#BIG HARD DRIVES?
10 messages in this thread
I need a larger hard drive and after listening to some disscusions
concerning r2 what size hard drive would you think would be necessary
indorder to [D [D [D fully utilize r2. I currently have a 210 ide in one
machine and 120 rll in anouther. I also have a cd rom (texcel) scis located
with the ide. I would like to utilize targa file and flices. I generally
like to render to the hard disk and transfere to tape. I guess one solution
would be to render directly from 3dsr2 to tape and not save as targas. but
doesnt that cause excessive wear on the tape machine (AG7750)? thanks for
your help and advice Rock
Rock, Any video tape playing or recording will cause the heads to wear. But
at least when doing frame by frame there is no preview edit to contend
with, with 3DS. So actually doing animation recording can be more gentler
than regular post production.
Regards
Steve
If you want to seriously take advantage of the video post-production
services inside of 3DSr2, you really don't have alot of choices… You HAVE
to get something like a magneto-optical drive with at least 300Mb per side.
The actual cost-per-megabyte is extremely low if you do alot of animation
to videotape at 512×486 or above. Plus, the convenience of having an MO
disk per project is incredible.
– G
The problem I have heard of with rendering straight to tape is wear on the
actual tape, not so much the heads. Your heads are staying on the same spot
until time runs out and they go to the park-point. (3 mins default, I
believe). This wears the tape out on that spot, apparently. I always render
to disk first, then when the project's done I do the disk-to-vtr at a
service bureau (don't have my own vtr).
As far as disk drives go, I have about 700Mb on several drives and this has
been enough for me, but I've never had more than 1200 frames on-line at a
time. Go for as much as you can afford, but SCSI seems preferably since you
can daisy-chain up to 7 drives on most controllers making adding drives
easier.
Thanks for the imformation, I think I will go with the scsi and I
understand that I can still use my IDE drive along with the SCSI card,
Thanks Again for th reply Rock/
Rock-
If your worried about tape wear, just set THRD=0 in your BCDSETUP.TXT.
That unthreads the machine after each edit. The only prob I have with
rendering directly to tape is that in a longer animation, it's a real mess
if your machine happens to botch or completely miss an edit. I know it's
not supposed to, but I've had it happen. It's a real mess trying to find
the exact frame where the botched edit is and you basically have lost all
of the time you've spent rendering everything after the bad edit. Your
Choice.
-Mark
Mark,
Unthreading and threading the tape for every edit is going to put more wear
and (literally) tear on the the tape then mearly parking it. the best
situation is to set your parkpoint a few seconds after each edit. That way
the parkpoint is always different.
James
James-
Thanks for the info on unthreading. Until R2 I had no way of going direct
to tape anyways (I use a BCD 5000) so I really didn't look into the Park
stuff at all. I've always gone to tape directly from disk. Does Park just
move the tape to a blank spot and leave the heads down?
I feel for you with your 2D animation. Now that R2 is here with all of
its wonderful stuff, I find myself doing 3 20sec. cartoon animations by
hand. Where's Walt D. when you need him? I'm curious about the best
methods you've found for using AniPro for 2D stuff. It's easier for me to
sketch characters with a pencil than to draw on the screen so I've been
scanning the cels in and using AAPro for cleanup, inking, painting, and
positioning. I too am using T+ for output (756×486). I've been creating
the animations 800×600 and letting flitape squash em down. It seems to be
working OK. Any better ideas. Also, I still have trouble with aliasing in
AAPro. Soften and UnBuzz make my lines too thick. Any suggestions there.
I'll be glad when this is over so I can get back to playing with R2.
-Mark
Mark,
Why don't you just use Animator Pro running on the Targa+ @ the same
resolution you want to record at? There is a Targa+ driver, after all,
available. You can even do video overlay, so you could point a camera at
your sketches, and draw over it in AAPRO.
Kevin Krell – Computer Support Associates
Mark,
R2 removed all the park point options, although when using the Diaquest,
the tape stops about 2 seconds after the last edit. I'm not sure what the
BCD will do, but the operation should be similiar. If the render time is
greater than the VTR unload time, I would reccommend rendering to disk and
using Disk-to-Tape option unless your VTR has an adjustable unload time. I
always render to disk first.
When using Anipro I've been scanning predrawn artwork at about 150 DPI and
then scaling it to 1024×768 with my scanning software. I then bring it into
Anipro and do the painting. Then I use Aniconv to squeeze it down to
756×486. This will antialias all the lines without thicking them up. I then
proceed to finish up the animation at 756×486 using the 1024×768 mode. When
ready to output them I switch screen drivers to the Tplus driver. I do use
3DS alot even for the 2D stuff, I just use the scanned artwork for a
background, render to a flic and then bring it back into Anipro to do the
paint work. Its easier than painting all the maps in Pro and mapping them
in 3DS. I mainly use 3DS where things fade in and out as I've found it much
eaiser to get good fade-in/out effects with 3DS. I had some problems
rotating a circular object at 756×486 so I used 3DS to do that part of if
to keep the aspect ratio intact. Try creating a circle in 756×486 mode,
grab it as a cel then use Cel/Turn and you'll see what I mean.
James