walter biscardi's Blog

Well, as an update the previous posts about our Final Share SAN, yesterday we installed a new Ethernet card to bypass the new Mac Pro ports altogether, but unfortunately ran into another snag. Final Cut Pro won't even launch with the card in the machine. No clue why at the moment. My guess is some sort of a conflict with one of the other cards that are in there and for whatever reason, FCP is just throwing up when it tries to launch.

So more head scratching and sleuthing for the guys to see what's causing the conflict. Their suggestion was to re-install FCP, but I'm not doing that right now in the middle of all this production and especially since FCP runs perfectly fine with the card removed.

So for the moment, we're dealing with the SAN disconnects and moving on with the edit.

http://store.creativecow.net/p/66/stop_staring_and_start_grading_with_apple...

Get em while you can! :-)

Dan Desmet came by today with one of the new FSI 2470W LED backlight monitors today so I could compare it to our 2450Ws.

So right off the bat, this unit features an RGB LED Matrix backlight vs. the fluorescent backlights of the 2450W. This makes the display lighter, use less power, run cooler and makes it basically "instant ready." The 2450W has to warm up for at least 30 minutes to be fully accurate in color. In addition, the LED backlights are even more precise giving you a wider and more accurate RGB display.

Now before we go any further, no I'm not saying the 2450W is inferior to the 2470W. In fact with the two monitors side by side, feeding the same 720p / 60 ProRes material, they look identical. Cannot tell the difference and of course this speaks to the superior quality of the FSI brand.

What the 2470W represents is FSI's answer to those who absolutely positively must have a 10 bit monitor. Telecine, Film Color Correction and very high end post production processes where an 8 bit panel simply will not suffice. And for those who are cost conscious, and today who isn't, they brought panel in at under $10,000 AND they include the 3G (Dual Link) input STANDARD. I'm not sure any of the other panels out there today offer this as standard equipment and certainly nobody can offer this for under $10k.

Dan brought up a gradient ramp to show the me the difference between the 2450W and the 2470W. There is slight banding visible on the 2450W. None on the 2470W.

For 90% of us out there, including me, the 2450W is the monitor you want in your edit suite. We don't need that extra $4,000 of features or quality especially if you're working in video production. I'm designing a new facility and in 8 of the suites we'll have a combination 2450W's and 1770W's because the image quality is superb and the 8bit quality of the panel suits our needs.

But I will admit that after seeing this panel today, I just may have to pony up for one in our new Color DI suite. Depends on where the budget falls.

See that's one thing I love about the entire FSI team. Even though this new monitor is out and it's pushing $9,000 they're not in a hurry to sell it to you just to make a profit. When you call or live chat with these guys, the first thing they want to know is what are you going to do with the monitor. If it looks like you really don't need to spend the extra $4,000, they're the first to tell you. And of course with the 30 day money back guarantee, you can always return one monitor and purchase the other.

After several months of debugging, it looks like the newest and fastest Mac Pros have serious issues with the Final Share SAN system. For whatever reason, the Mac Pro keeps disconnecting itself from the SAN, usually at the end of a render, though it can happen when launching FCP, launching a project that uses the SAN or a myriad of other reasons.

It started out happening once in a while but it's at the point now where it has really put a crimp in our feature documentary and causing delays in deliveries to our client. Because it's so unstable, I'm actually going to move the entire project to a local SAN for the remainder of the project through completion.

All evidence points directly at Apple for causing the issues with something in the latest Mac Pros. Unfortunately I just can't wait any longer for a solution and will be looking to bring in another local 8TB RAID to complete the job. We'll decide at a later date whether to keep or replace the entire SAN system.

So here in this section of the Atlanta area, our cable provider is Charter Communications. About 4 months ago we dropped their TV service that we’ve had since about 1998 because their HD picture left a lot to be desired. Specifically, we had about 12 HD channels and of those, only 2 were sharp on any given day. The others were a mess of very obvious compression artifacts. And at one point we had Charter install what was supposedly an HD DVR but it was obviously some really REALLY bad analog DVR that did some horrible upscaling of SD material to make it look like quasi HD. The standard HD receiver was far superior to the “HD DVR” and we had that DVR removed almost immediately.

So we switched to DirecTV after discussing the lack of HD programming and poor picture with a fellow colleague in television production. He told me that not only did DirecTV have about 100 HD channels, but they were all clean HD signals. He’s been with DirecTV about 10 years now so I knew he was pretty happy with the service. He was right. The HD signals are clean across all the channels, including the “On Demand” channels. And the dual recording DVR is absolutely fantastic. My favorite features so far? The customer service has been outstanding when I’ve had to make a call. The ability to program the DVR with my iPhone when we’re out and remember something we want to record. I LOVE that feature!

But this is a lesson in poor customer service Walt. So far it just sounds like you got tired of your service from Charter and made the switch to DirecTV. End of story. Well, here’s where it gets interesting and what follows is without a doubt the absolute worst customer service I have ever experienced.

