Proxied

As I’ve been working on my new feature doc “Unheralded” (web site coming soon). I’ve been struggling with edit technology. 90% of this film is going to be cut on my MacBook Pro at home. Since I’m using Cineform master files, they don’t play back nicely enough on my MBP in Premiere to edit (Adobe’s fault)- they’re fine on my octomac at the studio though. I needed a proxy.

I decided to use this opportunity to learn myself Avid. I picked up a copy of Media Composer for the Non-Profit price of $295 and started importing my Cineform masters (about 25 or so hours of HD). A side benefit to editing with DNxHD 36 proxies is that the files are small enough I can fit my entire project on one set of 500GB drives at RAID 0 on my CalDigit VR Mini. So now my entire editing setup includes one 17″ MBP, power supply and my VR Mini via FW400 (also doubles as the VR Mini’s power supply). Pretty sweet.

Now, Cineform is coming out with a Mac importer for CS4 that will greatly enhance the Premiere/Cineform editing experience. You FCP guys already have decent goods on that (see here and here).

Now boys, play nice!

As far as playing nicely together, Premiere to Avid via EDL works great. Just make sure you don’t use subclips from your Pr sequence. And I spent the rest of my allotted 2 week demo playing around with importing my Avid AAF’s and EDLs into Premiere and relinking to my Cineform masters which I’ll be doing for final color and mastering- I hopefully have an American in Bangkok to work on my VFX and titling using Cinema 4D and Motion. More on that later.

So don’t overlook Premiere as a solid go-between for Avid and After Effects or FCP and After Effects. Adobe’s Dynamic Link makes even the smaller stuff that much easier to work with sans rendering or outputting of more files. You can find out more about that here. Incidentally, my workflow is somewhat backed up by what the guys did on Avatar. (Watch the second vid clip under “making of” here).

New Year’s Workflow

2010 for the blog will have me talking a lot more about the production of Unheralded and continued discussion of non-profit media. I’m looking forward to it!

I’ve got another large teaching resource, a series of promotional web videos (hopefully shot with a VDSLR), and other random work for the non-profit this year, I’m heading to the middle east in May-ish for a pre-production trip on the next documentary and look out for some more workflow goodness with the Cinedeck, Cineform and Avid and Premiere.

Tags: after effects, avid, cineform, dnxhd, documentary, final cut pro, mac, premiere, Production, unheralded, workflow

Amongst editing the Leadership Module, I decided to make an attempt to discover what’s wrong with my Macbook Pro. After pulling the utilities that come with the Applecare Protection Plan, I discovered it’s a bad hard drive. This would also explain the read/write issues and the failure to completely copy.

After talking with the Apple rep, we opened a case, and found a local shop that can do the work. Problem is I need to to get things off that HDD. I back my computers up regularly. It’s a must if you’re going to survive in a digital world. At work, my stuff is normally saved on the network drives. My footage on redundant arrays and the Drobo. And when I’m on the road, Mozy works really, really well. BUT, I haven’t had a chance to back up the most recent work since I got back from Asia.

Due to the read/write issues, it’s taking a very, very long time. But I think it’s still quicker than reconstructing the Pr projects, AE comps and importing everything again. My Finder reports another 18 hours on those. Then, I *should* have everything.

So the laptop will go to the shop. But the new Mac Pro will be here on Thursday. I’m very excited about this. Without going into a lot of detail, getting the dedicated edit machine wasn’t really possible at the time everything came together. it is now. So the new setup will look something like this:

2.93GHZ Mac Pro
6GB RAM (to be updated to 16 at a later date)
640GB OS Drive
4 1TB HDDs for something…(currently mirrored sets of Asia footage)
1TB Lacie for regular Time Machine type backups
4TB Drobo for all dedicated production files and such
RME Multiface audio interface
GeForce 8000GT graphics (only currently supported card for PPro/AE and OSX)
Blackmagic Intensity Pro for Playback and maybe some capture
17″ and 19″ Samsung displays for working
24″ HP monitor for playback/color (couldn’t swing the $$ for the Dreamcolor though)
Spyder calibration
RME Quadmic Mic preamps
Mackie MR5 audio monitors. Although, I might bring the KRK RP5s in from the house for good measure.
Adobe CS3 for video, animation and graphics(upgrade to CS4 maybe)
Nuendo 4 for audio including video post

Most of this is a mish-mash of equipment I own and the ministry owns, but it’s just plain easier to do it here so I’ll be utilizing it all here for the time being. I’m looking forward to completing renders way, way quicker and adding capability for real time playback without rendering while working. This will also free up the iMac which is a power-house machine for anything but video for some of the intensive design and layout work we have going on around here.

Tags: hdd, mac, tech

Well, it’s been a whopping week of production on this end. I returned to town to immediately start editing some 1 minute promos for my church’s missions conference. While I got it done in time, I spent 12 hours on a 1 minute piece. This is a combination of incredibly and abnormally long render times and crash after crash; both application and OS. Video tends to take some time, but that’s unacceptable.

So the Macbook Pro has gone from bad to worse. Not sure why or what’s going on. I can’t seem to find any information on it. It never finishes any sort of file copy to or from the internal HDD, it takes almost five minutes to load any program in addition to approximately seven to ten minutes to boot. If you have any ideas, let me know.

So I resign myself to editing on the iMac in the office. Surely it’s a better performer? Well, not so much. After five hours of editing, it shared this with me:

So, because of budget constraints a new Mac Pro has been donated. It should be here by the end of the week if it ships on schedule. I’ll be donating some of my personal equipment as well. It’ll see more and better use here after I’m long gone anyway.

And that’s life as a media producer in ministry.

Tags: computers, mac, tech, video