Well to be honest, I probably get about 50% of what you're saying. But I get the general idea. I know I have lots of reading to do, but I consider these questions and answers as only part of my homework. And without a doubt, you are one of my tutors. Man...thanks for all your help. You've already given me a ton of info. Just so you know I plan to continue robbing your brain for more knowledge, don't try to resist...just keep the safe open and lets continue doing this the easy way!!!
Hahahahahaha! Hopefully I'll be able to continue to help - I know there are a lot of other people here too that know probably a lot more then I, and hopefully if I do give a bad piece of advice, they'll chime in
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Looks like I need to just focus on my primary setup first. What I would like to do though is just make sure that as I build my setup, I keep in mind that I will want to add a laptop into the picture for working out and about. So if you would help guide me in the right direction for that, but at this point, looks like the biggest thing you can do for me is help me with phase one of my setup, which will be the desktop.
I'll do what I can. It's a good idea to get your main rig figured out, but attempt to be as flexible as possible so you can easily add additional equipment (computers) in the future.
1. if you plan to use motion ?
Motion is one of the tools that is part of Final Cut Studio. It's a very powerful tool that allows for all sorts of work, including 3D, masking, rotoscoping, building menu templates for dvd studio pro, and a lot more. It is an extremely powerful program. If you've ever heard of Adobe After Effects - that's basically what Motion is, and it's including in Final Cut Studio
2. RAID 0 -(is mac pro raid the same thing, or is it raid1 or raid5?
You can do a few different types of Raid on a mac pro, you can do software raid (which I don't really like) or you can get a hardware raid controller (to me a better option because I prefer all hard drive access to be transparent to the OS rather then the OS doing extra work to act like a raid controller). The Apple Raid card I do believe supports raid levels 0, 1, 5 and 0+1 - so the card can do raid 0 if configured for it.
RAID is short for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. There are a variety of RAID levels that offer different benefits. For example - RAID 0 is striping, there is no redundancy but a nice speed boost over using just a single drive as now all of your reads and writes are spread across multiple drives giving you greater overall throughput. RAID 1 is mirroring - in its most simple configuration, on a 2 drive RAID 1 setup, everything written to one drive is also written to the second drive - this allows to continue to work even if one drive fails; it is slower because all the same data has to be written to one (or more) drives at the same time.
For a more indepth discussion on RAID and the different RAID levels, check here:
RAID - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
4. daisy chaining a 800->400 adapter off the drive
Depending on your external drive, it may have 1, or hopefully 2 FW800 ports on it. You hook one to the computer, and the second port is available to add another FW device to. Firewire cameras are usually FW400 connections, and either require the chassis itself to have a FW400 port that the camera can connect into, or you need an adapter to connect a FW400 device to FW800. In my case, my HD case has FW800 and FW400 and I can plug my FW400 device into my HD directly.
5. video scratch, render, cache, etc
While you are working, various things will happen to your video and audio.
It will need to be rendered at times
It will need to be captured or transfered or ingested somehow
thumbnails will be taken for clip identification on the timeline, etc.
All of these things are done on the scratch disk (or disks, scratch location and what is stored on each scratch disk makes more sense when you see the configuration of FCP).
FCP and FCE (final cut express) use a folder grouping that specifies capture scratch (where captured or logntransfered video is stored), autosave vault, render files (when the timeline is rendered for playback - you can't real time playback everything, some things need to be rendered. Command-R will become your friend), Audio Render (all non-video clip audio tends to want to be rendered, if you don't render it, you hear lovely beeps during the playback period where the audio isn't rendered) and various cache folders for the operation of Final Cut.
Don't worry - this may sound complex and hard, but it really isn't. Once you have your storage area setup, you don't have to worry about it until you need to move project data off.
And anything that requires rendering - you'll know. The timeline uses various rather obvious indicators to let you know if something needs rendering (ie: a clip that is not playable at all until it is rendered will show a red line along the top of the timeline where the clip is)
6. a raid 1 or 5 chassis would be good for a long term storage of footage
If you want to store your footage for long periods - for example, let's say you start building a footage library so you can reuse footage in later projects. You're going to want to store that footage somewhere. As hard drives are getting cheap, it is very economical to store it on HD's. But as hard drives are mechanical in nature, they can fail, which means aside from backups, you don't want to be down long during a project waiting for a backup to restore, so you would store your data in a protected manner so that if a single hard drive fails, you don't loose everything. In RAID 1, if one drive fails, the other can continue its work. In Raid 5 your data is striped across multiple disks with parity information so if one of the drives fails the array can continue to operate and it can rebuild itself when you replace the faulty drive (read the link above for a more detailed discussion on RAID levels).
7. you said project files can go on a usb drive right?
Mine have. I do use the same account name structure on my systems tho, so I can also just use a thumb drive to transfer my project files from system to system. I'm currently finishing a small project, final output is right about 11 minutes in length, footage stored on my scratch drive is about 66 gigs (60 gigs footage, 4.4 gigs dvd and rest is a few mp4 exports for preview videos); That project has a project folder of about 981 megs (which includes my final cut save file, motion save file, dvd studio save file, motion export video, mp3s, photos used in the project, some text files with notes, logo graphics, etc. This is a large project folder for me, most are much smaller, but due to the amount and size of photos this folder kind of ballooned a bit.)
Ok lastly, I guess I should give you a little info on what I would like to do and where I am so far in order to help you help me. I have a Canon xh a1 and a HV30.
I'm jealous on the XH - I'd love to have one!
Plan to shoot mostly in hd and downconvert to sd at the end when necessary.
That's what I'm doing right now. Mostly I've been doing SD in the past, so I'm still fairly new into HD.
Plan to shoot a variety of things... events, performances,interviews,documentary,indie films, music videos, and sports.
That sounds like a wide variety and should be enjoyable for you. Very different settings so you'll probably have to mixup some of your workflow to accommodate the different types of footage (ie: a performance may be done in low light which may require different corrections then say a documentary).
I myself do mostly video for the school I work for. A lot of it is nothing spectacular (like the graduations, I supply the camera, set it up on the tripod and let the person in the soundbooth control it since I'm usually downstairs taking pictures with my still camera), although I do sometimes throw together some special things like this slide show I'm finishing that has some people on camera making statements, some voice overs, some 3D work for the opening (I don't do a lot of 3D work as I'm not really good with it, but I have a lot of fun playing
), etc.
Purchasing a new mac pro w/ nehalem quad core (8 core but only if i have to). Purchasing the latest final cut studio 2academic version (when does fcs 3 come out, and should I wait for it?).
I honestly don't know when FCS3 will come out. I don't remember hearing about it when I was hearing about other announcements at WWDC so I don't know if it was discussed. I myself am usually impatient - I'd rather work with what I know I can have than wait and hope for what is coming at some unknown date. If it were coming at the same time as snowleopard, then I'd say get final cut express to get a feel for the use of the program (a lot of the interface is the same if not very similar) and then get FCS3 when it's out, but since I don't know when FCS3 is due, I can't say that my suggestion is good - also because I personally hate iDVD and final cut express doesn't come with any sort of DVD authoring, and there are very few options for OSX for dvd authoring (that has been one of my most difficult issues).
Good luck, and let me know if you have any other questions.