While we dropped the cable TV service, we did retain the high speed internet service from Charter. I’m paying for 20mbps, have been for years, but due to bandwidth issues that have always dogged Charter, we rarely get speed over 8mbps. So I finally got fed up with this and Charter sent a technician out here to look at the lines. This was at 5:00pm on a Friday evening.

He did a few things, then went outside to look at the cable connections. Our speeds jumped to 20mbps on the download. Well that was interesting, but of course I know that every time we re-set our modem, our speeds jump right up, only to settle back down to about 8mbps within the next 24 hours. But at least while he’s there, the speeds are good. We say goodnight to the technician and head out to a dinner engagement.

9:30pm we turn on the TV in our family room. No satellite signal. It’s a clear night, nothing to interfere with the signal. So I go up to the bedroom. No satellite signal. Grab a flashlight and walk outside to the cable connections. The digital splitter that was installed by DirecTV to connect the satellite dish to our TV’s has been removed and the four cables are just sitting there. The Charter Communications technician removed the DirecTV splitter and then stole it from our property. This is incredible.

Call Charter Communications help line immediately. There is no supervisor available, no one to help us at this hour. The operator says she will file a “damage report” and a supervisor will call back in 24 to 48 hours. But call back in the morning to see if I can get in touch with someone at that time.

I call back on Saturday morning at 8am. The operator sees the damage report in my file, but we have to “follow protocol” and wait for a supervisor to call me back in 24 to 48 hours. I cannot be put through to a supervisor by this operator. There are no plans to send a technician to my property until the supervisor calls me back. She tells me it was an “honest mistake” by the technician. An honest technician would inform the customer that he/she removed a splitter from the outside of the house so you now have 4 TV cables just hanging loose out there, is that ok?

I call back on Saturday afternoon around 3pm. Once again I’m told we have to “follow protocol” and no one has called back.

Sunday afternoon at 1pm I go to Home Depot and pick up a digital splitter and reconnect the DirecTV signal myself.

It is now Tuesday morning at 8am and have not received any phone call from any supervisor at Charter Communications. We’re heading towards 96 hours waiting on that 48 hour phone call to discuss the theft of personal property from my house by a technician working for Charter Communications. Nevermind that the technician had no right to even be touching any of the TV gear.

I would call the police and report the theft, but it is really worth it over a $12 part. Charter certainly doesn’t seem to think so.

So if you really, REALLY want to lose a customer, simply follow the example outlined above. And if you want to check out DirecTV’s offerings, they’re still running killer deals like the one we have.

http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/index.jsp

Just had a great demo of CatDV 8 which is a media management tool and much much more. After seeing Final Cut Server in action a few months ago, I can already tell this thing seems much much easier for the end user to use. The fact that it can be used in the field and tie directly back to the main server is incredible in and of itself.

Clients can view their proxy files over the internet directly off our server? Cool! No more window burn DVDs!!! Yay!

Due to our frantic production schedule I don't really have time to play with it right now, but over the holiday break, I intend to download that 14 day trial and really get in to testing all the details. But wow, I thought CatDV was just a simple, low end tool. It's anything but. Can't wait to really try this out, especially as we plan out our new facility and improving our data management.

http://www.squarebox.co.uk/

One of the best short films I've ever seen. Thanks to my buddy Kathy for passing it along.

My edit suite runs two 25' DVI extenders, VERY heavy duty extenders that were about $120 each. This suite has run with the G5 Quad 2.5, the Mac Pro Quad 3.0 and the Mac Pro Octo 3.2 with zero issues running two DVI monitors and the extenders.

Now I get the $7,000 top of the line Apple Octo Core machine with the ATI 4870 graphics card which of course Apple mandates with one regular DVI port and one Mini DVI port. I got the adapter that allows me to run two standard DVI monitors. The one connected to the Mini DVI port is not coming on. We even switched the cables in the back of the machine and only the regular DVI port is putting out an image to the monitors.

Now we're going to have to come up with another workaround. If you have a "special monitor" (i.e. Apple LED Display) that requires a "special DVI port" because you don't want to pay the licensing fees for regular DVI, why don't you create an adapter cable the OTHER way around? Regular DVI to the Mini DVI required by the Apple monitor?

Just installed FCP 7 on one of our iMacs and if I try to do a ProRes Easy Setup, everything greys out and I can select anything. So I selected an HDV Easy Setup and manually went into the Audio / Video Settings to switch everything over.

We have the iMac networked to a SAN and we do all the capturing via our AJA Kona 3 systems, but we can also edit on the iMacs as needed. Guess Apple needs to fix this because what if you're working in a tapeless format that doesn't require a capture card for ingest? Need to be able to select a ProRes easy setup even without a capture card.

In case you haven't read the light grey print on Apple's website....

Mac OS X Snow Leopard requires an Intel-based Mac.

No whining, no griping, if you haven't upgraded to an Intel Mac, then stay on Leopard and keep working away. When the time is right, you will be able to upgrade to an Intel Mac and Snow Leopard at the same time.

Oh and Snow Leopard is only $29 to upgrade from Leopard so that's pretty cool. No $129 upgrade fee or whatever is has been for the past few OS updates.