mature commenters.

However, one thing we will not tolerate is rudeness, the use of bad language and just flat out being mean spirited. While overall the responses we receive are very professional, there are a few people who are obviously deficient in the area of human interaction (they know who they are, and we know who they are).

One requirement that we have for all posts is that they come from a valid email address. Using a phony address is akin to screaming an insult at somebody and then running away like a child. If you have something to say, own your words or keep them to yourself.

More to Come
We have some great things planned for the upcoming weeks, so stay tuned! Thanks for your continued support.

For several years now I’ve made it a habit to read business periodicals as well as business books. As a business owner I feel it’s imperative to learn from those with more experience than myself, and I have to say I enjoy it more then I would have ever imagined. I keep up to date with Inc. Magazine and read between 4 and 10 business books a year. Some are good, some not so good, but I always seem to walk away with something of value.

It’s been quite some time since I was really excited about a business book, but I just finished reading one that I thought I would share. The book is called “The Knack:How Street-Smart Entrepreneurs Learn to Handle Whatever Comes Up“, and is written by Norm Brodsky, Bo Burlingham, both writers at Inc. Magazine.

The book is written in an interesting way. Throughout the book, between different topics/chapters, questions from business owners are read and answered by Norm. By writing the book in this way a diverse number of topics and questions are covered that are not necessarily covered in the book otherwise.

Topics covered include how to decide if a new business is worth pursuing, how to raise capital to start a business, non-traditional ways to compensate your sales people, ways to detect unhappy customers and make sure you don’t lose them, the decision to grow or not to grow your business and when to ask for help from other business professionals.

One of my favorite parts of the book is when Norm discusses business plans, and says that before you put any effort into a business plan you need to first come up with a life plan. Ask yourself what you want out of your life in the next 5 or 10 years, and be very detailed. Maybe it’s more money, more time for vacation, the ability to travel with your family, or maybe it’s to reach a certain milestone in your company. The point is, you can’t decide what you want out of your business until you know what you want out of life. By planning one without looking at the other you run the risk of moving further and further away from the things that actually make you happy in life. I found this especially powerful and I reflected on it for several days.

While nothing in this book is specific to the media industry, like many business books the lessons learned can easily be applied to any business. And even if you’re not a typical “business owner”, you are still in business for yourself in one way or another. Even if you have a staff position, you are still the President of your own personal company. You still need to market yourself, continue to grow and improve yourself, and at some point move onto another staff position and sell yourself again.

If you are a freelance editor, this is even more true. You don’t need to have your own facility and staff to learn and apply valuable lessons from a book like this. As a freelancer you really are out there selling yourself and your skill set everyday. Books like this one can give you an edge over your competitors.

If you’re like me and have a hard time keeping up with reading, this book is also available as an audio download from Audible.com. If it wasn’t for my iPod and Audible, I would not be able to consume as many books as I do now.

I hope you enjoy this book as much as I did, and look forward to your comments and emails.

To those that know me it will come as no surprise that I’m a backup nerd. Since owning my first DAT drive in the mid 90’s that held a grand total of 2 gigs per tape (compressed) I’ve been interested in backup technology, redundancy and “playing it safe” when it comes to my data. That trend has been extended to my business for the benefit of my company as well as my clients.

This post will discuss a new backup appliance being introduced at NAB this year, and cover in general terms how we currently use its predecessor in our workflow. Even if you have your own method of archiving and don’t need anything at this time, you might want to read about our process toward the end of the post to see if you can benefit from it at all.

A Brief History – The Wrong Way
From 2002-2007 we used a hard drive backup system at our office that was working OK, but was starting to show signs of fatigue. With about 45 drives on the shelf (300-400 gigs each), some of the drives were 5 years old now and on occasion we would have problems retrieving files on some of the older drives.

There has been plenty written about the expected life of hard drives, the need to exercise them and the amount of time they will last on a shelf without regular use. No matter which side you’re on or what your personal belief is, I can tell you from first hand experience that we were losing data and I was getting very concerned. What use is a backup system that slowly loses its files over such a short period of time.

Back in April 2007 I went to NAB in part to find a new backup strategy (and in part to just relax in the hotel spa). After looking at plenty of solutions and talking to plenty of vendors, I came across the LTO A-Series drives from Quantum. It had some really great features that nobody else offered at the time, and was targeted to post production professionals. Some of the features include…

• Built on the LTO-3 standard, you could fit 400 gigs of storage per tape (tapes were about $50 each at the time, and even cheaper now).
• It was network accessible over Gigabit Ethernet. If you have multiple edit systems like we do, this is pretty big. You can park the machine anywhere on the network and access it from any local machine. With other solutions you have to move the drive from machine to machine as needed.
• No special software needed – using a standard FTP client or their built in web browser client you could backup and retrieve files with ease. It’s truly platform independent.
• The drive was based on the LTO open standard (there was also a SDLT version if you prefer). The two main benefits of this are that it’s an open standard that was created by Seagate, HP and IBM and the tapes have a 30 year shelf life.
• Each tape has it’s own built-in file system on the tape, so loading the tape directory and locating a file is fast and very responsive. No need to have a separate catalog file that you have to keep track of.

