Small Facility Setup - help / advice

[shannyla]

Smoke translates scaling, text and video layers from the FCP timeline very well when using XML. No flattening of the timeline is needed. Also coping all used footage to a new conform folder via the Media Manager in FCP and saving the XML into this folder helps a lot too. Having FCP and Smoke on the same machine makes an XML conform a great experience, especially with ProRes444 files.

Hans

Agreed on all points, I'm thinking more of the room occupation. What do you do when you have client doing a long edit at a low rate, when you have clients that will pay much more for an online being blocked by the long, low profit offline edit.

 

[Steve Johnson]

Hi Steve

Main thing that jumps out at me is that you are proposing running two softwares (Avid DS and 3DSMax) on Macs when they would be much much happier running on something like an HP Z800.

I get that you've got the Mac love thing going on, but those two bits of software in particular are fairly demanding of the platform they are on. DS also needs an Nvidia Quadro card, that's a pre-requisite.

Don't get me wrong, I've run every bit of Windows post-production software you can imagine on the Mac Pro that's under my desk for testing purposes, but for production use with a client in the room I wouldn't personally use Boot Camp.

The other issue is that you're proposing running the finishing software (Smoke, DS) on the same machines as your editing software, when you can get a much better hourly rate for the finishing systems. At least you can in London. I left Glasgow 25 years ago and have no real idea what the market is like there so you may have a business model that could make that work.

You won't be able to calibrate the Panasonic with the Display 2 probes, as you need a non-contact probe such as the far more upmarket Hubble to accurately calibrate plasma screens. You should also budget for good calibration software, which tends to be far more expensive than you are expecting. The Panasonic is fantastic however, we use them in all our grading suites, where they replaced Sony BVM-D24 CRTs.

Last thing I've noticed is that you have a Tangent CP200 down as the control surface for your colour room. Most obvious issue is that neither Resolve or Smoke support the CP200. I would either look at DaVinci's own control surface, which will obviously only work with Resolve, or Avid's Euphonix MC Color, which presently only works with Smoke but I would suggest is a shoe-in for the next panel supported by Resolve, and Avid in Media Composer.

Hi Shannyla,

Thanks for your comments.

The Mac thing is because I have the machines already and there is not an additional expense. As you can appreciate, all the specs above will cost, so I have to watch what I am doing with the £!

The VFX 3dS Max stations are a stage 2 type of thing, so I am out on them at the moment! Just wanted to gauge and your comments are noted.

With the finishing, there is nothing up north that I can find - unless you know somewhere north of the border - am looking at options here...

I was thinking with the calibration to bring someone in to calibrate the monitors on a regular basis but no idea of cost on this also. Any thoughts?

Control Surface - give the type of client initially, I might just opt for the Tangent Wave which isn't great but does work with Resolve, so that might be the option initially.

Steve

 

[Bob Gruen]

I see your proposal as spending a lot of money to be on a Mac platform. I really like Macs, but I've moved to Windows to run Adobe products more cost effectively.

I'd recommend having a local computer guru build you Windows based computers using Tyan 7025 Motherboards, Adaptec Series 5 RAID cards, WD Caviar Black 2TB drives, nVidia Quatro video cards, and 10-bit HP monitors. Going this route you will not need Kona cards at all, You can get a lot more disk locally in each computer (up to 24 disks internal, no fiber required), and you can probably get 2 Red Rockets into each workstation.

I didn't wade through all the suggestions, but I didn't see tape mentioned anywhere. You need tape backups to rotate media out of the facility. If you go Mac the required ATTO card will take up an 8-bit slot in a Mac Pro, which I'm not sure you have available. If you were on Windows the Adaptec RAID card might drive an external tape drive, but even if it didn't adding a cheap 'Best Buy' PC to serve as a backup server would be an easy thing to do. In fact, Windows XP or Server 2000 have better (native) tape support and would be a better overall solution (and would still work with Macs, just not as easily).

Finally, which ever platform you choose you want to use 'managed' switches to team your Ethernet connections.

