I'm not the person looking for a hot-swappable drive. My first NLE
was a Miro DC-30+/DV-300 and I had an external cabinet full of 18GB
and 36GB SCSI drives.

I'm now putting together my DV-Storm and using 4 internal 250GB
E-IDE drives on a Promise controller. I don't see the need for
SCSI drives for SD NLE anymore. Heck, I had Premiere 6.5 loaded
up on my 2-year-old Toshiba 2GHz laptop with an internal 4800 RPM
60GB drive and I can capture (via ADS/Pyro firewire) just fine
on that.

mike

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Just wondering...

You edit video, but you work for Sun. What exactly do you do? Is DV a  
hobby? Or do you do corporate video? Just curious.

On Mar 1, 2005, at 2:14 PM, Michael Bender wrote:

Keith,

Mostly a hobby, but I have done some video for my product group
as well. I've been doing video since 1978 when I started on some
Sony U-Matic decks.

mike

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You've come a long way, then ;-)  From more traditional VTR stuff to
DV. That's some evolution.

Thanks.

On Mar 1, 2005, at 3:16 PM, Michael Bender wrote:

Not as far as it may seem - I'm an engineer by trade and by hobby,
so for me, editing on tape was painful, while my transition to an
NLE was like the holy grail - it was programming for video!

mike

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---LOL! I built a Miro system once upon a time! Gawd, what a nightmare!
Yeah sorry I got mixed up....still dont know why hot swap is so important to
the original guy but I admit that I was behind the times on this issue.
I now realize that SATA drives can accomodate hot swap so perhaps he'll be
looking in that direction.

JeffH
Ch.S.

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Ahhhh another U-Matic brother!
 I used to have some Sony 2860's, moved on up through both the BVU's, and
the JVC CR-8250's and then to CR-850's and also had a few Umatic SP's as
well.
It was all a very long time ago!

JeffH
Ch.S.

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Yep, but still, it was pretty cool - finally an NLE that could
do real-time video editing on a regular PC all for a couple of
grand, minus the disks you needed. I have this beautiful dual
processor 600MHz PIII system that I am going to give to my eight
year old daughter so that she can do webcam with her grandparents.
I remember what I paid for that mobo, for each CPU, and for the
memory in that thing (and, I'm too embarrassed to tell the amount,
let's just say the phrase "early adopter" applied to me!).

mike

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:-)

My last U-Matic decks with Sony RM-440 (is that the number?)
editing controller were the VO-58XX series. As a matter of fact,
I've got a VO-5800 (NTSC feeder deck) and a VO-5850 (?) (or the PAL
version of the VO-5850 NTSC editing deck, I forget the number
offhand) sitting in my barn. I recently found a bunch of old
U-Matic PAL tapes that I did back in the late 70's when I
lived in Belgium, and so I bought the 5850 PAL deck on EBay last
year so that I could play the tapes (they mostly still play
after being in storage for 25 years, I took good care of them)
and then capture them and put them on DVD.

As much as I live digital video editing, there's still something
really cool about hearing the audio on the feeder decks speed up
and slow down as the edit controller was locating the in points,
and being in the room with just some really great, solid hardware.

mike

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Holy moly. I remember training on a Sony Umatic and RM440 (or some
number like that) back in '91. Was trying desperately to get out of the
restaurant business and into CG, and we had a crash course in basic
video editing. I still got my 3/4" tapes and 5.25" floppies with my
TIPS and RIO files on them. But if it weren't for the computer, there's
no way I'd be pumpin' out demos and home videos the way I am now.

Keith

On Mar 1, 2005, at 8:30 PM, Michael Bender wrote:

In a message dated 3/1/2005 3:12:51 P.M. Hawaiian Standard Time,  

Ahhhh  another U-Matic brother!
I used to have some Sony 2860's, moved on up  through both the BVU's, and
the JVC CR-8250's and then to CR-850's and also  had a few Umatic SP's as
well.
It was all a very long time  ago!

Keep it up, you guys, and you'll get us Old Farts riled up again and you'll  
have to agonize over our days of physically splicing 2-inch video tape!  ;^)

Hot swapable drives, indeed!!!

Aloha,
Jon Burkhart

<<Keep it up, you guys, and you'll get us Old Farts riled up again and
you'll have to agonize over our days of physically splicing 2-inch video
tape! ;^)>>

---Did somebody mention 2-inch Quad??

http://www.geocities.com/jhaas84_2000/DeepFreezePreview.html

http://home.comcast.net/~ktrotter/LRDF-Stranger2.wmv

Cheers,
JeffH
Ch.S.

