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CF and mirroring (not)


Phil Palmer

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I currently use my FR2 as a back up recorder, only because back up recorders have become somewhat of a standard here in LA.  Sadly, I have to copy the days work on to some sort of media at the end of the day using a stand alone burner or laptop computer.

I wonder how many more machines these manufacturers would sell if they had mirroring ability.  If there was a machine out there that did this, I'd dump the one I've got...and buy it today.

It seems that some manufacturers are coming out with new machines, like the 702, and not addressing the most basic of needs...delivering the media in widely accepted format.

Am I the only one really frustrated by this situation?

PWP

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It seems that some manufacturers are coming out with new machines, like the 702, and not addressing the most basic of needs...delivering the media in widely accepted format.

Am I the only one really frustrated by this situation?

PWP

In another post of mine I answered the question about delivery formats, and specifically the history of the use of DVD-RAM, but what I did not mention is that this issue of "what do I deliver" has been primary in our minds alll the way back to the first time I used the first Deva. It was this "problem" of what to deliver, trying to mimic what most of us had done for years and years with analog Nagra and the DAT, that prompted Fostex to make as its primary design consideration with the PD-6 to go with DVD-RAM and NO HARD DRIVE or secondary media. Deva users had already proved that the most reliable method of master recording, at that time, was to a sealed hard drive, and Zaxcom went one step (a big step in my mind) by doing this with a proprietary operating system instead of an off-the-shelf OS. The mirror process was implemented by Zaxcom which allowed us to produce, from the internal hard drive, another media to deliver. Fostex wanted to provide a machine that did not need to mirror anything, just hand in the media just like a DAT cassette or a roll of 1/4 inch tape. It was a grand plan but the error was tying their whole system to DVD-RAM optical disk as the recording medium. DVD-RAM had proven itself as a very reliable DELIVERABLE but it wasw already well known that it had serious limitations as a location production master recording format. Soon after the PD-6 came out, an internal hard drive was fitted as an option, and whether you call this a backup or the master, whatever, it did bring the PD-6 closer to what we had been doing with the Deva.

I believe that all the machnies will, if they do not already, "record" to several different media and one of these media will end up being the preferred deliverable, at least for some unspecified period of time. The Deva already has this problem solved, so does the Cantar and the PD-6. Sound Devices I'm sure is not far off providing some sort of mirroring routine. Whether any of the ultra-low cost or low end machines (and I would include the FR-2, now somewhat of a low end but higher priced unit) will provide good mirroring or deliverable routines, remains to be seen.

Regards,  Jeff Wexler

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I'd rather see the ability to take media in more formats than just DVD-whatever, ie CF cards themselves.  In many ways a CF card is a more reliable  and rugged medium than a DVD anyway.  According to our friend Oleg, where he works CFs are an acceptable delivery format.  Maybe here too some day.  On a film or longer job I could see exchanging CFs, especially if they were a backup medium.  It also depends on the sort of job you are doing: on films or film commercials one has to be ready for the dreaded film break, while on video jobs there is usually time to burn disks during wrap.

Philip Perkins

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about dvds  ,i can only say its your industry problem that invented the dv -40/dv 824  as a telesin player .

any way  i dont see in the yer or 2 many telesines delivering the rushes on  beta /dv cassettes of any kind

and making the delivery straight on on some hard disc media to the post - who need cassettes any way  if the 95% of the industry  working on nle

Good points Oleg, and I agree entirely that the DV-40 telecine "problem" is OUR industry thing to deal with. In Europe, as I have pointed out many times before, there is a totally different mind-set regarding post procedures, syncing and so forth. It was actually much easier in other countries to adopt a more direct utilization of FILES in the process than it has been here. In all fairness to Fostex, the DV-40 was just trying to continue the familiar, traditional and LINEAR was of working that had been established. Even today, most of the dominate Avid systems still "ingest" (I hate that term) material by playing it out, linear fashion, from linear tape based media. As I pointed out, in the early days there were many times when sound files were played out in real time to get the sound into the Avid, so the process woud look just like it always did, like it was coming in off tape.

Your projected figure of "95% of the indistry" working in Non-Linear Editing systems is already true but the big problem is they want to work non-linear on THEIR system only and little effort is made to have this be the way everyone is working. The Avid had no problem with compatibility issues in the past --- the Avid would just not deal with ANYTHING until it was able to "ingest" everything on its own terms, ignoring whatever the rest of the people involved are doing. I remember sending in a disk to a facility that had actually been quite nasty to me but had finally agreed to do the work (they had a long standing contract with the commercial company to do all their work) and I found out later the ridiculous things they had done. They took my disk, sent it to another facility abnd had it transferred to DAT, had the DAT sent back to them so they could do a "normal" telecine session. The worst part was, they charged their client (this company that they had the long history with) the cost of the transfer and then explained that it was the sound mixer's fault and they probably should not hire that person (ME) again.