Implementing the A-Series Solution
The drive was not shipping at the time, but would be later that year. I patiently waited and in the fall of 2007 purchased the desktop version of the A-Series and a case of tapes.

This is where I’m supposed to tell you that everything went smoothly and rainbows were flowing out of the tape drive. Well, that was not the case. I’ll spare you the particulars and just say it took us almost 6 months, countless emails to tech support and a major software/firmware update to finally trust the drive with the long term safety of our projects. To their credit, the Quantum support staff and engineers were first rate in the way they responded to each and every problem we had. As annoying as I’m sure we were, they never made us feel we were any trouble even when we sometimes lost our patience.

In early 2008 they released a major software/firmware update that addressed 99.9% of our issues, and since then it has been smooth sailing. We have not had a single issue with archiving or retrieving elements and have found ways to turn the drive into a new revenue stream as well.

The Future is NOW (or at least very soon)
So here we are approaching another NAB, 2 years after my first introduction to the Quantum A-Series drive, and it just got better. I’m so excited and impressed with what’s coming out that I’m considering selling my current A-Series drive and buying the newer model. But, the new drives are not from Quantum. They’re from Cache-A.

Cache-A is a new startup company that has licensed the A-Series technology from Quantum so that they could build on the platform that Quantum created. They have some of the key players that helped create the original drive, and some seriously good people that have really thought through how to improve the new drive. Much of their feature list no doubt comes from feedback from the current customer base.

Here are the highlights of the new drives from Cache-A.

• The new drives are all based on the LTO-4 standard. This is huge, because now each tape can hold 800 gigs, double of the LTO-3 model from Quantum. That brings the price down to about 6¢ per gig. Wow!
• The drive is backwards compatible, and can read any LTO-3 tapes created with the Quantum A-Series drives. This is very smart, because it means upgrading from the previous model is very easy.
• The file system on each tape is now an open standard, which was not true before. This means that you can exchange a tape with anybody who has a standard LTO-4 drive. In the past, you both needed to have a A-Series drive to read the content. This was one of my biggest concerns with this solution originally, and it’s nice to see it has been fixed. No need to be that proprietary.
• The file system supports original metadata from source files, and they’ve made it clear they are adding to this support in the future.

I have requested an evaluation unit once they’re shipping, and if I get my hands on one I’ll do a follow up hands on review of the drive. For the previous review that Scott Roberts did on the Quantum A-Series drive we currently own, check out his post.

Looking a little further down the road, there are plans for the LTO format to progress with LTO-5 and LTO-6. LTO-5 will have a capacity of 1.6 TB per tape, and LTO-6 will hold 3.2 TB per tape. Time will tell if the technology continues down this path, but so far history has proven this format to be very robust and successful.

The Workflow
So how do we use the drive in our post production work flow? Here are the broad strokes.

Deciding What/When To Archive
All editing projects are archived to tape once the project has been complete and unchanged for 3 months or longer. It’s usually flagged for backup right around the 3 month mark by the primary editor on the project after conferring with the client. The backup will include all elements in the job (with the exception of digitized or imported original camera media) as well as a final master QT export of the project in it’s original format. If the client would like to include original camera media, we will do so for an extra charge based on the amount of space they need. This process is quick and easy since all projects use the project folder system I outlined in a previous post.

Once a project is marked for backup (by using colored labels in the Finder) it is moved into a folder called “Archive-Projects”. On the first of every month our assistant editor Scott goes to each edit system, verifies that each project has a master export, and creates backup folders that each contain roughly 400 gigs of files. We’ve found from experience that pre-organizing the folders/files in the finder prior to backup works much better then trying to do it all during the transfer process.

Performing The Backup
At this point it’s a matter of putting a blank tape in the drive and logging into the drive using your standard web browser. Using the client side software through the web browser you start the transfer by a simple drag and drop.

It takes roughly 3 to 3.5 hours to fill a 400 gig tape, but since this can run in the background it’s no problem to continue working on the computer. Once the transfer is complete, you get a confirmation message telling you that everything was successful, or a list of any problems that occurred during the backup process.

Once the projects are all successfully archived (as verified by Scott), he then turns the folders another color, indicating to me that the projects are safely archived and ready to be removed. Where removing projects is concerned, I’m a bit of a control freak and prefer that I’m the only one that deletes project folders and media. If a mistake is ever made and something is deleted by accident, I would rather be mad at myself.

Removing All Project Assets With A Simple Search
For the last part of this process I sit at the edit computer and load all of the media drives in the office (we have 2 raid systems totaling 20 TB of space, but a few years ago we had several G-Raid drives on each system). Using the job number from each job that has been archived, I do a file search for any and all files related to that job number across all drives. By doing this, I am able to not only delete the project folder, but all render files, capture scratch, project archives and so on. Once I have them all in the same window I give them a quick review – and then select them all and delete them. I then move onto the next project and repeat the step.

Keeping It Accessible
You may be wondering how we find files once they’re on the tapes. After all, we have over 25 tapes now and finding a single QT movie would be a nightmare without some sort of system in place. Well that’s the final step.

