Tech Notes
Don’t Sell That Old G5 Just Yet!
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.
* If you use TimeMachine you know that you really don’t have a lot of choice when it runs and how often. However, you can use a free program called TimeMachineEditor to give you more control over this. I personally don’t need it to backup every second that I’m working, but even once a day is enough in most cases. It takes less of a toll on your system resources that way too.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.
The Dark Side of 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.
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.
NAB Preivew: Cache-A LTO-4 Archive Drive for Video Pros
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.
The Top-Ten Things I Wish I Knew About Final Cut Pro…Ten Years Ago.
I’ve been an editor for a while now at several different shops. Through those days and places I have mostly been self taught until I ended up here with SuiteTake. At SuiteTake training and skill development is not just encouraged, it’s part of our daily responsibilities. Therefor, in the recent past my learning curve has increased dramatically.
The Top Ten things I wish I knew:
10. Shift and option dragging
9. Quick Ken Burns effect
8. QuickTime vs Quicktime Conversion.
7. The Black and code button.
6. Option 1,2,3 for transition alignment
5. Esc, tab, spacebar to navigate windows
4. Apply normalization to audio in FCP
3. Disable dropped frames warning.
2. Disable rendering with caps lock.
1. Map your keyboard.
The SuiteTake Take?
If you’re an experienced editor you probably know most of these already, however, if you’re just starting out like me so many years ago you’ll be putting yourself ahead of the game by learning these tricks now and not 10 years from now.
The following video tutorial demonstrates a list of 10 efficiencies and workflows with Final Cut Pro that I wish I had known from the start. If I had these often simple tricks in my pocket from day 1 I would have saved myself countless hours and heaps of frustration.
The Emergency Boot Drive, Your New Best Friend
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.
Permission to take Permission?
I’m not sure exactly when it all started, but over the last several months I’ve been having permission issues while using OSX. Every so often I’ll go to save a file in a folder I should have access to – and I’m told that I don’t have permission to do so. Normally it’s a local drive, but it happens with network drives as well. I thought maybe it was something specific to Tiger, but recently we updated to OSX Leopard and the problem actually got worse. And when I say “upgrade”, what I mean to say is we rebuilt each system from scratch, formatting a drive and reinstalling all apps from scratch. Our last few upgrades have been OS upgrades using the “Archive and Install” option, but we wanted to really start clean this time.
To make matters worse, I got tot he point last week where I had locked myself out of making any further changes somehow. We have a common folder on a local network server that we use for web approvals. It’s been there for years without having any problems at all. Then all the sudden, I couldn’t copy over my QT movie so that it could be processed with the rest of the files. I did the usual “get info” command, unlocked the pane with an administrator account, but when I tried to change the permissions it would not allow me to. I could click on any of the users or groups and set “Read & Write”, but as soon as I clicked off it it went back to either “Read Only”, or even worse “No Access”.
You might be thinking that I should just run Apple’s “Disk Utility” and choose to “Repair Permissions”. That would be great except that it’s not a boot drive. Disk Utility needs to have an installed version of OSX on whatever drive it’s to repair permissions on. Without a OS it has nothing to use to determine what the correct permissions are.
So an hour has passed now and I’m getting very frustrated, because nothing about this should be hard. So I did what every good editor does when backed into a corner. I did a google search on the problem.
XDCam Import Plug-In for Final Cut Pro
If you’ve ever had to edit with the Sony XDCam format, you already know that the work flow can be a challenge, especially if you’re using Final Cut Pro. While the Panasonic P2/DVCPro HD format integrates very well with the Log and Transfer tool, XDCam has had many shortcomings. That is, until now.
Sony recently released version 1.0 of their log and transfer plugin that works with both XDCam and the newer SxS solid state media cameras like the EX-1 and EX-3.
Installation is very simple, and no restart is required except for relaunching Final Cut Pro. When you open the Log and Transfer tool, you won’t find anything visibly different, but when you select XDCam media, either from a hard drive or directly from a SxS card, the footage now loads, and you can log and transfer the same way that you can P2 footage.
In limited testing, we have found it to work as expected. The only downside is that you can’t transcode the footage into another format during import. This would be a helpful feature since editing in the XDCam format less then ideal. But for now, we’re pretty excited to see Sony improving the workflow and look forward to future upgrades.