Regards,  Jeff Wexler

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Hi,

What about the Nagra V ?  It turns in the work on a small hard drive .  Whay is this not used much by US  / Los Angeles based mixers?  It has everthing we have asked for , I think.

Coleman Metts C.A.S.

WWW.COLEMANMETTS.COM

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Hi,

What about the Nagra V ?  It turns in the work on a small hard drive .  Whay is this not used much by US  / Los Angeles based mixers?  It has everthing we have asked for , I think.

Coleman Metts C.A.S.

WWW.COLEMANMETTS.COM

The Nagra V never caught on, to my knowledge, as it was a little too little and a little too late. It is only 2 tracks and Nagra originally made the same mistake that Fostex made, providing only ONE recording medium as the master recording medium (in the case of the PD-6 as pointed out this was the choice to use mini DVD-RAM) with Nagra this was the Castlewood Systems Orb drive --- big mistake. The Orb disk had only one advantage and that was that it was removeable. Nagra quickly went to a hard drive as the main storage medium and it was installed in the same area as the Orb drive had been. I do not know if they still even offer the Orb drive. Turning in the hard drive, even on a daily basis with a long term show, has not proven to be a very good idea, particularly when the drive is in a proproetary housing and may require special connection to a host computer. I am not familiar with exactly how Nagra expects its users to turn in their dailies --- all I know is that machine has not gained a large following at least here in the US.

Regards,  Jeff Wexler

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I did not know there was a Nagra VI in the works. I remember in the early days of DAT wishing that Kudelski would come up with a Nagra DAT machine, and then the StellaDAT came along which was the closest we got to at least the "look and feel" of the Nagra (which was of course, and still is, in stark contrast to how most of the machines feel these days). Sadly, the StellaDAT had MAJOR problems (I owned 2) and now it is all a memory. We knew it would only be a matter of time before Nagra came out with their non-linear professional machine and I was so looking forward to it. The Nagra V was very dissappointing. Now, what do we know aobut the Nagra VI? Will it be at NAB?

Regards,  Jeff Wexler

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Am I the only one really frustrated by this situation?

Absolutely not.  I voiced a similar complaint over at RAMPS recently.  I wish the manufacturers in question could experience a load-in to the camera truck at the end of a shoot day to see why this is so vital to our needs.  Our need must seem trivial from the perspective of working in an office (where there is already a computer set up) but trying to burn a disc on a computer on a truck that's being bounced and jostled about by ten to fifteen people moving a lot of heavy equipment, carts, etc around, during which time the PAs are anxiously waiting to collect your tracks so they can get the dailies run together and your crew is frustrated because your attention is diverted from helping them with the wrap process, is a very different scenario.  If there's a computer failure or a write-once media verification failure, the problem only becomes more compounded as you need then to start all over, at which point the teamsters (in expensive overtime) are ready to go and just waiting on you. 

The need in this scenario to take something out of the machine and hand it to someone at camera wrap becomes critical to avoid all of these obstacles.  It's the wrong time to be messing around with laptops or cart computers. 

To be fair, they have promised that they are working on it.  But like yourself, I could not help feel disappointment when I see new machines being issued when the old ones (OR new ones) still cannot deliver on their original promises.

In your case, since it's a backup situation and not a primary media situation, could you not simply dump everything to an external drive during downtime (if there is any) on the following shoot day?  Or does production want a copy of the backup as well at the end of every workday?

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According to our friend Oleg, where he works CFs are an acceptable delivery format. 

There's a caveat, though: Oleg has mentioned that for many of his projects, there is no synching of audio at telecine and sound is loaded directly into the NLE workstation.  If that were an acceptable workflow here, we would not be having any of these problems.  A $15 flash card reader would be all that production would need.

However, in our part of the world, it is not part of the editorial team's job description to sync every shot of the production (or even the selects).  On top of this, the producers expect a bevy of dailies in various formats to be distributed quickly to different members of the production.  To accomplish this, we need telecine. 

What seems most critically needed now is not a telecine machine that can handle CF vs. an optical disc, but something more flexible.  I agree that CF is, by design, better and more robust than DVD-whatever (even though lots of folks, including our host, have had good success with DVD) but eventually it too will be supplanted by something even more improved.  How about a telecine controller that is (or can act as) a computer, and take ANY kind of FAT32 or otherwise acceptably formatted piece of media (through a standard connection, such as FW or USB) and execute the telecine session from that volume?  It doesn't seem as though it would be that complicated -- it just seems that no one has bothered to do it yet.  As Jeff notes, there is a tendency to treat the recordings as a piece of physical property (as they were with 1/4" and DAT), instead of treating these recordings as what they actually are: BINARY DATA, which can be carried and processed on any number of media.  Rather than having telecine houses buy another $*000 telecine deck that now has a flash card receptacle, and in three years have to buy another one that has a new media receptacle, how about one that can simply recognize incoming DATA, whether it be on an external sealed drive, an optical disc, a flash drive, a flash card, etc etc.?