As each tape is filled, we mount it on the desktop of the computer and use a program called CD Finder to create a catalog file of all contents of the tape. This usually only takes a few minutes per tape. Once complete, the tape is in the CD Finder database and can be searched from any computer in the office without the tape being loaded. Once we find what we’re looking for, we load the appropriate tape and retrieve the files. It has turned out to be a great system.

The Payoff
So in the end, we have all of our important files backed up and safe for the next 30 years, they’re cataloged in a way that allows us to find a file in minutes, sometimes seconds, and we’ve made a small profit along the way by charging for the backup process and tape stock used. What started out as just pure overhead has turned into a income stream.

The SuiteTake
The amount of digital media attached to any single post production project is growing leaps and bounds at an alarming rate. Only a few years back having 1TB of storage per edit system seemed like a bottomless pit, and now we have 10TB per machine and at times are running low on space. The list of files to archive keeps growing, and if your workflow has includes tapeless media you have probably already been pushed to the limit.

One way to stay on top of managing your space is to do regular archives to a safe format that not only frees up drive space for new projects, but gives you peace of mind that all past projects are there when you need them.

As much as everybody wants to move away from tape, I still believe when it comes to reliability, cost per gig and shelf life, there’s still nothing better out there to archive your data. And I have literally put my money and company behind that belief. If you’ve been looking for a long term backup solution, I highly suggest you check out the new line of drives from Cache-A. If you can’t see them at NAB, be sure to check out their website or call them directly for more information. You won’t meet a nicer bunch of guys interested in helping you out.

See For Yourself
As of this writing, prices have not been set yet but I’m hoping they’re in the same area (or cheaper) then what the Quantum drives were selling for, which was about $7K for a single drive unit. If you’re going to NAB, be sure to stop by and visit them at booth SL-9605.

Back in 2003 when I converted my basement to full blown edit suite (a year long process), it was both a blessing and curse all at once. Gone was the commute and fighting with Chicagoland traffic. I could sleep in later and “get home” from work earlier. Sounds great! But the flip side of that, if you don’t have a serious commitment to putting up work/personal life barriers, you are always at your office and always working. And clients know that too. So what’s to stop you from working late into the evening or over the weekend? As I found out, not much.

First home edit suite, 2003

Basement edit suite, 2004

Luckily, the home edit suite was short lived. In less then a year my wife and I had outgrown it and had to get office space or we would lose some of the larger jobs. The separation of work from home life was back in balance. However, there have been times that I wished the suite was back at home. It’s one thing to stick around the office to edit, but it’s another to stick around watching a render bar or compression bar just so you can finish and upload a file. What if you could do this from home? And what if it was free to you assuming that you already have a high speed internet connection at your home and office? Well, I’m hear to tell you that the solution is not only out there, but it’s a lot easier to get setup then you might think.

I’m sure by now everybody knows about MobileMe and Back To My Mac on the Macintosh (just try to get Back To My Mac working reliably though) and services like GoToMyPC.com (now supporting the Mac platform). There is also a client/server based service called HamachiX for Mac, but I could never get that to work reliably and it would often get very frustrating. About a year ago I found a free service called LogMeIn.com, which supports both Mac and PC. They’re goal is to get you hooked on their free service, and then have you upgrade to one of their paid accounts. But for what i use it for the free version is perfect. I now have several computers registered with them and use it at least weekly, sometimes every day. It has become an important tool in my toolbox.

How It Works
The concept is very simple. You create an account at LogMeIn.com. Make sure you sign up for the free service to start, it’s not always obvious that it’s available. I actually had trouble finding it when I started writing this article. Once you have an account, you download the client software that you install on every computer that you want to control. The installation is very fast, and during the setup you enter some account information that they provide you when you setup your account.

Once you install the software, it takes you to the LogMeIn.com website and registers that computer as one of your computers. You’re able to keep everything in one master list of computers, or create groups of different computers as I’ve done here.

One of the great and flawless things that the LogMeIn.com service does is get around all of the routers hubs and firewalls of your network. Our network is by no means complicated, but it’s not just an open network either. We have a cable modem, Apple Airport Extreme router, and about 5 switches in multiple locations on the network. And not once have I had a problem navigating through all of that to the machine I wanted. Hell, I can’t even get iChat to work at the office half the time.

At home it’s a similar setup. Cable modem, Time Machine wireless router and a few switches. There have even been a few times that I was at Panera Bread and wanted to start downloading something on the server at the office, and did so with great success. That says a lot because if you’ve spent any time on the free wifi from Panera, you know how painfully slow and frustrating it can be.

If you want to get really crazy, there is an iPhone application from LogMeIn.com as well, allowing you to perform all of the same functions but using your iPhone. I have not tried this, but if you have please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Putting It To Use
Once you’ve setup one or more computers, it’s just a matter of logging into the LogMeIn.com home page and you’re taken to your list of registered computers. From the list you can tell which ones are on-line and available, and which ones are not. Just click on the computer, enter a name and password and you’re in. Your browser window transforms into the desktop of the connected computer, or you can make it full screen and get the full experience being in front of the remote computer. Nearly all keyboard shortcuts that you would use locally work as expected (I’ve found a few that do not and randomly quit the browser).

