Slow weeks past

Indeed, there have been painfully slow times just passed. The football show continues, although painfully slowly, and beyond that work has ground to a depressing halt.
Mac Pro is half paid for, although its probably going to be now that it all slows done. Still waiting on Apex to pay, that will be a huge weight off my shoulders.
Have been experimenting as of late with converting HD to any format readable and editable in Windows – honestly this has been a fight not worth fighting by any stretch of the imagination. Using compressor and Quicktime Pro – the same version installed on both machines – we have been able to get hardly anything to work. Plus we’ve been enjoying the frustration of no proper mass storage solution to be used between the machines. Currently using a FAT32 drive to go between the systems, we are also having to deal with the incredibly inconvenient 4Gb file size limit. Bah. Initially I provided the unaltered HDV 720p24 in a mov container, which would play back audio but no picture, even with Qwuicktime Pro 7.2 on Windows. On the Mac it played fine (albeit a bit choppy on the PowerBook G4).
Next I tried a DV codec in a mov container, DV progressive at 24fps, but once again hit a similar wall, wherein the footage had to be covnerted to play back correctly – and the audio was wildly out of sync.
Finally, I provided the most basic, universal file I possibly could. Mov container, DV codec, interlaced, 25fps (50 fields), anamorphic widescreen. The quality was still good, and it wasn’t mission critical footage, so that was okay. The point here being had it been mission critical, and had time been of the essence, we would have been screwed a little by it.
Herein is my problem as an editor – I was unprepared and unaware, I had no idea what software he had at his end, a massive oversight on my own part. I also initially prepared a file that was the full 40 minutes at 25p, however it was over 8Gb – and thusly would not fit on the FAT formatted disk.

Something to consider truly.

Mac Pro revisions are expected in November using the new Penryn CPUs, not 100% on it but they may all be Quad Core, and the price shift should change the standard CPUs to a dual 2.81GHz Configuration – also, the highest end Quad Core machines should peak at dual quad-core 3.11GHz, a modest improvement but good nontheless. Assuming these new 45nM CPUs use the same Socket 771 then any current Mac Pro should support a simple drop in upgrade of the existing CPUs to newer quad core Xeons with a whopping 12Mb Cache. This is probably something I will consider in the near future with my own Mac Pro once it has arrived and my finances are in order.

Gotta reboot now

J

Mac Pro negotiations have started

We may have routed the renting game altogether. I am currently in negotiations for a Mac Pro which should hopefully cover us and finally end this painful charade. The gentleman in question has made quite a reasonable offer for price, however, there appears to be some competition at the last second for it. This has left me uncomfortable but unmoved – if I can bid higher I will, my main priority is securing a machine and playing the enormous game of catch up that has laid itself ahead of me.
That said, I’m back onto those funerals…

J

Fire Away!

Well, the shoot with the Round Earth Theatre Co. on Tuesday went (mostly) without a hitch. I accidentally broke an 800w globe in a redhead, but otherwise things went pretty smoothly. We were chroma keying, which was a bit of a battle initially. Being my first shoot on a chroma set, we made sure we had more than we needed – but that was still within the budget of the shoot. Creating the even lighting was difficult initially, but after some playing around we eventually achieved a very decent result. Not likely to win any awards, but not so bad for the news studio/satellite feed look we were going for. Creating the assets will be the next challenge, but I’m confident that shouldn’t be too difficult.
That said, this week’s episode of the Premier League Football Show was simultaneously a pleasingly smooth edit, and then a horrific stuff-up. I master every episode to DVCPRO50 to ensure minimal quality loss, and then that DVCPRO50 master is put off onto Mini DV tape (I am assuming that it would be transcoded to DV for the Mini DV tape). However, because my laptop is still not set up correctly (and my Hard Drive situation worsens by the second) I was left at the end of the football show edit with less than 6Gb of drive space available. I rendered the episode out to DVCPRO50 as I usually do, and then deleted the project files to free up some valuable virtual memory. However – when it was played back, the DVCPRO50 file stutters all the way through – mostl likely because of my lack of VM space at render time) and the problem was thusly unrepairable. Also – black frames had appeared in the episode (again!) and I had accidentally left out a critical bit of footage that had to be spliced back in. So – some frustrating time later…its finally done, stuttering away, its sent off a second time.
This made me all the more eager to get onto what was going on with the Mac Pro. We were trying RentSmart, thinking that this would be an easy way to finance a Mac Pro & to really get back on my feet and stuck into editing on a machine that would be easily fast enough to breeze through my work. Wrong! RentSmart refused me business, at which point I moved on to my employer Mr Video, asking him to get it (since I’d be using it for his business anyway) and I’d make the payments (that was fine with me). What happens? They screw him around too. Week after week passes, and no love. Mr Video is calling managers and sending through all kinds of details, just so we could pay exorbitant prices on renting a computer! I got a loan for 3x as much done and approved within five days, and I was on basically no income at the time. Absolutely ridiculous. Of course, had I not needed it desperately, they probably would have approved it on the spot…well, that’s being pessimistic, but its frustrating all the same. Greek Media (who produce the Premier League show) have put us through to some people they lease their gear off, and now we’re getting onto them in the hope that they will sort us out quicker than RentSmart would. After getting everything sorted and approved, I still have to wait for the machine to be shipped here – and when you’re producing a show that goes on air once a week, every day matters. We’re fast approaching the next episode, episode 10, and it will be the third I’ve done on my unprepared laptop. It is excrutiatingly painful – I really cannot reccomend anyone jump from a dual processor machine with five configured Hard Disks to a laptop with one FireWire bus, and internal 4200RPM drive and one external drive. I was meant to have my FireWire 800 RAID prepared by now, which would have made all this a walk in the park. Ah well.
So – hopefully the Mac Pro arrives next week, fingers crossed. Straight away it’ll be armed with 4Gb RAM and over 1.65Tb of Hard Disk space. I pre-ordered one of the new apple keyboards too, hoping that’ll be here by the end of this week.