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There's a caveat, though: Oleg has mentioned that for many of his projects, there is no synching of audio at telecine and sound is loaded directly into the NLE workstation.  If that were an acceptable workflow here, we would not be having any of these problems.  A $15 flash card reader would be all that production would need.

What seems most critically needed now is not a telecine machine that can handle CF vs. an optical disc, but something more flexible.  I agree that CF is, by design, better and more robust than DVD-whatever (even though lots of folks, including our host, have had good success with DVD) but eventually it too will be supplanted by something even more improved.  How about a telecine controller that is (or can act as) a computer, and take ANY kind of FAT32 or otherwise acceptably formatted piece of media (through a standard connection, such as FW or USB) and execute the telecine session from that volume?  It doesn't seem as though it would be that complicated

Noah does re-state what I was saying about the workflow here in the US. It is TELECINE INTENSIVE and our requirements on almost every project are that dailies (or rushes as they are called elsewhere) need to be out on a daily basis, usually by lunch the next day, and in multiple formats to multiple people and departments.

As for the "telecine controller that is (or can act as) a computer" this has already been done, beautifully over 15 years ago with the Aaton InDAW system. The original InDAW was a DOS based PC that would take in all the production tracks (at that time it was almost always analog 1/4" tape) into the computer and then was prepared to spitg out all forms of audio needed for the various places it needed to go and worked beautifully in telecine when the film was ready. When this "system" (and it was a systems approach) was coupled with Aaton cameras utilizing timecode on film (remember, TC on film has been a reality, though almost never used here in the US, for well over 15 years) the syncing of dailies was very quick and relatively painless. Sadly, the use of the InDAW here in the US never really caught on in a big way. What the InDAW provides (and you are right, no other company has come up with anything similar) was getting audio, ANY audio, into a computer, into a file based system so that you have all the power and flexibility of good software control over our sound (because it isn't sound, as Noah points out --- it is DATA). This solves so many of the problems being discussed here and will be implemented in some form, I hope, sooner rather than later. When a system like the InDAW is used, we would be able to send in almost any CARRIER of data, which is our production audio, and InDAW could deal with it and service all the rest of the devices down the chain, thereby accomodating all of the variious functions (or lack of) in other devices. If someone needs our sound in a linear format, tape based digitial or analog, the InDAW can accomplish this (of course it will be real time transfer but that is the nature of linear mediums). If someone else just needs all the files on THEIR computer, InDAW can make that copy for them also. Need backups? Standard operating procedure could be multiple file copies in multiple locations in various formats --- and these are things that the PRODUCTION sound team does not have to do.

Regards,  Jeff Wexler

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As for the "telecine controller that is (or can act as) a computer" this has already been done, beautifully over 15 years ago with the Aaton InDAW system.

What external media can the InDAW accept for synchronization besides optical discs?  And by what conduit? 

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I agree that the current system of how telecine is done in the US is a dinosaur.  The InDaw idea is much better and I think makes for a smoother session for those high -priced colorists in any case.  It is also cool in that any sort of audio media can be input and the issues with it worked out before the film transfer part of the work begins.  Meanwhile, I see the number of jobs that rely on that sort of high-pressure telecine shrinking anyhow--and the new problem is how to get double system audio into and synced up in edit systems directly for video shoots.  It is this work that is still very unstandardized and this presents a major barrier to us using any of the wonderful new non-linear recorders to overcome the considerable limitations of on-board camera audio recording.  At the moment everyone is bending over backwards to overcome various limitation of these edit systems, particularly Final Cut.  Those of you who go to NAB this year--again, please all of you ask Apple when they will able to import BWF files and batch sync them to picture clips which have the same original time stamps.

Philip Perkins

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In your case, since it's a backup situation and not a primary media situation, could you not simply dump everything to an external drive during downtime (if there is any) on the following shoot day?  Or does production want a copy of the backup as well at the end of every workday?

If the first media, the DVD-RAM, fails...they want the backup available.  Telecine sessions are usually in the middle of the night, and they don't want to stop for anything.  Yes, they want it delivered with the primary media.  I would love to do the wait and see method, and not burn unless asked...but they tend to get nervous if there aren't backups in the box.

PWP

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