This is one of those situations where seeing it in action goes a lot further then me telling you. See my real-time demonstration of it at work by watching the video at the end of this post.

How This Can Help You In Your Business
I have found many uses for LogMeIn. The initial problem was getting used to the idea that I didn’t have to hang out at the office for everything that needed to get done. Here are a few examples.

Post Edit Output
By far the biggest use we’ve had for it is web approvals. For example, it’s the end of the day and you’re finally ready to show the client your masterpiece. The typical process for us is the export a self-contained QuickTime Movie to the project folder, take that into compressor and create a H.264 QT movie file optimized for the web, take the output from compressor and into our Dreamweaver Template, create a web approval page with all of the necessary details, sync that to the server and send the client the approval link. With the exception of the compressor step, it all goes very quick. But unfortunately, if we have a long video to post the compressor step can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2-3 hours (we’ve tested the Elgato Turbo.264 USB key, but the output is not as good and the files tend to be larger. It is fast though).

Using LogMeIn.com, this has changed. When the edit is over and the master is exported, we take into compressor and start the conversion. We prep the web page with everything except for the final video file, and leave. Then the editor, from home that evening checks in when the file is done being compressed (we’re sent email notifications from compressor as each file finishes – or fails), finishes the web page and sends the link via email on the edit computer. Total time spent about 5 minutes. The big differences is that all of the time you would have waited around, is now spent at home.

Check The Status
From checking the progress of an AE render, FCP export or making sure a large copy in the finder completed, getting peace of mind is fast and easy. How many times have you left something going in compressor just to find out that it crashed 5 minutes after you left and you had no idea. Now, even if you can’t fix it remotely, you know what you’re in for before you get there.

We’ve also used it to check on large DVD runs. Our duplicator usually runs flawlessly, but on runs of 500 or more it occasionally gets hung up and has to be reset. Again, in this case there’s not much we can do to fix the problem remotely, but just knowing that somebody has to go in early to fix so that we make the deadline it is a huge help.

Creating DVD’s
While this is not an ideal way to create a DVD by any means, in a pinch it can be very helpful. There have been a handful of occasions that I received a last minute panicked call that a client now wanted a DVD instead of a web approval. At the very least I could login and start the compression so that the DVD was a quick output in the morning. In most cases though I can get the entire process done right up to saving a disk image that the assistant can burn as soon as he gets in and then messenger it out.

Grab Files Remotely
While the edit computers themselves can not share files outside of the office, it’s no big deal to login to grab some files and upload them to a FTP server so that they can be downloaded elsewhere. When I was out of town on a remote job there was a situation where I needed a graphic element from a current job that I had forgot to bring with me. It was an animated background in QT format. No problem. I logged into the edit system, dragged the QT movie to a program called FileChute, and emailed myself the link from the edit system. Ten minutes later I had the file downloaded on my remote edit system and the client was blown away (these sorts of things can really make you look like a hero).

These are just some of the ways we’ve found it can help. I’m sure based on your own projects and work flow you’ll come up with new ones of your own. If you do, feel free to leave a comment on the blog and share it with others.

See For Yourself
Click on the link below to see a real-time demonstration of just how easy it is. To sign up for your own free account, just go to LogMeIn.com and you’ll be up and running in just minutes.

Several times a year I find myself on the road editing on-location with clients. These travel jobs are usually a convention, corporate conference or incentive trip. The locations can be as close as Chicago (20 miles away) or as far as Thailand and Hong Kong. I have a travel system that’s in cases and ready to go at a moments notice, and each year this part of our business at Edit Creations has grown.

One concern I always have when doing these jobs is having a system go down while being far away from the office. Part of my safety net is having a second laptop with me on every trip. I learned my lesson the hard way when a few years ago one of our editors was doing a job in California and the a AJA IO box stopped working. It was a Saturday so I couldn’t get in touch with tech support at AJA and no amount of google searching helped find a solution. By Monday the job was going to be all over, videos laid off or not. So in that case, after troubleshooting all night on the phone and realizing it was not going to be fixed, with only a 4 hour window I had to shower, head to the office and make a second system from one of our edit bays, stop and Home Depot and buy a hand truck and head to the airport. I made it in time to save the day, but it burned though all of the profits for the job.

While having 2 systems is great security, I always want to have the ability to troubleshoot, test or rebuild a machine with all of the needed software on site, should the need arise. In my worst case scenario that I play back in my head (rehearsing it like a fire drill) I imagine running to a local Apple Store, buying a new machine on the spot and reinstalling everything I need to get the job done.

Up until recently I’ve always brought with me a small selection of DVD’s. Everything from all of the original FCP and Adobe install disks, to Disk Warrior and a system restore disk. While this would obviously work, there is a better way. Why not buy a new, small portable FW drive (or even better, use one of those old drives that you have laying around) and created a multi-partition boot drive that contains everything? Then, not only do you have everything you need in one place, booting and running off of the FW drive will be much faster then working off your DVD drive.

The rest of this post will show you how to create your own emergency boot drive that is the perfect companion to your travel system.

Check List
Before you get started, here’s what you’re going to need.

