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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What I turned up was a nifty little free utility (Donations requested via PayPal) called BatChmod. It allows you to change the file permissions any any file, any folder, or an entire drive with the click of a button. Sounds great, but you have to be careful too. Changing permissions on an entire drive, if done wrong, can cause serious access issues. Especially if it’s a boot drive.

It’s very simple to use. Open the program and follow these 3 simple steps.

Select the file, folder, or drive that you want to change permissions on.

Choose the user and groups that you want to apply to the selection, as well as what permissions “Everyone” will have.

Click Apply.

Your done! I did this with a pretty large folder and it happened so fast I thought that nothing happened. But in an instant, all of my permission problems were solved and I was able to (finally) finish my web approval.

Check it out for yourself and take control over your permission issues. You have my permission (sorry, couldn’t help myself).

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. 

DOWNLOAD THE SOFTWARE

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. 

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.

Open your terminal program and enter the following command. You will need to enter the administrator or root password when prompted.

sudo SystemStarter start Qmaster

Then for good measure, run this command as well.

sudo qmasterprefs -reset

The first command restarts Qmaster, and the second deletes the pref file.

If you have compressor open, close it and reopen. With just a little bit of luck, when you try to submit again you’ll see everything back to normal.

In my experience, this fix is temporary. It may work or the rest of the day or even several days, but the problem eventually comes back. If you know of a more perminant fix that doesn’t involve reformatting the drive and reinstalling everything, let me know.

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.

For those who don’t already know, a CBR encode simply applies the same number of bits to each frame of video, regardless of the material being encoded. The data rate is setup at the start and is applied throughout the encode. What you end up with is a very predictable file size and a very steady, predictable stream of data when playing back the file.

With VBR you also set a data rate at the beginning of the encode, but instead of applying that amount to each frame of video, frames are analyzed to determine how many bits are really needed to recreate the image. The bitrate is actually averaged over the frames, sometimes going lower and sometimes higher then the number you have set.

For example, a talking head over a static background would require less compression then a busy city street full of traffic and people. In the first example, much of the screen from frame to frame stays the same, while in the second example virtually every pixel on the frame will change. What VBR does is apply more data to the frames that need it, and less to frames that can get by with less. As a result, you end up with a very good picture, and with a smaller file size. Sometimes, a significantly smaller file, depending on the material. I recently encoded an 80 minute video in both VBR and CBR for a client. THe CBR file was 267 megs, and the VBR was 169. This is a huge deal when you’re paying for server bandwidth!

I should mention at this point that not every compression program will offer both CBR and VBR, and on some programs it actually costs extra. For example, Sorenson Squeeze includes CBR compression for encoding into the On2 VP6 Codec, but if you want VBR it’s an extra $100.

So you might be wondering why you would ever want to use CBR if VBR creates a better image and smaller file size. Well for one, CBR is a much faster way to encode. Because each frame  does not need to be analyzed, it can take half as long. So if time is an issue, CBR might be the answer. Especially if you’re talking about doing on-line approvals for a job and quality is not as important as having it to the client on time.

There is another reason to consider CBR. Streaming.

If you are encoding files that will be handed off to a client to be used elsewhere (as opposed to creating the files for your own use or site) one question you should always ask is how the files will be used. If they are for the web, they can be streamed using a Flash streaming server, or hosted as a progressive download over a typical http server. Which one is being used affects how you should encode the file.

When a file is being hosted by a streaming server, there is a set bandwidth for the streaming pipe. For example, a service may guarantee that a 500 mbit stream will play without any pausing because they dedicate 500 mbits to each client accessing the file. So with a CBR file, things work well. The server provides the proper bandwidth, and the file stays within that limit. But with VBR, the rate is not constant. And not only does the rate drop when fewer bits can be used, but it can spike to higher then what the dedicated pipe was expecting. The end result is very jerky playback that’s nearly impossible to watch, especially in busy areas of the video.

So the most important thing to take away here is to always ask what the file is being used for. Never make an assumption that even your client knows, often they are just relaying what they were told. Whenever I’m asked for any type of compressed file (Flash or anything else), I always ask how they will be using it, not what technical specs they want. The answer might be PowerPoint, web, CD, laptop playback, or anything in-between. I have found that nearly half the time asking this question (and sometimes several follow up questions) changes what I deliver, and in most cases avoids having to do it over a second time.

Asking pertinent questions is the most important thing you can do for yourself, as well as your client.

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.