Flyer Brochure
24 messages in this thread
Jerry,
Glad to hear you got your board back. Sorry to see all the problems you seem to
be having. Hope you get them figured out. I know what a nusense hum or noise
can be.
Guess what? In todays mail, I received a large envelop from NewTek. Information
on the Flyer.
First a letter explaining how the price of the Flyer is now $4995. Also telling
me that a new demonstration tape on the Toaster and Flyer will be available to
my dealer in 4 to six weeks. I don't know if that means the dealers will be
giving out tapes or that you can view it there.
Then there are two other pieces of literature. A one page piece on the Flyer
and a fold out on the Toster.
According to the information about the Flyer, you record clips of audio and
video into the Flyer. Does this mean that you load each take as a separate
clip? Is this the way other NLE work? Somehow I thought that you could run an
entire tape onto a hard drive. Then fast scan through the material and mark the
beginning of each take.
Now that I just said that, it doesn't seem to make much sense. I guess the only
way you could catalog material is to load it scene by scene or take by take.
That has got to be time consuming.
You know that I purchased the Toaster last year, sight unseen. Now, I've gone
an ordered the Flyer sight unseen. Not only unseen, but unmanufactured. I'm
glad I don't work for a company. I'd hate to have to explain what I've done. Or
have to ask someone to order a piece of equipment that isn't completely
finished, won't be ready until sometime in the Fall, and runs on a computer
system that may not exist next year.
We must all be crazy. But, I've got to admit, the Toaster does more than I ever
expected it to do. So, I'm praying that the people in Topeka don't let me down
with the Flyer.
My wife and I are going out of town for a week. We are taking a cruse through
the Gulf to Mexico. I even booked the cruse before I knew where it was going.
But, we have not had a vacation in years, so we're just closing up the office
and going.
So, I won't be online till next weekend. I'll get back to you then. Hope you
have a nice weekend.
Fred
You can probably grab a whole tape and then clip and remove unwanted takes
and then edit the remaining slices together. Think of it like film
editing….cut and paste….
Grant Boucher – Amblin Imaging
"It's hard to believe grown-ups do this for a living."
Digitizing an entire tape of takes would be an incredible waste of time and
disk space. Much better to decide what takes to keep as you go, and just
digitize the ones you want to keep. You could always go back and get another
take if you wanted…but you'll definately want all your takes to be separate
clips…so as to use them properly as A's or B's…
Grady
if you got the drive space, flaunt it!!!!
Grant Boucher – Amblin Imaging
"It's hard to believe grown-ups do this for a living."
Fred,
"Unlimited capacity" NLE facilities will have tech run all the reels in
that are part of an edit session, with each reel just being a super long
clip. The editor-producer-director team then usually do an "off line"
where the actual clips are created, usually in rough form leaving extra
stuff at the head and tail of each clip. From the rough-cut tape or
window dub, the next refinement is made, the clips (or portions that will
be used) get trimmed, in the EDL and then the answer copy is made. After
a last refinement, the final EDL is used to make the master. Now, all
the original video may be still on the digital media. The clips mearely
name segements of it (e.g designate either fields or frames [depending on
NLE 'resolution']) for the sake of providing the operator and software a
handle for communicating what goes where in the EDL.
I think, if you load up a flyer with 21 9 GB HDs, (189 GB total) you might
be able to get a few 30 minute tapes entirely in the system. But the
flyer is targetted at us "low end guys". So to make efficient use of the
probably 2 1 GB or 2 3GB disks we are likely to try to slide by with, they
are probably assuming that we will load in only the enlarged clips we want
to work with – essentially start the digital processes at the rough-cut
clip location, and our first edit session will be to trim those down, a
feature I saw demoed at NAB. (Essentially double click the clip crouton
and you see the start and stop time in requesters where you can enter
trimmed values.)
The telling tale will be this: Will the Flyer allow you to break a long
clip into several smaller ones, not necessarily covering all the time of
the larger clip, possibly overlapping frames included in different clips,
and allow trimming by use of +/- times as well as absolute times. My
guess is that it will, otherwise they would have a VERY hard time
convincing anyone that it is non-linear.
wmc – via Autopilot!
Hi, I have been in contact with NewTek in conjuntion with an article I wrote on
the Flyer, and my understanding is that you CAN use different pieces of a
segment(or the same piece for that matter) in this manner……. even have the
same piece overlap itself. Regards, Gary
Gary,
I was reasonabley sure that would be the case, otherwise everyone would be
all over them about calling it 'nonlinear'.
wmc – via Autopilot!
Wayne,
have you or anyone else heard if the flyer will let you acquire at a lower
resolution (reading in lots of material), edit, then actually do the
re-aquisition
(implies machine control which is doubtful), or help you in the process (prompt
you).