• A hard drive. FireWire is my personal preference, but a bootable USB 2.0 drive will work as well. I don’t care what anybody says, FireWire is still faster then USB so I prefer to never buy a drive that is only USB.
• Hard drive space on your computer – lots of it if you’re going to be putting a lot of software on your new boot drive.
• Original CD’s/DVD’s that you want to make copies of.
• Apple Disk Utility (in the Utilities folder of your hard drive).

Pick Your Drive

The first step is to get yourself a drive. For me, I used a 500 gig G-Raid Mini that has not been getting a lot of use.

I had several other options as well, but all were too small for what I wanted to do here. Funny how 60 gigs is now considered “small”. However any one of these would make a great DiskWarrior/OSX Install disk.

If you are buying a new drive, I would recommend one of the Western Digital Passport drives. You can get a 500 Gig USB drive for less then $120, or a 400 gig version with both USB and FW800 for $115. If you’re not as concerned about the size of the drive or having an external HD, you can get an even better deal on a 1TB Quad Interface drive for about $150, also from Western Digital.

Select Your Software
Before you do anything with the drive itself, decide what you want to use it for. In my case, I decided to make partitions for the following.

• Disk Warrior Emergency Boot Disk
• OSX 10.5 Leopard Install Disk
• OSX 10.5 Server Install Disk
• OSX 10.4 Tiger Install Disk
• “Additional Software” partition for Adobe and FCP disk images

Make Disk Images

It’s time to make disk images of each disk. If you have not done this before, it’s a way to create an exact byte by byte copy of a disk (even a hard drive) to a single file on a your hard drive. Later you’ll use these files to create the hard drive versions.

Insert the disk into the disk drive and open Apple’s Disk Utility program. Towards the bottom of the list on the left you should see your DVD drive listed, and the CD that you have inserted. In my case the Leopard install disk is inserted in the machine. Click once to highlight the mounted disk as shown here.

Now click on the button along the top that says “New Image”. You will be asked for a place to save the new disk image. If you’re doing this for several DVD’s, you’re going to want to make sure you have plenty of space since each disk can be multiple gigs in size. Name the disk something meaningful and hit save. The default options of “compressed” and “none” will work fine.

Disk Utility will now create a single file that is an exact copy of your CD or DVD.

Repeat these steps for each disk you want to put on your boot drive. Even if it’s not going to be a bootable disk (for example, the Final Cut Pro suite of disks). Later you’ll see the benefit of doing so.

Get Organized
Once you’ve created a disk image for every optical disk you need, it’s a good idea to organize them into two main categories. Boot drives, and non-boot drives.

As seen here, I’ve not only put my bootable disks into their own folder, but in the additional software folder I’ve created sub-folders to keep programs grouped. Doing this is going to help you figure out how many partitions you need, and how large to make each partition.

Looking at the list I have, I can tell I need 5 partitions. There are 4 boot volumes, and the rest will go onto a 5th partition called “Additional Software”.

Before we move on we need to know how big each of the bootable volumes need to be. The best way to do that is to double click on each Disk Image so that it mounts on the desktop, and do a “get info” on the mounted volume. You may be tempted to just look at the size of the disk image, but since it’s compressed it will not give you an accurate final size.

I went through each of my drives and just made note of the final sizes. I don’t really care about the extra non-bootable images since they’re all going on whatever is left and there should be plenty of extra space. If you think you’re cutting it close you may want to get their sizes as well just to be sure everything will fit.

Splitting Up Your Disk
We now have everything we need to create the boot disk. Again, open Disk Utility and select the drive that you’re going to use. Make sure to select the drive itself, and not the current volume that’s right below it.

With the drive selected, click on the Partition tab. Currently there is just one partition for the entire drive. Let’s change that. Under “volume scheme” change it from “current” to “5-Partitions” (or however many you need for what you’re creating). We know we need 5 from the previous work we’ve already done.

Initially you’ll see 5 equal sized partition boxes. To optimize the use of space we’re going to create each partition to match the disk image so that we don’t waste space. To do this, starting from the top box click on each partition box and type in a name and size based on the sizes you recorded earlier. I usually make the partition size a little bit bigger then the size I recorded, just to be sure it all fits and there’s some working space. it’s really not necessary, but that’s what I do for my own neurotic reasons. I usually add half a gig to each recorded size.

Repeat this step for each of the new partitions, working your way down the list. When you’re done, name the final partition “Additional Software” and leave the size as is. It will automatically be whatever space is left.

The Partition Table Scheme
I will come right out and tell you the first time I went through all of this trouble I ended up with a disk that would not boot. I was baffled. I knew I did everything right. It took some digging to realize what I had done wrong.

This part is very important. Before you create the partitions, click on the option button at the bottom of the screen and you’ll see this dialog.

The type of partition scheme you use effects what machines can boot from the drive. By default, it’s setup so that it can boot from non-intel machines only (G4, G5). My problem was I was using a MacBookPro which is Intel based.

Nearly all of my machines are now Intel based, so I don’t need to have a dual booting drive that does both. But if that’s what you need, there is a way to do it. I’m not gong to bother showing you since I didn’t do it myself, but I found a good step-by-step description on how to do it on Mac OSX Hints. Feel free to follow their instructions. If it were super easy I may have done it just to say I did it, but it’s more of a pain then it’s worth to me personally.

