Biscardi Creative Blog

Just had to post a quick note on an awesome client session today. As you know we’ve been posting the Foul Water, Fiery Serpent documentary since March of ‘09. And then in December it was decided to completely re-work all the material in the piece. So during the Christmas Break, the client and I did a long distance iChat edit session to do a rough re-blocking of the timeline.

For the past three weeks, I’ve been working to rebuild the entire 90 minute timeline. Well today, the client was here in the suite and we blew right through the first 54 minutes. The main structure I had completed served us well as we really only had to do a major re-working of about a 10 minute section.

We are really getting close now to putting locking this documentary down and getting it off to sound and color design. Days like today I flat out love my job!

I see posts on the Creative Cow weekly and I receive a lot of requests to help folks configure an editing system to meet their needs. Honestly, all one needs to do is find a good, reputable Value Added Reseller. There’s two primary reasons for this.

One - This is what they do, they configure systems for people. So they know what people are buying, what is working and what is not working. Some things that look great on paper and should work, just don’t for whatever reason in the real world. The VARs know what has been installed that had to be replaced because it simply did not work as advertised.

Two - They have to stand behind and fix whatever problems you may have when you get your system. Almost no system arrives with zero issues. Many VARs will fully configure and test a system before it arrives at your facility to make sure it’s working properly. But even there, when it actually gets to your place and you start working on it, issues usually crop up. When this happens, all you want to do is make one call to your VAR and let them deal with getting everything in order. You have work to do, let someone else take care of all the phone calls and repairs.

Lastly, what if you ordered something that just isn’t what you thought it was going to be? It works fine and all, but it doesn’t quite suit your needs. A good VAR will work with the manufacturer to have that product returned for a full refund and offer you alternatives for a replacement product.

So a good VAR offers you the peace of mind that you are getting a good functional system with solid follow-up support. Build a relationship with one of these companies and you’re set for your career. That’s the value of a true VAR vs. the cheapest price on the internet.

I use and recommend the WH Platts company, based out of Charleston, SC and they have offices in several other states. They cover pretty much the entire East Coast. I deal directly with their Atlanta office and representative David Strupp. Been working with these guys almost 8 years now and pretty much everything, and I mean everything, that I order goes through these guys.

Well, we could not overcome the hurdle on our last building, seller refused to pay for a government mandated environmental test, so we moved on. Got a great new real estate agent who’s going to give a quick look at the current inventory of available buildings. We have three lots ready to purchase and build our own facility from scratch but before we do that, we figured it was worth one more look around to see what’s out there.

More soon!

Well, we knew we would hit a snag somewhere along the way with the new building purchase, you always do when it comes to real estate. It might be too much to overcome and if that’s the case, well we move on to the next option.

One of the beauties of working in a buyer’s market, we already have multipe options ready as a backup and our bank has just been tremendous working with us. Would I love to have this first choice building? Sure. But at the same time, if we can’t reach an agreement, well it’s just business and we’ll open up elsewhere.

We’re definitely opening a new, much larger facility in 2010. I’ll let you know exactly where that will be shortly….

In December of ‘08 we installed a Maxx Digital Final Share SAN system consisting of a 16TB array that is shared to 6 workstations via high speed ethernet connectivity. You can read a full article I wrote on the installations at the Creative Cow website.

The primary purpose for this installation was to allow a shared editing environment for three feature length documentaries. We have in the neighborhood of 450 hours of footage (and growing) for all three and our first doc, Foul Water, Fiery Serpent is using around 100 or so hours. All footage is digitized at Apple ProRes 720p/60 via Apple’s Final Cut Pro so we’re using a very low bandwidth format for the edit.

We started really cutting on the project in March of ‘09 and as I have reported both on the Creative Cow website and here on my blog, it has for the most part, been a thing of beauty. I’m cutting on a Mac Pro / AJA Kona 3 workstation while my edit assist is cutting on a 21″ iMac. We broke the doc into 9 segments to make for easier project management and to allow each of us to work on different segments simultaneously.