I heard that it was going to support time code, but what kind (L or V) and for
what
purpose I am not sure. Any thoughts, info, anyone? Brian
Brian, The Flyer will have user controll over the compression ratio. The useful
range will be a bit under 5 Megs per second (D2) down to about 1 Meg per
second. SVHS quality will be at around 2 Megs Per Second. This is my
understanding at this point. Regards, Gary
Brian,
Some of your message appears garbled so I didn't get all of what you are
asking. But WRT timecode, I didn't notice at NAB that they were
controlling decks with time code, but then they were getting new revs of
software seemingly every hour.
My own sort of never-gave-it-a-second-thought assumption was that they
have to support time code, otherwise it is not an editor. For example,
the primary aquisition and distribution medium is tape. Editors will want
to get tape segments into the NLE by time code if they are not reading in
the entire tape. If you read the entire thing in a high compression
"draft" resolution for "offline" EDL development, you are still going to
come up with the problem of designating which full resolution segments you
want to read in for the final edit. Then there is the problem of being
able to insert segments onto tape with pre-existing scenes you do not want
disturbed. That has to be done fram accuratly for professional use.
I know Tim Jennison absolutely HATES tape. But I believe he knows we are
as far away from tapeless video as we are from the paperless office. And
if the Flyer could not handle frame accurate capture and output, it would
not be an editor. It would merely be a video compositer.
Alot of people don't understand NLE because they take the computer disk
file analogy incorrectly. If you think of the frames of video like hard
disk sectors instead of focusing on clips as files, it makes a little more
sense. Clips and Files are logical constructs used to designate a
temporal collection of frames or disk sectors. The process of NLE is a
little different than transferring files on PCs for most of us (systems
programmers aside). We never get concerned about the blocks directly. In
NLE we have to explicitly allocate the frames to clips, and the frames are
time-code designated. Another difference is that clips can overlap, where
files cannot. (That is a situation called 'cross-linked files' and is bad
news on a hard drive.) And, on output, once again, we have to tell the
clips as composited, butted, transitioned, trimmed, and overlapped, which
frames to end up on on the tape. Whereas in computer land, when you copy
a group of files to a floppy, you don't care which sectors from the HD end
up in which sectors on the floppy as long as they are properly linked to a
logical definition – the file name. the Non-linearity of video actually
exceeds that of computer files in its basic nature, so it will be along
time before anyone will produce a high-end editor where time coding of
frames is 'transparent' to the editor, me thinks (especially as long as TV
advertising is still sold by the second…).
wmc – via Autopilot!
Sorry my message was garbled. What it said was basically, will we be able
to capture at a lower resolution (higher compression) in order to get more
raw material on the disks, do our editing, and then tell the system to go
and automatically re-acquire the used stuff at the "on-line" resolution we
want. There have been several systems come out that WERE tape ignorant and
care nothing about it because they consider themselves to be "on-line"
NLEs at whatever market can use their resolution. They have been met with
mucho complaining and are going back and putting it in. Just because it makes
sense to do it doesn't mean that NewTek will put it in, especially considering
that they are already radically departing from the timeline interface of most
NLEs
because they think they have a "better way". RE: your pitch about disk files
and video, it does not mean that they see any need to link the internal Flyer
housekeeping with the timecode on the original tape, as stated above (others
didn't).
The next question is, what kind of machines will they control? RS422, RS232,
Sony Contol-L, Panasonic AG1960, 1970. The market that the toaster and
presumably the flyer serves is such a hodge-podge I really don't see how they
could make everyone happy with an automated system. I could see their solution
being putting an LTC audio input on the flyer and during the re-acquire mode,
putting a message on the screen that says
"position the tape to a position at least 20 seconds before
time code 01:05:30:10 and push play"
and then the flyer
sits there and watches the LTC and captures the necessary material. This is
what
I meant by "assisted" if not automated in my original message. There are so
many
other things that they have to work out, like audio, and I heard that their was
going to be some kind of automated LW interface that will let you render
transitions
that require any squeezing so they aren't the crummy pixelated transitions that
the
toaster currently has, that I figured this kind of thing would be lacking in
the
initial flyer release. Hopefully, they will at least include all the hardware
needed
to do this so that we won't have to all upgrade to Flyer 4.0s after a year or
so.
Brian
Brian,
I was told by a Newtek guy at an ITVA NLE "face off" that the flyer has no
batch digitization capablility, so you can't offline at a low rez, create
a list and then re-aquire only the needed media at full resolution, ala
Avid. This is a fatal error as far as I'm concerned. Storage is getting
cheaper yeah, but why keep enough drive space for a long format program
when the need only comes up once in a while? Re-dig is an elegant
solution.
Mark C.
Hi Mark:
While I will agree that, that would be a nice feature to have in the
Flyer out of the box, remember who the target market is. I am sure that
like the first incarnation of the Toaster, the Flyer will work it's way up
the "High End" ladder of acceptance, in fact has a sustantial built in
nitch. But, this is technology entended for the Every Man. the guy who
plans to plug his camcorder in to the damm thing. Besides I'd bet that
within a year or so there will be a few third party packages to fill any
gaps that NewTek has left in.
Brad Hayes
CG&A
Wayne,
Your discription sounds a lot like my old film editing days. Make a workprint
of all of the good takes. Assemble a rough cut. Go back and fine cut.
