Drives

I got a complaint from our distributor that I've been sending him USB drives when they're so dang slow. I don't think they're that bad -- an 80 gig file seems to take about an hour to transfer. But he wants Firewire 800. So eventually I'll get some Firewire 800 portable drives.

But that's not the weird thing I've found.

We've shot two features with the Panasonic GH1 camera, transferring the footage to ProRes422 "SQ" ("standard quality") using the Neoscene software. The first movie (Day 2) we did with a stock GH1. The second one ("Earthkiller") was with a cracked camera with a 30Mb/s data rate.

Now, when we first did sync tests and the like, we found we could edit just the way we always had. I've been using USB2 drives to edit HD movies. You're not supposed to but that's what we've been doing and it works (and the USB drives are cheaper.)

For some reason we simply could not edit Day 2 without playback stuttering and hiccuping on a USB 2 drive. I had to order a more expensive Firewire 800 drive. And (knock on wood) it's performed just fine and flawlessly. My buddy Mitchell, who has edited dozens of projects from his GH1 (transferred via Neoscene to ProRes422) thought that going to Firewire 800 was just nuts -- he'd never had to do it.

Robin Kurtz as Helen in Earthkiller

But then one day he had a project which simply would not play back smoothly from his USB drives. Just the one project mind you.

And our movie Earthkiller doesn't seem (again, knock on wood) to have any problems at all playing back from a USB drive. Remember, this was the movie which started out at a higher bandwidth.

So yeah. Who knows? Just some ghosts in the Pandora Machine.
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Giant among men, Ian Hubert publishes a tutorial on lighting for outer space in Blender. The "sun" lamp with some ambient lighting is the trick. The man knows how to light in 3D.