Super Black
Cost is ALWAYS an issue. We have about 9 gigs of storage lying around here in
various formats. I have no desire to constantly add more, just to render more
graphics. The inclination is to hold onto the rendered frames until the client
has approved the final animation, and then hold onto the frames until it can be
run onto a house tape for demo reel stuff. In the end the frames would want to
hang around all too long, and then archiving takes up a lot of organization
time and tapes. It's a busy place. I spend too much on drives right now to get
more. We went through this for a long time when we used a service bureau to run
to tape. That was an enormous headache. I broke down and bought all the gear
necessary to render straight to tape: deck, controller, transcoder, waveform,
vectorscope, monitoring and switching. It was a good investment. Productivity
went up about 70%. We also tend to render more often for tests and catch a lot
of errors before the deadline. It also alleviated all the storage problems,
especially when there are several animation projects all at once. Then one goes
to disk and the other to tape. When we're really pressed for time we'll go to
tape with one machine while the other renders the last half of the animation to
disk. When machine 1 is done then we run the other frames from disk to tape.
The business with the traveling matt doesn't happen that often. But our
Symbolics is equipped to handle it the way we want (when it's working, which it
isn't). It's just another wish list item I suppose.
We're a film and video production company. But we're a little different
than most, especially here in the Midwest. We own all the equipment necessary
to control post production and keep it inexpensive, while not owning an online
room. We have EMC digital non-linear editing, a Dyaxis II digital audio
workstation, two PC graphics workstations, and a Symbolics graphics workstation
(dead as a door nail). We do complete projects in film or tape or we do a la
carte work for other producers. We have post production wired so we spend an
average of only 1.5 hrs in online (as opposed to 2 or 3 days).
We never reuse tape. It just isn't worth it. The client buys the Betacam SP
tape for the project, it's shot and then archived. It's loaded once into the
NLE system, run once in online and then archived. Graphics tapes may have
several projects strung on them one after the other, but in 7 or 8 years of
using Betacam SP metal tape we've never had one problem. Drop outs may happen
on a bad lot, but that;s extremely rare and more likely to be a problem for
field tapes.
The next step for us will be a DDR especially for multilayer compositing.
Then storage will be a problem again, especially versus cost.
-Robb
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