To give you an idea of the size of this project, we have between 2,800 and 3,600 raw video clips, over 100 music cuts, animations, graphics and voice tracks. So we’re in the neighborhood of 4,000 to 4,500 media files for this project. That’s as big a project as I’ve worked on yet. As I said, the SAN has worked great during the editing process.

However, in the past few months I believe we have found the limits of ethernet based SANs; playback of a large project timeline. In November we finally had a full 98 minute timeline cut of the entire documentary. I could not play the entire timeline without dropping frames. And not just once, it would drop frames multiple times, every time during playback of the timeline. Plenty of speed on the RAID (about 600MB/s or more), plenty of speed on the network (about 100MB/s) but for whatever reason, I was dropping frames throughout the timeline.

Now I don’t believe the length of the timeline is an issue. In my testing I played a 30 minute episode of “Good Eats” in a continuous loop for 3 hours on multiple systems simultaneously. So the system can easily sustain a long playback cycle across multiple systems, let alone on a single Mac Pro workstation. No there has to be something else other than pure speed.

If you’ve read my blog entries you also know that we’ve been dealing for months with an ethernet port issue introduced by Apple with the latest Mac Pros that caused the network disconnect from my Mac. So this problem of dropped frames was thought to be part of the same issue. Over the Christmas Holidays, with help from Small Tree Electronics, we dealt with that issue finally by moving the SAN to the Snow Leopard operating system because Apple finally created a fix to the disconnect issue in the latest updates.

But our dropped frames remain. The SAN is running as fast as ever, but we’re still dropping frames during playback of our 90 minute timelines. From what I can gather, we are the only facility running this large of a project off this type of ethernet SAN. All the other facilities are doing 30 minute or shorter programming and a lot of :30 to :60 spots. In our own shop, we have multiple workstations doing projects of 20 minutes or less with no problems.

How we’re dealing with these dropped frames right now is to export a self contained movie to a local 8TB array that is connected directly to my Mac Pro. This is how I screen the film for the client or folks who come in for reviews. It’s the only way I can play the film without it stopping.

So for whatever reason, it appears to be the sheer project size and the amount of files that the project has to access during playback of the timeline that seems to be the issue. It really shouldn’t matter, but it does appear in our real world application, the system simply does not support playback of an extended timeline from a project with this many files.

It’s a real shame because the system is performing incredibly well overall, we have two series being cut on it and I’ve been able to work with a 2nd editor simultaneously on editing the documentary. But if you can’t play back your main timeline without dropping frames on a large project, well then the system is not made for all editing applications as I originally thought and was led to believe when I made the purchase.

So if you’re working on shorter projects, episodic television, 1 hour projects and need to share media across multiple workstations, this is still a killer deal. Fibre Channel is still the only alternative and you can’t come close to what this system does for the money. We will continue to use this system moving forward on most of our projects.

But for the long form stuff like these documentaries, I’m going to invest in a few more local 8 and 16TB arrays. The primary workstation for each documentary will have its own dedicated local storage and anything that needs to move across to other workstations, we’ll push to the SAN. It’ll make things a little less efficient for the really REALLY big projects, but I’ll have the best of both worlds. Low cost SAN for 90% of our projects. High speed local RAID for the documentaries.

So would I still recommend an Ethernet SAN for you? Absolutely, but go in understanding the limits and make sure it’s right for your application before you buy. I won’t say that this system was a $20,000 mistake, but I would have spent my money a little differently 12 months ago had I known this system would be limited by the documentary. And we all know technology improves almost daily so with any luck, future improvements will allow this type of SAN to even support the really REALLY big projects in the future.

UPDATE 1-21-2010

After some suggestions from colleagues, I mixed down the audio tracks (we had a total of 24) in the timeline and attempted a full timeline playback. We got 38 minutes through the timeline before it dropped frames, but it did not drop frames again. It was a 1 hour 18 minute timeline. So that’s progress. Not exactly efficient since it took a while for the computer to do the mix, but it’s an improvement.