Bob

 

[Steve Johnson]

Smoke translates scaling, text and video layers from the FCP timeline very well when using XML. No flattening of the timeline is needed. Also coping all used footage to a new conform folder via the Media Manager in FCP and saving the XML into this folder helps a lot too. Having FCP and Smoke on the same machine makes an XML conform a great experience, especially with ProRes444 files.

Hans

Hans,

Have had a look at Smoke, and all things in, it look great and will be an addition. Given the pot of money and everything else, the budget won't stretch to that at the moment - but I'll put it on the list of things to move up to.

Thanks for the heads up about it - wasn't something I thought of.

Regards

Steve

 

[Steve Johnson]

I see your proposal as spending a lot of money to be on a Mac platform. I really like Macs, but I've moved to Windows to run Adobe products more cost effectively.

I'd recommend having a local computer guru build you Windows based computers using Tyan 7025 Motherboards, Adaptec Series 5 RAID cards, WD Caviar Black 2TB drives, nVidia Quatro video cards, and 10-bit HP monitors. Going this route you will not need Kona cards at all, You can get a lot more disk locally in each computer (up to 24 disks internal, no fiber required), and you can probably get 2 Red Rockets into each workstation.

I didn't wade through all the suggestions, but I didn't see tape mentioned anywhere. You need tape backups to rotate media out of the facility. If you go Mac the required ATTO card will take up an 8-bit slot in a Mac Pro, which I'm not sure you have available. If you were on Windows the Adaptec RAID card might drive an external tape drive, but even if it didn't adding a cheap 'Best Buy' PC to serve as a backup server would be an easy thing to do. In fact, Windows XP or Server 2000 have better (native) tape support and would be a better overall solution (and would still work with Macs, just not as easily).

Finally, which ever platform you choose you want to use 'managed' switches to team your Ethernet connections.

Bob

Thanks Bob,

The Mac thing is that we already have access to these machines, so taking a large chunk of computer costs down really helps - working with what you have and being creative.

Thanks for the thoughts.

Tape - good point! I had it in my head to have a LTO 4 machine in possibly an "ingest" room and backups being made to that. Thanks for the reminder.

Steve

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

Hans,

Have had a look at Smoke, and all things in, it look great and will be an addition. Given the pot of money and everything else, the budget won't stretch to that at the moment - but I'll put it on the list of things to move up to.

Thanks for the heads up about it - wasn't something I thought of.

Regards

Steve

I'm sure you have a business plan. I decided to invest into Smoke on Mac based on these figures:

Smoke on Mac costs roughly 12K EUR plus 2K annually for maintenance. I figure an edit suite booked 10 day per months, 9 months in a year. That's all together 90 days per year. Pretty conservative, I recon.

To return your investment of a Smoke on Mac license in a year you need 12k plus 2K = 14K in 90 days which equals 155 EUR/Pounds per day. Now Smoke may be a system that will stay with us the next 3 years like your MacPros probably will. This again leads to the equation: 12k plus 2K, plus 2K, plus 2K = 18K devided by 270 (three years) edit days. The Smoke on Mac investment will add 66.66 EUR/Pounds per day to your investment.

Now the question is: will your possible charge for an edit day on Smoke be more worth than 66.66 pounds per day or not?

The answer is easy.

The implementation in real life business is not as easy. You need qualified operators which can turn out to be a major obstacle. But with any business postproduction is people business,

Hans

PS: Luckily enough I managed the ROI for Smoke on Mac with one job. But apart from the software all other components, including a learn-eager operator (me) were there already.

 

[Warren Eagles]

Go for the BMD Ultrascope for the grading room, you need decent scopes the Resolve internal ones slug performance. The Ultrascope runs on a PC and is ideal for grading

Warren
Colorist Australia

 

[Benjamin Rowland]

I've done a lot of audio mixing for TV and I can highly recommend two brands of audio monitors:
JBL and Genelec

I've got the JBL LSR4300 series in one edit suite and Genelecs in another. They're both incredible monitors.