So in my case, I chose GUID partition table and clicked OK. This will create partitions that all boot on any Intel based Macintosh.

With everything ready, click on the “apply” button and you’ll receive the standard warning letting you know you’re about to destroy the disk as you know it.

Click Partition and let it do it’s thing. It shouldn’t take more then a few seconds to a minute. When it’s done you’ll have 5 new volumes created under the main hard drive on the left side of the screen. You will also have 5 new hard drives mounted on your desktop representing each of the new partitions.

Makin’ Copies
We’re almost done. You now need to take each disk image that you created, and restore it to the matching volume that you created for it. This is pretty straight forward.

Inside of disk utility, click on the first partition that you want to work on, and click the “restore” tab. From that window, you can select your disk image file, and then drag and drop the HD from the desktop that you want to copy that image to.

Click the “restore” button, click OK on the warning dialog and enter your user password and away it goes. This part can take awhile, especially if like me you’re restoring form a network server drive that’s also busy doing other things.

Repeat this for each of the boot volumes.

If by chance you get an error like this one…

…don’t freak out. At least not yet anyway. Chances are pretty good you have that disk image mounted on your desktop. Just unmount the disk image by and try again.

The Rest of the Software
The disk images that were not intended to be boot disks (all of the Adobe/FCP images) can just be copied using the finder to the volume called “Additional Software”.

Once all of the drives are restored from their perspective disk images and all of the extra software is copied over to the extra drive, it’s time to take it for a test drive.

Restart, Reboot, Relax
Plug in your drive and choose restart. As soon as your Mac chimes on, hold down the option key on your keyboard. (I should mention that this needs to be a wired keyboard for this to work). In a few seconds you’ll see a list of all of the bootable disks. Use the arrows on the keyboard to make a choice and hit return.

A Few Usage Notes
A few things I wanted to mention.

Installing OSX
When you use the OSX install DVD, normally you put the DVD in and click on the “Install” icon, and away it goes – rebooting the machine and starting up from the DVD. If you try to do this from the boot drive you just created, it will not work. It can tell that it’s not the original DVD and gives you an error. So the way to get around it is how I described above, restarting and holding down the option key to choose your drive. After that it all goes as normally.

Installing FCP
One of the great benefits of having a program like FCP Studio as disk images, is that the installation goes a LOT faster, and you can install everything unattended. No more switching of the DVD’s as it needs them. The trick is to just open up all of the images and have them mounted on the desktop. Once you start the install, it will appear that you have multiple DVD’s all mounted. So as it finishes with one, it just moves onto the next one.

Quick System Restores
Creating disk images can be a great way to keep a backup of your current edit system. Once a month we create a disk image of the boot drive of each edit system in the office. Why? This way if a system crashes or goes down due to a hard drive problem, we can use the image to create a new identical drive and be up and running with all of our software, plugins and system settings as we had them. This was put to the test once already when a system just didn’t boot one morning and we were on deadline. By noon we had a new drive installed and imaged from the backup and were up and running again. Try rebuilding an entire system from all of the original software disks in just 3 hours. Our usual rebuild from scratch time is about 8-10 hours, and usually several days of finding little things that we forgot and fixing system settings and preferences.

Adding or Changing Partition Size
Let’s say that you create 5 partitions as I did in this example, and later on want to add a 6th because a) you have enough space on the drive and b) you now decided you wanted to add Snow Leopard as an additional boot disk. Can you do this? Yes, and no. Mostly yes.

Apple’s Disk Utility does allow you to resize the partitions, but in doing so you will destroy everything on that partition. After going through all of this work, it’s clearly not the best option. However, there is a great and reasonably priced program called iPartition from Coriolis.

This nifty program makes it possible to non-destructively and intuitively adjust the size of each partition. You can create new partitions and a whole lot more. In my limited testing, iPartition performed as promised and made short work of what would have otherwise been impossible using Disk Utility. At the low price of $45, this was a no brainer purchase for me.

Duplicate Your Work
And finally, after doing all of this work, wouldn’t it be nice if you could make a disk image of your new boot drive? Well, you can! Just follow the same procedure and you can have a backup disk image on your system to either create another drive from, or to just have as a backup in case your new boot drive goes down or gets lost.

The SuiteTake?
With a little bit of work you can not only put some old unused drives to work, but be better prepared for a unplanned emergency. At the very least, you will have a more efficient way to install your standard production software and have a great troubleshooting disk. If you ask me, being prepared like this is underrated. It’s little things like this that allow me sleep just a little bit better at night.

Late last year we added a new camera package to our offerings at Edit Creations. In part because we wanted to diversify the services we had to offer, and also because it played into a spinoff company we’ve been working on. That new company would be a lot more production based then Edit Creations currently is.

We looked at all the options out there in the sub 10K price range, and after weeks of research ended up with a Sony EX-1. That really surprised me because when we started the search I was pretty much set on the Panasonic P2 format and the AG-HVX200A model. Not only do I have experience with that camera, but almost everything else we do is shot in the DVCPro HD format, so we have a nice workflow in place. More then that though, I can’t stand editing in the MPEG-2 format. It’s fine for shooting and can capture great images, but once you get it into the edit system you can be assured you will rendering more then ever before. But in the end, the Sony EX-1 won hands down in image quality, built in features, and price. There was just no denying it.