Had a great meeting with the City of Buford planning department to lay out our plans for the new building and that went very well. We’ll open with somewhere between 4800 and 6000 square feet of office space and 2000 to 3200 square feet open stage space that can easily be used as a small studio or insert stage. Even a practice venue for bands, we haven’t decided.

Definitely on opening day it will be our indoor play area with some basketball hoops, golf net and more…. We’re on track with the closing at this time and with any luck will have our grand opening in early Spring!

Keep an eye out on various technology sites and tech blogs as there have been multiple issues reported with the new 27″ iMac computers. From cracked glass in the shipping to overheating with the computers themselves.

I’m set to order 4 of these machines next month so I’m keeping an eye on how Apple is responding to this and what the results are. At the moment Apple seems to have addressed the shipping issue and there is currently a 2 week delay on any orders placed at the Apple website. Not sure if they are fully addressing the overheating issue or not.

Numerous publications have pointed to January as the month Apple will announce their new Tablet computer. But the Wall Street Journal says it will actually ship in March.

http://tinyurl.com/ybzms55

I can already see the questions lining up.

Can I run Final Cut Pro? Does it support 4:4:4 uncompressed HD? How are the render times? Does it make a great espresso? Can Color work on it? So I’m on a set and the Director says he wants to do Green Screen how do I feed the Genesis into the tablet so I can show him what it looks like? If a train leaves Chicago going 45 mph and a train leaves Orlando at 65 mph but we have no idea where they are going, how long until they meet up?

How many of these things do we need to create 3D TV shows?

Time Warner has agreed in principal to pay Fox for free over the air programming. Of course with the end of analog signals, “free over the air” is all but a misnomer today. But this is an interesting development and one that will certainly hit the end viewer in the pocketbook.

Fox has fired the first salvo in moving traditional broadcast networks into the business model of cable networks. With cable TV, networks get paid a set fee for every subscriber to that cable company (or satellite company in the case of DirecTV). You might laugh at 10 cents to 1 dollar per subscriber per month but multiply that by some 200 million television viewers in the US and you can see just how quickly those dimes and dollars add up. Fox’s reasoning for this is that advertising dollars have dropped off due to the glut of competition out there both on television and other media outlets like this internet thing where you’re reading my blog. Time Warner agreeing to a subscription demand, no matter how small, is the opening of the floodgates.

Which floodgates you say? The gate to your pocketbook. Surely it won’t be long before ABC, NBC and CBS all come knocking on Time Warner, and pretty much every other cable / satellite provider, to demand a subscription fee to be no less than what Fox got. So cable / satellite operators will of course pass the fee along to, you guessed it, you and me. See the important thing to remember is that these fees are based on SUBSCRIBERS and not VIEWERS. So while all the advertising that appears on a given network is paid for by the advertisers at a certain rate based on how many eyeballs are on that network, the subscription fee is simply based on any and all subscribers, whether they ever watch your network or not. So it’s pretty much guaranteed money because your viewership doesn’t matter.

It’s an interesting time as “free over the air” TV is definitely about as dead as a doorknob first with the digital transition and now this deal with Fox. I’m sure we’ll hear more from the other networks in the coming weeks. Get your wallet ready, the cable company will accept credit or check……

We signed a contract a few days ago on a new building and if all goes well, we close in February. I knew I would get a good deal on a building in these economic times, but I didn’t imagine just HOW good of a deal. We just happened to find a seller that was equally motivated to sell as we were to buy.

Where others have seen so much negativity this past year, I have continually found opportunities. Yes, it’s a down market, but thanks to solid planning and a very slow but steady build of our business, we were in the right place at the right time to take advantage of the current economic market. It’s scary and exciting at the same time, but we’ve looked this thing over forwards and backwards and just can’t see the negatives in this deal. Best part is, we’ll have additional room left over if some Producers and Editors want to share the space. More details as I can share them.

It’s going to be an exciting 2010!