Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

ProRes Encoding on PC?

Brian,

RE: Antivirus Software

I highly recommend ESET NOD32 Antivirus... It does not take over you whole system like Norton and Mcafee. It's small, does not take up much system resources unlike Norton and Mcafee.
 
Call me old-fashioned in a way, but I still do all my ProRes generation on a Mac. I'll output 16bit DPX when finishing on Windows and then the Mac pushes that through Compressor. I'll have to look into Miraizon… 6 months ago this was all still a huge pain in the ass to do ProRes on Windows. Scratch and Quantel will do it with a properly licensed encoder.

As for Antivirus. Norton, Mcafee, etc.. they all suck. Most of them are bloat-ware, malware themselves and all the good virus creators to a fair job of working around the common AntiVirus systems. ESET and GriSoft are not too bad. GriSoft offers a free version, but it doesn't have the same level of protection and once again, it's become popular enough that virus creators work around it -- or at least the free version.

I know it goes against most recommended practices, but I tend to not run any AV software on my Windows systems. I like LavaSoft's tools if I do any web surfing or email checking on a Windows system, but I tend to not. I keep 99% of all my web and email use on Mac and Linux. For the Windows systems, your best solution is regular backups and proper security, sandboxing and isolation. And keep them up to date! If you're going to go out on the web to anything but updates from known companies like Adobe or RED, better have protection. It's annoying as ever, but also turn up your security settings so the stupid thing will ask you for permission to run any sort of ActiveX control or whatnot, or just set it to automatically deny. Most of that crap out there is for tracking, spying purposes anyway.

Good security is your friend. Make sure you have different admin passwords on all your systems and hardware and switch up admin usernames here and there. Don't operate from administrator accounts. Monitor inbound and outbound traffic through your router or gateway for anything suspicious. Most viruses or malware these days are usually data-miners that need to connect to outside servers to share info. Most every malicious software still has to get some sort of confirmation in order to install or execute. The vast majority of system infections come through email and not general web surfing, but all of it can be a risk. If you go looking for warez or porn, don't be surprised if you bring home something else. You might think that's a "well, duh.." sort of statement, but try having a bunch of employees that you can't watch ever nanosecond.
 
Last edited:
+1 for Jeff's long AV advice. I run MS AV as a minor safeguard because it's lightweight and about half the protection that you need. But the rest of the protection you need is you. Don't click on suspicious links. Don't click on anything in an email from an unknown source. Don't install freeware, warez or shareware that's not from a reputable source. I've stated virus free this way since 1983. And, due to long standing email addresses, I get over 500 spams a day.
 
Last edited:
thanks for all the input guys...yea its a tough call to make when your looking for one system to do it all...until resolve works itself out on the PC side i think i will try and wait out a decision for them, or a rocket x to arrive. also going to talk to the people who actually hire me, most of which trust macs more. i think at a certain point your cart can be as powerful as you want, but unless it can earn the trust and respect of the DPs/producers that hire you, won't even matter that its more powerful. i still think those laptops at mediaworkstations.net look awesome....apple won't be giving me dual 8gb vram cards in a laptop until 2020 I'm pretty sure...and for me the form factor really kind of matters as far as trying to get things mobile as possible. also talking with those guys working on a prototype cart for the trash can still the dragon fire system i had talked about before. as stupid as it is i like the systems that have little to no set up and super powerful...ideally aiming for mac if i can wait out that prototype to be finished since that seems like the best way to move a trash can around on sets..

edit:

heres the link to the PC version of the dragon fire systems... power and mobility in a case, thats just awesome! can't wait to see what they cook up for the trash cans!

http://dragon-fire-systems.com
 
If you build a reputation for yourself, DP's and producers won't care about your equipment and cart. They shouldn't anyway. They should care about your work and the end result. At the end of the day, can you deliver all the dailies or rushes and hand-off drives in the way they want? All while spot-checking footage, ensuring data integrity, etc... If so, then they shouldn't care if you're using a 30ft. trailer full of Amiga 4000's and i486's running OS/2 to do the work.

Where I have seen productions get judgmental about equipment is when they're paranoid that a DIT can't keep up with the camera crews. And all too often, that is a valid concern. But that usually falls back on the production for not spelling out their needs and looking into all their options. All too often, DP's, producers, directors, etc.. are not as tech-savvy as they probably should be and most still make assumptions based on old info or even FUD from 3 to 5 years ago. As a working DIT, you have to be prepared explain your capabilities and your limitations. Even if you don't have the full cart or necessary hardware to take a certain job, that equipment can be rented in larger markets. You may not be able to make money on the hardware rental portion or coordinating that with the production, but it can be worth it to gain the experience and trust of others in the industry. Like many pros in this industry, you don't need to own every bit of kit. Like the majority of working DP's, they often do not supply camera and lighting packages to productions. That has only become more common with the whole indie owner-operator movement due to lower purchase prices and rapidly evolving tech.
 
