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View Full Version : Version 4



jasonrudolph
02-03-2006, 07:40 PM
So, I just finished doing Premio Lo Nuestro, which is basically a people's choice awards for latin music. On the sow, I used 9 catalyst servers, 8 of which are owned by Univision, which were built by myself, and were just upgraded to V4. I actually had to do the final upgrades on site, after testing with one here at the studio to see if it would be stable enough for the show.

I have to say that it was extremely stable, and the performance gains I was able to acheive were substantial. This is mostly because I use an Xserve RAID to serve all the content to the servers, and in 10.4 there are MUCH better drivers for the Xserve RAID.
I had zero problems with the servers, which were up for a week straight, without shutting down. The additional layers were extremely useful, especially the sub-mixes. Due to the sub-mixes, I was able to drive three seperate outputs os low-res video from one machine. This was acheived by having all three mixes up on screen using the HUD, locking these windows down into a position, and then this output was sent to three different processors that mapped the signal to their outputs devices (versatubes on one, versatiles on another, and Mipix on the 3rd) This made my life much easier when it came to programming.
The new color effects, specifically the HSC mode is a GODSEND. If I was not using a specific color effect, 80% of the time I was using this color mode so that I could tweak the video for that particular look. This is extremely valuable in TV, especially since I had a mix of Barco D7, projection, Verstiles, Versatubes, Plasmas, Mipix, and Barco I 10 each of which looks a little different to the eye, and then even more different through a tv camera.
The new video effects are great. There is just so much there to experiment with, and it is very easy to get a completley different look out of the same clips.

The only problem I had, was that when having the V4 application in startup items, the OS must load the Catalyst before the Alladin Driver, so you see the blue bars. Just exit catalys and re-open and they are gone. This is an OS thing though, and not a Catalyst thing.

Overall, I rate this as an A+. the improvements are very significant.


Jason Rudolph