So, what to do with the workflow?

On the first several projects we tried multiple different ways of attacking the projects. Everything from working in the MPEG-2 format natively to converting everything to ProRes and editing with the converted files instead. We also have extensive experience working with the Sony software, which includes XDCam EX Clip Browser and XDCam Transfer.

In addition to all of this trial and error, I was training a client on how to handle the workflow for his own project (he was renting our camera). But it seemed every time I met with him I was saying “OK, I know I said do it like this, but now there’s a whole new way to do it”. Nothing like learning on the job to keep everybody on edge!

So here we are now, about 6 months later, with what I believe is a solid workflow. So if you’re using EX-1 (or XDCam footage of any kind) you can learn from our mistakes and start off on the right foot.

In The Field

If you’re new to using a tapeless format, it can be very unnerving to spend an entire day shooting and have no tape to show for. To avoid disaster, redundancy is the key.

A simple but important note – label your media cards!!! Use a sharpie or a nice printed label, but make sure each card has a unique name/number. This will avoid confusion in the field when you drop your cards into a pile of other cards and don’t know which ones have footage to download and which are empty. Seriously, this one little step can save you in the field.

Assuming you don’t have enough SxS cards to make it through an entire day of shooting, you’re going to have to offload the cards and erase them in the field so that they can be reused (see, you’re already freaking out). Here’s how we handle that task.

In addition to the producer, camera person and possible audio guy, it’s ideal to have a AP or junior tech person with you. The handling of the media cards is very important, and getting it wrong can be disastrous. Don’t underestimate how important this is, just because it’s easy. We call this person the Media Assistant (MA from here forward).

The MA has the job of offloading all cards in the field, checking to be sure files were successfully transferred, and then erasing the clips from the card so the card can be reused. The equipment used for this is a MacBook Pro and two portable FireWire or USB drives. You can do the same thing using the PC but we’re all Mac here so I’m unable to provide any details on that side of things.

As each card is filled by the cameraperson, it’s passed off to the MA. The MA will then load it into the Express 34 slot on the MBP and it will mount on the desktop as an external drive (make sure you have the proper drive installed on this machine so that the card will mount on the desktop properly). Then, using a program called Shotput EXPress, the media is copied, simultaneously, to two different external drives (you can do up to 3 different locations. While you can do this manually in the finder as well, Shotput EXPress makes it more automated and does a nice data verification as it copies everything over. It just adds another layer of security.

Once the media has been copied, Sony’s XDCam EX Clip Browser software is used to view the clips on the drives and verify that everything looks and sounds as it should. At this point we’re just spot checking a random sampling of clips. Once the MA is satisfied, the inserted SxS card is erased by selecting all clips and hitting the delete key (this is also done using the Clip Browser software). The card is then given back to the producer or camera person for use again.

Once the shoot is over and the producer is back at the office, the footage is all copied to 2 different full size (and less expensive) drives. One is used during the production of the project by the producers and editors, and the other is a backup, and is stored with the client. It’s essentially equivalent to the box of beta tapes the client would have received in the past. After the media is successfully copied to the larger drives, the mini-drives are erased and ready for the next shoot.

As a side note, don’t cheap out on your hard drives, especially the big ones that are the final destination for your camera originals. A good drive does not cost that much more then a cheap one. Just ask yourself how much your shot day is worth, and if you would be willing to pay to reshoot everything. I highly recommend buying drives from G-Technology. While they’re not the cheapest, they are backed up with the best warranty in the business, they run quite and most of all, cool. On the flip side, STAY AWAY FROM LACIE DRIVES! I can’t tell you the number of editors and clients who have horror stories about drive failures, myself included. We used to have a ton of them but sold them all on eBay just to avoid any additional disaster.

Preparing for the Edit

While the free Sony tools can be used to screen and prep for editing, we have opted to go the route of having a FCP work station for the producer. After doing it both ways, we feel this is the most efficient for both the producer and the editor. (We’re currently looking into setting up a FCP Server workstation to streamline this process even more).

At this point loading, logging and transferring footage is the same is using P2 footage. Using the Sony FCP Logging plugin outlined in a previous SuiteTake post, the footage is loaded into the Log & Transfer window and clips are marked and labeled. As each clip is identified, it’s added to the import cue and converted to QT movies that FCP can edit with. The files you end up are basically MPEG-2 files wrapped into a .mov file. (For faster logging, check out our post on log and capture shortcuts.)

While going through this process, the producer can import multiple clips from a single recorded clip, add clip names and log notes, and organize footage into multiple bins as desired. This is all typically done to a drive designated as the “project drive”, so what you end up with is a single drive that has the FCP logging project with all of the bins and clips, and all of the transferred and transcoded media. This is what is handed off to the editor at the start of the edit.

Once the editor receives the drive, the project file that the producer created is opened, and all bins/clips are copied and pasted into the current working project (or the template project if we’re starting one from scratch). The project the producer creates is treated as a log project only, we do not edit inside that project.