You can find more information by visiting Sony.
G-Speed, Un-boxing
About 2 years ago we decided that we wanted to start taking steps to move toward a shared network of storage. But when you look at what it costs to do everything at once, it is just outrageously expensive for a small post house like Edit Creations. So, we decided to break it down into smaller purchases that over time would reach our goal.
Step one, we purchased the newly released (at the time, early 2007) G-Speed XL, 8TB, 16 drive 4 Gbit Fibre system, a new ATTO Celerity FC-42ES Fibre card, and a new Quad MacPro to hook it all into. The result was a super fast edit system that could handle anything we threw at it.
Here we are just over a year later, and faced with almost all of our jobs going to HD (Mostly the Panasonic DVCProHD format) and continuously running out of drive space, we decided to buy a second unit. We went with another G-Speed based on our great experience, but this time bought a 12TB system. Once formatted you have about 10TB of usable space. We purchased another ATTO card, ran about 50′ of new fibre and were ready to receive the drive!
One thing I didn’t do the first time was take “un-boxing” photos. This time, I remembered. I know it’s a bit geeky, but the video geek in you will enjoy it.
So now we have two dedicated RAID system, and two rooms that can handle all of the HD jobs coming up. What’s the next step? A fibre switch, management software, and a media controller computer. Not this year though, that sounds like a nice 2009 upgrade.
Compressor Cluster Submit Problems, and Solution
When Compressor (part of FCP Studio) works, it works well. And when it doesn’t, it can be a really pain and waste of time trying to get things working again. For me it’s a true love/hate relationship.
Have you ever went to submit your batch compression only to find that you don’t have the option to submit it to anything?
When you try to click on the cluster as shown above, you don’t have the option to select the default “This Computer”, or anything else for that matter. If you just try to submit it anyway, you’ll get an error telling you to re-install Compressor. But don’t (at least not yet).
There is a simple Terminal command you can run that will, at least for the moment, fix the problem. Try the following.
Flash Encoding: VBR or CBR? It depends.
It’s been a few years now since the battle over which video format would dominate the web. It’s hard to argue that over the last few years Flash is by far the clear winner. From entertainment sites like YouTube to news organizations like CNN, when you watch video changes are it’s Flash encoded.
I would argue that as far as quality, bit rates and file sizes go, Flash is not the best choice out there. But its cross platform ubiquity is unquestionable.
This post is not going to get into all of the ins and outs of Flash, but I want to discuss one point. VBR (variable bit rate) and CBR (constant bit rate) encoding.
Tech Note: Importing AVCHD with Final Cut
If you have one of those new tapeless camcorders, chances are pretty good that it records in AVCHD on a memory stick, hard drive, or DVD disk.
Final Cut Pro still does not nativly support AVCHD, but will automatically transcode it into ProRes by default, or the Apple Intermediate CODEC (if you’re using iMovie it’s Apple Intermediate by default).
If you’re already used to importing P2 media using the Log and Transfer window inside of Final Cut Pro, then the process is the same using AVCHD. However, some have had problems (myself included) with Final Cut continuing to crash during the import.
Very often this problem stems from having the QuickTime component Perian installed. Perian allows QT to play back additional file types that would not otherwise be supported. However it seems it does cause a conflict in this case. The quick fix is to remove the file “Perian.component” from you Library/QuickTime folder. Once you do that, importing should resume as normal.
Apple has an official tech note on the problem as well.
Updated Tuesday; February 26, 2008
About a week ago Perian 1.1 was released. My hope is that this fixed the problem, but I have not had time to test it. If you have let me know what your experience has been.
Hi Thomas,Thanks for your article, after reading so many websites about the technical side of things or 'how to run ...
My question is if I hand an LTO to one of my network clients who does NOT have Cache-A will ...
The Creative Spark database is still in constant development and at least at this time is for in house ...
Is there a way of getting this creative samples software?Would be great to sort my library!thanks 
Nice post! Definitely a lot more productive then collecting dust... Now did you do a software raid 0 or hardware ...
Thanks for tip #9, a better Ken Burns Effect. 7:54 to 15:35. 
Thanks Tom for your great explanation. We too have a Drobo and used it 'out of the box'. Then, when ...