Brian Shephard said:
Awesome! I'm actually getting ready to switch from Mac to PC. My new computer arrives on Friday. I've read about Miraizan on these boards a few times and am definitely going to get it this weekend. Thanks, Phil, for the visual explanation.
On a quick side note (not to get too off topic), do you have a good recommendation for virus protection (other than staying with Mac)?
Click to expand...

There are a lot of them... some good in some areas, some in others. I personally have a lot of experience with Symmantec (don't like it... big fat pig of a system resource hog) at work and have never gotten a virus... and I use Microsoft Security Essentials at home (not as highly rated but a lot less of a resource issue) and I've never had a virus on any of the my home systems.

There are a couple behaviors that protect you from viruses better than any software:
- Stay away from the Pron.
- Don't use the machine as a general internet browsing system - one thing that's pretty easy to do these days is set up a VM with Windows 7 on it and do all your internet stuff in the VM.
- Firewall between your machine and the net (and a firewall that doesn't have a hundred holes in it for gaming, file sharing, etc...)
- On the machine you use for internet work... make sure the user account you use doesn't have admin privileges.

I'm sure there are more but these are off the top of my head...

A couple others that popped in after I submitted:
- make sure whatever you do use is kept up to date.
- Don't EVER open email attachments from untrusted sources... in fact... it's best not to open email attachments AT ALL, email is a pretty crappy file transfer system.
- Don't install Facebook or other social networking applets... they all suck anyway so it's no great loss.
- Keep Flash UP TO DATE, and if you can get by without it then do so.
- Set your java settings so stuff can't run without your permission.
 
Last edited:
Yes your entirely right about the situation in the second paragraph. I think a big part of it is not communicating needs ahead of time, or bias based on FUD, stuff of that nature. Lots of silly things, so I try to be prepared and over prepared as possible these days but for someone who wants to get into resolve but has clients that mostly want prores its just kind of a tough situation. I hope that Rocket X shows up or resolve and apple get the PC prores encoding thing together, at this point I will just hope either happens since both present a good workflow option. I am going to go do some extensive tests when Dragon arrives regarding workflows and post them here...


Jeff Kilgroe said:
If you build a reputation for yourself, DP's and producers won't care about your equipment and cart. They shouldn't anyway. They should care about your work and the end result. At the end of the day, can you deliver all the dailies or rushes and hand-off drives in the way they want? All while spot-checking footage, ensuring data integrity, etc... If so, then they shouldn't care if you're using a 30ft. trailer full of Amiga 4000's and i486's running OS/2 to do the work.

Where I have seen productions get judgmental about equipment is when they're paranoid that a DIT can't keep up with the camera crews. And all too often, that is a valid concern. But that usually falls back on the production for not spelling out their needs and looking into all their options. All too often, DP's, producers, directors, etc.. are not as tech-savvy as they probably should be and most still make assumptions based on old info or even FUD from 3 to 5 years ago. As a working DIT, you have to be prepared explain your capabilities and your limitations. Even if you don't have the full cart or necessary hardware to take a certain job, that equipment can be rented in larger markets. You may not be able to make money on the hardware rental portion or coordinating that with the production, but it can be worth it to gain the experience and trust of others in the industry. Like many pros in this industry, you don't need to own every bit of kit. Like the majority of working DP's, they often do not supply camera and lighting packages to productions. That has only become more common with the whole indie owner-operator movement due to lower purchase prices and rapidly evolving tech.
Click to expand...
 
There is always Cineform instead of Pro Res and it's a better codec. Cineform is cross platform and works in almost all of your current editing applications.
 
yes but clients want what they want is the problem...for me its lot of prores, h264, or flavors of dnxhd typically...the one time it was 5k dpx it couldn't even be finished on set in time and i pulled an all nighter after wrap to encode... even with rocket and xeon. its just rough on me cuz I'm gonna to take any crew call i can get on ya know? today was an f55, and they provided me a station and nexto, tomorrow, who knows? thats the problem is trying to figure out what my needs really are when your going to jump at any crew call you can get...how can you not over or under buy ya know? I'm going to talk to apple about their leasing program and try to look into leases else where as well...there has to be a better solution then rebuilding a new super computer constantly regardless of what platform we use (pc or osx)
 
Paul Russell said:
But the rest of the protection you need is you. Don't click on suspicious links. Don't click on anything in an email from an unknown source. Don't install freeware, warez or shareware that's not from a reputable source.
Click to expand...

+1 to this. I've been running on Windows virus free for over 10 years with any form of dedicated protection. Now that Microsoft bundles some form of protection in by default, I don't go out of my way to disable it as it's lightweight, but honestly would not bother me if it wasn't there. Don't install, click on or use stupid things and you will avoid 99% of the problem.

I also have my emails run through gmail apps so that probably does double duty in filtering spam and also virus zapping along the way...


Also just purchased Miraizon the other day for ProRes duties - it's already paid for itself in time saved :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top