You mention that the Flyer is targetted at us "low end guys". That was the
market that NewTek probably first targetted the Toaster at, but if from what
I've seen throughout this and other forums, the Toaster is ending up in network
production, television stations and a lot of other high end production houses.
Reading the brochure from NewTek, I believe that they are also trying to market
the Flyer at the high end market also. Their opening sentence reads, "For
$3995, the Video Toaster Flyer provides the same D2 quality image you expect
from a $50,000 digital video deck".
I'll bet when you look at the actual equipment, it doesn't cost that much to
manufacture a NLE system. Curcuit boards and chips are reasonable inexpensive.
I would guess that the only reason a NLE system would sell for $120,000 and
more is that the company has to recoupe a lot of R & D cost and also allow for
the fact that there is not a real mass market for their product.
Look at what is happening to the cost of TV sets and computers. Hmmm with that
logic in mind, how come my 1960 cheve only cost me $2,000 and my 1986 Ford cost
$17,000?
Fred
Fred,
The difference between the FLyer and the "High End" stuff will be the
software. The 50-100K will likely be digital component, will likely do
most compositing of up to 5 or 6 layers in near real-time (ABCDEF Roll as
it were) and have much more sophisticated image processing tools built in.
The Flyer/Toaster will likely still have pixelization problems with some
of the DVE that you can get the D2 anti-aliased version for only by
rendering in lightwave. And that will be slow compared to the high-end
"on line" systems. Time is money – in this case, less time=more money.
But, as with Lightwave, many high-end places realize that the low end
NewTek equipment can do 90% of what they need, relieving the on-line
equipment for the truly elaborate, short lead time stuff.
No one said high-enders are unwilling to take advantage of a bargain when
it jumps up and bites 'em.
wmc – via Autopilot!
Think of the low-end type non-linear systems around today, they take
minutes to render simple dissolves!
Aki,
But those rendered effects can be stacked and layered. I shudder to think
of doing online editing with only a toaster for a switcher, "you want to
hold a super over a dissolve? No, Sorry."
Mark C.
Mr. Berney asks:
> […] how come my 1960 cheve [sic] only cost me $2,000 and my 1986 Ford >
cost $17,000?
At the pre-inauguration Clinton economic summit, the CEO of Ford Motor Company
said that over $1,000 of the cost of each car Ford sells goes to pay health
care.
It is said that years ago, two Honeywell engineers gave a keynote speech at a
computer convention in which they pointed out that if cars were like computers,
a Rolls Royce would cost $2 and get 500,000 miles per gallon. At the end of
the convention several days later, two Honeywell programmers gave the closing
keynote address. They noted that if cars were like computers, there would be
no roads, no maps, and you would need a specially-trained chauffeur for each
make, model, and trim level of car. 🙂
— David Schachter
— David Schachter
Fred,
Since you got the brochure on the Flyer, you know far more about it than I do.
I pre-ordered one the other day myself, also…
Jerry
Jerry,
Even after buying the Flyer, there is still the cost of the hard drives. Prices
keep coming down. I hope by September they drop even more. From what I have
read, you need about 9 or 10 GB to have a usefull system.
That amount of hard drive space will give you around 50 or 60 minutes of video.
Fred
Fred,
Yeah, I understand that the highest level of quality in the Flyer will consume
about 1 GB per 6 minutes of video; of course, to edit 54 minutes of source
material, it's gonna take TWO 9 GB drives. Still, the total system, if
delivered as described thus far, is gonna be way ahead of anything else out
there as far as value for the dollar is concerned.
It would really be great for the kind of work I'm doing a lot of right now,
which is producing series of training tapes. All are related and much of the
footage is used in more than one of the tapes in the series. Oh well, this
project will be long since finished by the time I get my Flyer, but I'm sure
there'll be others… Rather, there BETTER be others… :`)
Jerry
Jerry,
You sound like me. I have a bunch of projects that would be perfect to edit on
the Flyer. However, if I am going to come up with the money to pay for it, I
have to finish these projects first.
I was seriously considering buying The Media Suite or another system in the
same price range. But, when I saw the price of the Flyer, like you, I figure it
should deliver a good product for a cost savings price. Even if I end up
spending $7,000, I couldn't get anything else in that price range.
When I got back in town last week, I found a large package from B&H. Inside was
a very BIG catalog. Not too many prices, but a lot of information on everything
they sell.
Haven't seen anything like this since the days of F&B CECO, SOS and Photo Mart.
After I scrape together the balance for the Flyer, I need to buy a new video
printer. The one I have now is about three or four years old and although the
quality is OK, the new printers have much higher resolution. It never ends.
Fred
Have fun on your trip. I took a cruise a couple of weeks ago, and it was
great!
Steve,
We're back. Five days at sea. Ship took us to Mexico. Playa de Carmen and
Cuzomel. Had the ability to bring back $800 worth of anything – duty free – and
in that part of the world, there are no electronic bargins. Just gold and
silver and gems. Nothing really worth while like TVs and VCRs.
Fred