Travel Matte

[litemover]

Cristian,

Have you experimented with Xserve RAIDs at all? I have been able to get very good results with one. I can get quite a lot done with one serving 8 Catalyst servers doing SD. I'm sure if you were to use serve less catalysts off of one, and used the correct codecs this might be possible to do (of course there still lies the limitation of the color modes). An xserve RAID serving a catalyst built around a Quad G5 should have the horsepower to pull something like this off. I have not tried it just yet, but if you could get one layer to work using the animation codec, which supports Alpha channels, and one using either DVntsc (if they are giving you a Beta meant for broadcast anyways you wont be losing anthingin your colorspace) or perhaps PhotoJpeg you might be able to do this. I know these are more expensive pieces of gear, but it is still probably cheaper than Profile, while being a little more versatile.

What do you think Richard?

Jason

I think that is one of the best possible setups, especially for SD DV. Unfortunately, I don't have the Xserve raid though I do have an 8 drive raptor array (or 2 4 drive arrays) which has served me well playing HD and uncompressed 4:2:2 SD. With 8 drives I could play 4 strong layers of 1080P compressed, with 4 drives I can play 2 HD layers and 1 HD laer that runs at about 18 fps.

Xserve Raid is defenitely one of the best alternatives, however not cheap. When you are really pushing it with all of your machines does it at all studder? Studdering is one of the most intolerable attributes for the people I used to work frequently with. I once did a Catalyst demo for the Grammys the year they had the big wings and Walter Miller, the Director was so intent on finding studdering. He is about 70 so he kept saying he saw studdering but the 4 others in the room kept saying what studdering? I think he had heard about the studdering from other gigs but I had my raptor array hooked up and there was no studdering. Another time when I had to put together an emergency show and fiber it to NY then Sat feed it to Equador from there, the fiber receiver kept complaining about studdering thinking I was feeding it through Catalyst. For a very long time Catalyst digital Video was synonomise with studdering. I went to great lengths when I was programming Catalyst frequently to make sure there was no studdering and everyone thought I was crazy.

You can get higher speeds with Sata II now and for a fraction of the cost. There are also other brands of Xsan. I'd like to experiment more with all types of arrays and file systems. Huge systems had a very fast Xsan system when I last checked.

If I could just get that color mode, I would play the matte and the fill without sync and they keep up with each other as long as you start them at the same time. Most of the travel mattes are just play once and stop and they don't last long so going without sync within the same machine shouldn't be a problem.

As you know, when you are in the midddle of rehearsal and someone hands you two uncompressed files (a key and fill) for a title, you don't have too much time to get them into Aftereffects or Shake, comp them together, render them out as a pixlet, png, photojpeg or any other millions+ codec that supports alpha, get it accross all of your machines or your main Raid array. It takes a fraction of time to just pop in your usb drive and drag the files to you title directory, renumber them, and do a quick shift scan.

It would be really convenient to have that color mode but for now I'll just have to keep comping them during my lunch break. Getting the Avid people to comp them is really difficult to do since they are so used to handing them in separately and they aren't compositors. "Compositing is my job" I was once told, they just batch render the clips while they browse ebay and hand the batches in when their finished.

You are lucky Jason because you work in a friendly environment. Even though you get content thrown at you at the last minute, it's much more of a cooperative atmosphere there between playback and Catalyst isn't it?

Christian

[jasonrudolph]

With the latest version of catalyst being able to run on Tiger, my performance just shot through the roof, as the Xserve RAID drivers are MUCh better than they were on 10.3.x On my last show, doing all SD, I was able to have 7 catalysts playing back two files each, and an 8th server which was doing three seperate outputs (so 6 files playing back sometimes) and I did not notice a stutter anywhere, except for one file the art department gave me which had been encoded to Pjpeg at 100% quality.
Also, As a test when I first got the whole system set up on site, but did not yet have any projectors or LED walls up, I put one file of a fan that I had shot, slow motion, and let it play on all 8 catalysts, they stayed perfectly in sync with each other for around 4 hours. These had been encoded as DVntsc. This was not using the sync feature, just started them all at the same time and let them run.

I also used this sytem at the Latin Grammy's this year, and it performed very well. The only issue I had was that I had a really nasty delay on the SDI input (like almost 2 seconds), and they wanted to sync something with audio, so we had to delay the audio and roll it off of a backup profile.

While Xserve RAID is not cheap, it is not really any more expensive than the Huge systems arrays, or anyone else's for that matter, and when I was putting together this sytem, it actually ended up being around the same cost as doing SCSI for each machien, but with much larger disc capacities.
While SATA II does have faster throughput, the disc latencies are still the same as SATA I so it does not really help us all that much for Catalyst. The benfit, is that you can do port multiplication, and create larger arrays, and do more uncompressed stuff if you want.

If you could get Animation to work on a G5 using catalyst, then this would really solve your problem. You'll have to ingest from tape anyways and render out to whatever format you are using anyways.....

Yes, I am a little lucky in the environment I work in, however I still get artist's people coming to me 10 minutes before rehearsals with a beta all the time, and the same goes with people from withing the network who are not used to working with me, but I have trained most of the graphics artists to give me what I want and how, and we work to gether so that if it is something that can be easily accomplished in Catalyst, I handle it, if it's not, they take care of it for me ahead of time. It's becoming more and more of a challenge, because for each show, they put more and more on my plate, and I live up to it, so the tasks just keep getting larger and larger. It gets to a point where you hit a limit of how much one person can really handle.

[litemover]

That's great.

Definately the way to go. You're lucky to have the Xserve Raid.

Christian