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Did you have hot-swappable razor blades back then so that when you
were done pulling a few all-nighters to get the project edited,
you could then shave in the edit suite to present to your client in
the morning, Jon :-)?

mike

Isn't it interesting the Norelco made both cameras and razors?
Coincidence? I think not!

:-)

mike

Norelco....one hundred seventy five pounds of "mini-cam"....for some strange
reason I am thinking "contradiction in terms" (LOL).
Can you imagine what backaches and chiropractor bills those early minicam
operators must have had?
Camera operators got slipped discs and pulled muscles and editors died of
heart failure or lung cancer from huffing all those Edi-Vue fumes....
and here we sit, pissed off because we can't pull a full-rez SD proxy off of
HDCAM SR or get 4:4:4 out of a DV camera.....oh wait, thats right...now we
CAN!

ROFL.....Cheers,
JeffH
Ch.S.

PS: I own the rights to that Leon concert video.....and its being readied
for re-release on DVD.

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I used to install Ampex BCC2 'mini-cams', a little later than the Norelco
but still a hefty sized back-pack. It was mollified by having a
cradle/harness made by the same folks who made the one for the famous
personal rocket pack (think LA Olympics) and was actually very comfortable.
It was though made for a typical US male and I was installing in the
ME/Africa; I remember once working in Zanzibar and being 'given' the
smallest, skinniest guy you can imagine as the trainee operator and the pack
simply slipped off his shoulders! I solved the problem by getting them to
use a third operator just to carry the backpack, and naturally chose the
second biggest guy I could find! The biggest guy was of course reserved for
the second operator who had to carry the Ampex VR3000 Quad 'portable'! This
was a really heavy unit and by contrast to the camera, not a very
comfortable harness.
I guess in reality the operators had a worst time with the next generation
of ENG kit where single man operation was a reality. I have an amazing
picture of a Canadian colleague 'wearing' a TK-76 camera feeding a Sony
BVU-110 deck and with a couple of heavy battery belts - that was definitely
a 'man's' job!
Perry Mitchell

In a message dated 3/2/2005 12:57:15 P.M. Hawaiian Standard Time,  

Did you  have hot-swappable razor blades back then so that when you
were done  pulling a few all-nighters to get the project edited,
you could then shave  in the edit suite to present to your client in
the morning, Jon  :-)?

No, but I thought about slashing my wrists a few times ;^)

I vividly recall doing some fast editing for the evening newscast and  
accidentally broke one of the two glass guides through which we cut the tape  with
the razor blade. It cost $125 to replace.  That was big money in those  days.  
By the way, those cuts had to be within about 1/10,000th of an inch  during
the vertical interval or the video would roll when the splice went  through the
machine.

Gotta stop now or the nightmare's will be coming back tonight ;^)

Aloha,
Jon Burkhart

 > readied for re-release on DVD.

Are you doing the "clean up" yourself? What kinds of things are
you doing and what problems are you running into if you are?

mike

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Jon said, in part, ".By the way, those cuts had to be within about
1/10,000th of an inch during the vertical interval or the video would roll
when the splice went through the machine."

But ya didn't tell 'em how we did that.  There was this little bottle with a
medicine dropper that contained a solution with powdered iron dust.  You'd
drop it on the edge of the 2" tape and it would show where the scan tracks
started across the width of the tape.  Then you'd just be sure to register
the scan lines when making the splice.

"Good old days", right Jon?

-Rik.

 We're looking for a system to transfer news stories from one location to
another. They could be in analog or digital format but primarily we'll be
dealing with tape playback and recording at both ends. We're hoping to set
up a computer at either end with ftp type transfering system.

The main thing we need is speed of encoding - decoding and ease for
operators.

We have a good broadband connection and both stations are on a wide area
network as well as having a ftp site available.

We need broadcast quality. The stories will be a maximum of 2.5 minutes.

We do have a microwave link at present but this is a backup for when the
microwave is in use.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Chris

---Obviously you read the little story I posted on my site....the problems I
am running into have more to do with my use of software MPEG-2 encoding than
anything else. If you saw the sample clip from the original retail VHS that
was in the stores ten years ago you already have an idea as to how noisy the
video really is.
The sad news is that it's not much cleaner on the master either, and it's
wreaking havoc with every encoding program I have used so far.
Every software encoder I have tried to use gets so busy trying to
interpolate the noise that it falls on its face in a few spots....I probably
dont know enough about custom encoding to know what to do, and I believe in
the Clint Eastwood axiom about a man having to know his limitations, but I
blindly press on in an effort to learn more.
The only major piece of software I haven't tried yet is Main Concept and
it's just the $$$$ keeping me away from it right now, but I am starting to
think I will have to buy or rent a hardware encoder and feed the AVI file to
it.

