Do It Yourself 6TB Video Array on a Mac

With high definition, multi camera productions and emergent video formats all the digital video rage, power video users are refocusing efforts on computer storage.  Last year, Norco Technology approached this author to write an article building and testing a storage system around the Norco DS-1220, a 12 bay, port multiplier SATA chassis for the Do-It-Yourself Mac video community.  A test regime to benchmark and field test using Final Cut Pro Studio 2 (FCP ST2) was devised.  In August 2008, Fini.tv brought me on board to edit one of four 1 hour segments(1), build and manage a shared storage system for five FCP ST2 workstations. This project would ultimately create 3.9TB of material with the four programs edited simultaneously and delivered under a tight deadline.  The opportunity to build and test a secondary storage system of this caliber in a real post production environment was a rare coincidence and a valuable test.

Scene vs. Display Referred Profiles

Color management has been improved in After Effects CS4 to now recognize and compensate for the differences between “scene-referred” and “display-referred” color profiles. The short explanation is “Don’t worry - CS4 is merely more accurate now. Leave the option File > Project Settings > Compensate for Scene-referred Profiles enabled when using color management, and in some scenarios your output will now be even more accurate than it was before.” For a longer explanation, read on; these changes affect Photoshop CS4 as well.

Large Scale Final Cut Pro Installations, Part II

This is the second of a two part series on large-scale Final Cut Pro installations. Pie Town Productions currently produces nearly twenty TV shows, including Design on a Dime, Hammer Heads and (my favorite!) Color Correction. I spoke to Scott Templeton, one of the founders of Pie Town Productions and to Dana Besnoy, Pie Town’s VP of Post. We discussed the workflows and standard operating procedures that allow Pie Town to pump out around 600 broadcast TV shows each year using about 100 seats (we have 30 bays, and a staff of about 75 people total. 100 seats is a high estimate) of Final Cut Pro running on a massive SAN.

PVC: What’s the key to media management with Final Cut Pro?

ST: The key to us in media management is experience and knowledge. When you know the limitations of something, rather than yelling at the ocean because waves are crashing onto my beach, well, learn what those limitations are and how to work with that.  In an operation like ours where we have such a lot of material that we deal with, it’s really starting with the basics of understanding first and foremost how FCP handles new clips. 

Premiere Pro C4 and After Effects CS4 Workflow Using the NEW Native RED R3D Plug-in

The RED Importer plug-in provides full native support of RED raw files including the ability to work with RED media at resolutions from 256 up to 4k. RED files can be imported directly into Premiere Pro and After Effects and worked with in a variety of frame rates, aspect ratios and resolutions. Dynamic Link can be used to serve frames directly from Premiere Pro to After Effects and sequences can then be exported using the Render Queue in After Effects.

Resolution can be assigned for RED footage as desired by accessing a global RED Source Settings dialog in Premiere Pro. For example, a low-resolution setting such as 512 or 1k can be assigned to RED media with higher native resolution. Lower resolutions provide increased playback performance during editing. Later, when editing is completed, a higher resolution sequence can be created and clips can be reset to higher native resolutions, such as 4k, for high quality export, grading and effects workflows .

On Artbeats.com: Intro to Color Finesse

As more of us acquire our own media and import it directly into our computers, the art of color correction becomes more important. However, many - particularly non-editors - shy away from it. Well, if you have a recent copy of After Effects, you have no excuse, as a very powerful color correction tool - Synthetic Aperture’s Color Finesse (CF) - comes bundled free with the program. This article we just wrote for Artbeats.com will give you a quick tour of the CF interface, and then walk you through a sample correction using footage archived with the article so you can compare your results.

Click here to download a .zip file containing a PDF of the “Introduction to Color Finesse” plus associated footage.

By they way, credit where credit is due: Steve Hullfish’s own color correction videos here on PVC are what prompted us to get back into color correction ourselves. His recent video on using Color Finesse is what prompted us to focus more in our piece for Artbeats on using the Waveform Monitor rather than the familiar old Histograms.

Avid Gems 9

This column on Avid tips and tricks was originally designed to include hidden “gems” from the Avid user manual, but today we’re going to feature a bunch of nice “gems” from one of our readers, Josh Petok as well as a stream-of-conscious of gems from me. Manuals? We don’t need no stinkin’ manuals for these gems!
 
Josh’s gems are definitely included in the list of tips that I know I learned at one point but I’d stored them away in that section of my brain that has the giant dust bunnies and is crawling with spiders. That doesn’t mean that they’re not great tips! Far from it. These are excellent tips and Josh has reminded me that I need to store them somewhere closer to the frontal lobe with the important information like my wife’s birthday and our anniversary.

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