With the new bins/clips pasted into the working project, we then use media manager to move all of the logged footage to our local edit drives and re-link them. We never work off of client drives, and instead opt to always have the footage on our own system. Since we have dedicated raid systems on each edit system, it’s a lot faster and it’s easier to keep things organized on our end. Once everything is copied over and re-linked we eject the drive and give it back to the producer.

Editing

So the main drawback to editing with the XDCam/EX-1 footage is that it’s saved in the MPEG-2 format. Because it’s a long GOP format, there’s not actually a full frame of video for each recorded frame of video. So when editing, FCP has to recreate those missing frames. While on the fly editing it’s usually seamless, the moment you add a transition or anything else that requires editing FCP has to create these new frames (FCP Calls this “Conforming MPEG-2 Video”), and THEN render. It adds a whole new layer of processing and even on a fast machine it’s a slow process.

So, what to do? There are three basic options.

Transcode to ProRes
While logging and importing footage inside of the FCP Log & Transfer window, you don’t have the option to transcode the footage into any other format. However, once that the footage has been imported and wrapped into QT files, you do have the option to convert everything to ProRes using compressor. What you’ll end up with are iFrame based video files that look as good as the original, but are more “edit friendly”. You’ll be able to edit quickly in a ProRes sequence with minimal rendering, and be able to do compositing without watching the image degrade right in front of your eyes. The drawback is you’re adding another step to your process, and depending on the amount of footage you have and the speed of your machine, it can be a very timely step.

Edit Natively in the XDCam EX MPEG-2 Format
For some very simple and short projects, this is actually a good option. Just drag your first shot into the timeline and let FCP match the timeline to your raw footage, and everything will play and edit in real time and you’ll be pretty happy with how it all comes together. But there’s one trick to make it go smoothly.

After you’ve let FCP match the sequence settings to you footage, open up the settings for your sequence and go to the “Render Control” tab. Make sure all rendering is done to ProRes instead of Same as Sequence. This way whenever you do need to render it will take less time and you won’t be compressing back into the MPEG-2 format. This essentially removes the conforming step that FCP would otherwise need to perform, at least while editing.

Exporting your final sequence will go slower then you might be used to, but it’s usually tolerable unless your project is very complex with lots of effects/render files. Because you’re exporting back into the XDCam EX format, it has to convert everything back into the Long GOP MPEG-2 format, which is very slow even on a fast machine.

Edit in a ProRes Timeline
You can also setup your timeline as a ProRes timeline for whatever frame size/frame rate matches your source footage. Once you do this, you can edit with your footage and for the most part play it back in real time (except for some effects) with FCP’s RT timeline. The advantage to working in this way is that since you’re working in the ProRes codec, your footage will continue to look great even if you throw lots of layers, graphics and effects at your project.

The huge down side to this is everything, and I mean EVERY-THING must be rendered at one point or another. Even if you’re able to play things back in real time while you’re editing using the RT features of FCP, when it comes time to print to tape or export a master QT file, you will have to render everything and it can take a very long time, even on shorter projects. You will end up with a very nice, high quality ProRes master file, but if you’re on a tight deadline this might not the way to go.

The Best Way?
After trying all of the above approaches on multiple projects, I don’t think this is a single solution that fits every project. I think before starting each project the best thing to do is look at the details of that project and decide. For simple projects that are short, mostly cuts and dissolves, few graphics and no real layers, staying in the MPEG-2 format is by far the fastest way to go. But if you have a more complicated project with layers, keys, graphics and so on, I would work in the ProRes world so that the image quality holds up though all of the processing.

At least for the majority of projects we do, transcoding everything to ProRes before we start is not really efficient. It takes too long and just adds an extra step that we just don’t have the time for. So in my opinion the it’s just not worth the time penalty.

The SuiteTake Take?
The EX-1/EX-3 and the higher end XDCam cameras have all proven that you can create some great images and record them to the MPEG-2 format. MPEG-2 cameras have really matured over the years, and they’re far superior to the baby brother HDV format cameras.

But understand that if you go this route there are tradeoffs when you get to the postproduction stage. The tradeoffs are not nearly as bad as they used to be and there are now multiple ways to handle the challenges – but they are still tradeoffs.

When starting any project, you should always consider the entire work flow start to end before shooting your first frame of video. If after doing this the EX-1/EX-3 fit your production needs, I say go for it.

Have you ever been fear stuck while looking at an empty timeline, with no idea where to start? Are you sometimes creatively challenged and questioning your career choice? Have you ever wanted to learn how to fly a plane? If you answered yes to the first two questions, this post is for you. I can’t help with the third one.

Last week I did a presentation a the Chicago Final Cut Pro User Group (aka CHIFCPUG) that I titled “Inspired Editing”. Overall I think it was well received so I wanted to post the video of that presentation here for those who may have missed it.

This presentation not only gives you good tips and trick on where you might find inspiration and ideas for your projects, but walks you through a promo/pre-roll trailer that was created for a large DVD project. From starting with an empty timeline to the final version, you’ll see how the trailer was created and what the thought process was. There are also some tips for using Google Earth in your project.

Your feedback is always welcome so shoot me an email or post a comment on the blog if the mood moves you.