In closing – do not use RentSmart. If they don’t want money, what hope does anyone have of getting things through them??

Well – funerals and a soccer cover to do now. Check my blogroll – I’ve added the website of my friend and filmmaker Brad McGinniss, so that will keep updates of our progress on his projects.

Justin

Still no Mac Pro…but coming…

Working still, but its become INCREDIBLY slow. Funerals used to take a few hours, now take an entire day. I never realised how much scope there was to do other stuff with 2 CPUs. With my laptop as it is currently, if I even dare to open TextEdit whilst capturing or whatever, BAM! Dropped frames, aborted capture. I never really fully appreciated the simple power of two 1.25GHz CPUs on a single 167MHz Front Side Bus….really, it was quite amazing…
This PowerBook is quite nice though. For editing, it flies compared to the TiBook. The plan will be that anything I have to edit on the road will be rendered via ethernet utilising my forthcoming Mac Pro’s quad Xeon processing power. That’ll save on the headaches in rendering times. And ALL Motion based content will be handled on the Mac Pro. The Radeon 9700 Mobility and the 1.5GHz G4 really just can’t cut it.
Working on a second Funeral, hope to render overnight tonight.

Work is really picking up, great since the Football show ends soon. Maybe we should cover Futsal also? I might suggest it. Have a job with a local theatre company, shooting within a week I think, also will be working on the project I discussed earlier with Brad McGinniss. He’s expressed interest in helping me with my project if I can get in on its feet, so I might seriously have to start looking at that when the football show is done. Could be a great opportunity whilst I’m not busy. Also going to be finishing a project I shot a month or two ago, they have almost finished the 5.1 sound mix, which means that the soundtrack will be awfully sexy.

Back to this funeral, got bills to pay

Justin

G5 Quad = no, Mac Pro = YES

Well, RentSmart is the path I have now chosen, and I will tread the soil of the Intel-based Macintosh. The model I’ll be getting (Quad Xeon 2.66GHz/3Gb/Radeon X1900 512Mb/1.5Tb) will be over five times faster than my old editing machine (if geekbench is anything to go by). Working will become so efficient and easy I may be able to take breaks occasionally! Although the lack of small renders means I’ll be forced to continue working when normally I’d take a five-ten minute breather….every few minutes.
The other upside of this RentSmart scheme is that for a few bucks more, she’s fully insured against theft and accidental damage. Plus it is 100% tax deductable thanks to it being a work machine.
Working on the Football Show at the moment – Episode 8. Its looking a bit poorly at the moment, but the time constraints, and the laptop I’m working on, seem to be working together to ensure victory can never ensue.

Well, back to it

J

Forgotten how fun…

I’d forgotten how fun installing all the media for Final Cut Studio 2 was…especially when running on the slot-loading drive in my PowerBook. Currently installing to a spare HDD that I have, that’s been chucked into my external case. The bugger is – 1 firewire 400 external case and four hard drives that require regular rotation. The sooner I get a new machine the better I say!
Found a quad G5 on eBay just now, but still waiting on Apex to pay for the recent work in Ballarat…so nothing on that currently. Otherwise I’ll jump on a Mac Pro via RentSmart to do me ’til I finish paying off my camera and invest in a hardcore editing station.
Installing the media for FCS2 at the moment…painfully slow on my laptop. Gotta get the Blues Brothers project finished today and this is proving to be yet another hiccough.
Plans are coming together for next year’s football show. We are in accordance that the end highlight was not working so well, so we’re considering other avenues for the credits. We don’t want a recurring credit sequence, but want to keep it flowing and consistent. We’re also looking on focusing on more team profles and player interviews to keep it fresh and interested, and to probe the sport deeper than just the surface – ie. watching the games.

Back to work now – lots to do in less time than I anticipated.

Justin

Peter Gunn Theme

Work goes slowly – last night was a bit difficult – the PowerMac finally gave up the ghost. Dicovered the problem – the boot drive was overheating in the spot it was in (thanks to poor ventilation on the part of the G4 MDD) and warped itself to death. Real bummer. Although it proved not to be a hardware issue on the part of the G4, I’m not going to put in another drive just to have it cook, and I can’t work limited to just the one internal hard drive. So upgrade it is. I’m confident that the machine will run fine with a single drive in the front drive bay (with adequate clearance) and the software RAID (which runs external of the case) but with all the DVD disk images I need immediate storage and access to, I’ll have to bite the bullet and upgrade.
Looking at two options thus far – go the prohibitavely expensive route and get a Mac Pro (stock config) and run a software RAID internally, or get a second hand G5 and blow a grand on an external FW800 RAID (which I will be able to switch to my PowerBook if there is a hardware failure on the part of the G5). Decisions decisions, and of course, no cash to back them up at the moment.
Blues Brothers project is alive and well however, edit is almost complete. A full rough edit has been achieved, and will be moving on to sound post and applying the visual effects that the project requires. This may take a little longer than first anticipated on the laptop – but at least it is achievable.

Been given a break on all other projects for the time being whilst I sort out a new machine which has been a good break. I’m hoping to use this time to get some of my more straightforward edits put together (the ones that don’t require special effects) before I get back into it. At the current rate of things, its looking like the eighth episode of the Premier League Football show will be done on the laptop. I guess the regular crashing will offset whatever loss in speed I’ve taken from using a single CPU computer. Only time will tell.

Justin