The original tapes were recorded by a crew that was pretty hopped up on dope
at the time and there were massive synch problems all throughout, but I take
pride in the fact that I was able to take the iso's from various cameras and
drop in shots that synched up, and I was able to weave a patchwork quilt
that derived footage from three concerts and make it look like one, and I
did it all with a Umatic offline and a handwritten EDL which I had to later
type in to the GV online controller at the session.

Cheers,
JeffH
Ch.S.

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At 10:31 PM -0600 3/3/05, Jeffery J. Haas wrote:

You probably need to focus more on preprocessing than the encoder
since, basically, all encoders are going to try and do the same thing.

I'm not aware of any software video noise reduction tools but they
exist in hardware. The other alternative would be grain reduction
software, I'm sure that exists. I know it's now bundled in Adobe
After Effects (Grain Surgery). From a video perspective there's not
much difference between noise and grain.

Also, near black, try crushing the blacks down a little bit.  Kill
all that near black noise to a solid black.

and at the extreme end, blur.
--

Philip Hodgetts
"The Present and Future of Post-Production
Business and Technology"
http://www.intelligentassistance.com/blog

News, tips and the best resources for
Apple's Professional Applications:
http://www.proapps-hub.com
Download now, it's free.

 In my corporate days I once had to produce a music video from the video and
audio each recorded at two completely separate sessions. To make it far
worse it was a Jazz group and they couldn't resist some extensive
improvisation!
With considerable licence on trumpet and saxophone finger keying (few people
would know when wrong) I managed to get most done but I was really stuck on
one part which had to be a close up on the drummer. I just couldn't get it
to look right and time was approaching midnight before my morning deadline.
I took a break and met with a casual acquaintance from R&D by the coffee
machine, and we got into conversation about my project. He then announces
that he is an amateur drummer and before he knows what is happening I've
dragged him into the edit suite to see my last effort. Without telling him
the specific problem, he watched it through twice and thought it was fine
and didn't himself see any of the syncing problems that seemed terrible to
me. I nearly kissed him and sure enough the playback next day was generally
accepted well.
I learnt a lot from the episode, specifically to get lots of third party
opinion on such matters before wasting too much time in trying to fix what
ain't broke! We always have to remember that video is an optical illusion or
conjuring trick and that it effects all viewers differently.
It is also curious that in the modern day with all sorts of digital encoding
and picture processing, my home TV pictures are VERY RARELY in full sync
between audio and video. I've learnt to put up with it but my wife simply
doesn't notice!
Perry Mitchell

Cue another story! (I'm at home today with a heavy cold)

What you actually had to find was the frame pulse marker - a sharp ident
recorded on the Control Track. The catch was that because of the physical
offset of the CT head, you then had to move the tape and count video tracks
(was it 8?), and then once you had counted the requisite number you made the
splice between two tracks. This meant that the splice was then in the frame
blanking and the inevitable 'splat' wouldn't show. The trouble was that once
the tape was moved the correct amount, the frame pulse was off the
microscope view and thus it was easy to sometimes miscount and produce a
'long' or 'short' frame. This would inevitably cause a VTR machine re-sync
on replay (several seconds loss of picture) and thus need a re-edit with
inevitable loss of a few frames either side.
We used to mostly use cut editing for football game highlights (for UK
readers, very early MOTD) and there was considerable pressure on editing
time. We simply couldn't afford the time to perform re-edits. I evolved the
technique of only counting enough tracks to put the pulse on the edge of the
microscope field of view and then making the cut. This put the join in the
bottom of active picture but if you were neat and accurate then it would
mostly play with minimal disturbance. Perhaps one edit on my finished clip
would typically produce a bigger disturbance, and in a worst case this could
cause a quick frame roll on the monitor.
We thus developed a trick where we would ring the programme producer in the
gallery during the show just before the worst glitch, and hope he would be
distracted from seeing it go through! It worked a treat for over a year and
I never received a single complaint!

Incidentally, what so many folks failed to appreciate was that cut editing
was much faster than 2 machine rolls, because you didn't have to dub the
material. What killed it was the terrible cost of replacement heads being
hit by the splices.
Perry Mitchell  

________________________________

From: Rik
Jon said, in part, ".By the way, those cuts had to be within about
1/10,000th of an inch during the vertical interval or the video would roll
when the splice went through the machine."

But ya didn't tell 'em how we did that.  There was this little bottle with a
medicine dropper that contained a solution with powdered iron dust.  You'd
drop it on the edge of the 2" tape and it would show where the scan tracks
started across the width of the tape.  Then you'd just be sure to register
the scan lines when making the splice.

 TMPEnc has a noise reduction option, although it has a terrible effect on
rendering time!
Perry Mitchell