CTG FYI

A Little Fun: Vintage television commercials from the 1950s through 1980s

2011-11-28T10:29:00.000-05:00

Duke University has a digital library of vintage television commercials spanning some three decades, from the 1950s to the 1980s. The body of work in this collection includes ads for once-classic and now obscure brands like Super Bravo, Fluffo, Byrrh, Heart of Oats, Klean n Shine, Virex, Ansco and others, as well as brands still common today: Avis, Bounce, Charmin and something weird called Maxwell House.

You can browse the collection online and watch the commercials right in iTunes, and even subscribe to a specific brand and pull down every commercial they aired during those years. Check out Duke's AdViews. (Thanks Tara)
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Vin Di Bona Productions Continues To Upgrade Avid Workflow

2011-11-18T07:14:00.000-05:00

-- Meeting Growing Storage Needs of HD Production for
'America's Funniest Home Videos' & New FishBowl Worldwide Media --

Burbank, CA (November 10, 2011) - Vin Di Bona Productions, best known as the creator of "America's Funniest Home Videos," is now in its twenty-second year on ABC Television. Vin Di Bona Productions recently expanded its Avid Unity MediaNetwork™ for the third time with Archion Technologies' Synergy high-performance storage system. Used by thousands of clients worldwide, Synergy integrates seamlessly with Unity and provides greater scalability and protection without compromising workflow and performance.

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Spectra Tape Plays to Cloud, Big Data, HPC Communities

2011-11-18T07:05:00.000-05:00

Tiffany Trader, Editor, HPC in the Cloud
In the past decade, the prevailing wisdom would have you believe that tape storage was a dead or dying breed, soon-to-be usurped by the sexier, speedier disk. Now that particular hype cycle has run its course and logic and common sense have returned to the storage conversation, prodded no doubt by a the latest buzzwords du jour, big data and cloud computing. At any rate, there's no doubt that tape storage is as relevant as ever, and perhaps more relevant than ever. Indeed, this was the prevailing theme circulated by a group of prominent storage analysts at a recent Spectra Logic event in Boulder, Colo.
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2011-11-10T07:26:00.000-05:00

Hard Disk Drives supply will become scarce due to supply interruptions.
The recent flooding in Thailand, has led to production and supply issues for many hard disk drive vendors. Below is an article from Data Center Knowledge that summarizes the issues surrounding this crisis and it's repercussions:
Read About It

Avid Resource Roundup from CTG/FYI

2011-02-10T23:27:00.000-05:00

Here's a round up of the best Avid resources we've seen out there on the web for pro editors and post-production:

A logical place to start is Avid's own site. They have the most authoritative and up to date product info and great user groups.

Avid Community is content-rich with blogs, forums, user groups and a helpful, knowledgeable group of participants. 100% Avid 24/7/365.

A strong clearinghouse for professional level tutorials is Creative Cow. They have over 60 different articles about Avid, and hundreds more on related topics. "High signal/Low noise."

Scott Simmons is based in Nashville, and works on Avid and Apple Final Cut Pro. His blog (the editblog) is a very deep resource, with tons of info. It is hosted on Pro Video Coalition.

Sony has a new blog, also hosted on Pro Video Coalition. It's called livewire, and it's the home of the Sony Tech Guy.

Splice Now is the avid based blog of Steve Cohen, a motion picture editor based in Los Angeles. His site is full of practical tips for real world situations.

Benjamin Hershleder's site is a great blend of the professional and the irreverent. He knows a lot and has super tips and tutorials... and also has a one-of-a-kind humor collection. Benjamin is based in L.A..

Look what some Avid users are able to accomplish here

Stay tuned to CTG/FYI for stuff that's actually useful, fun, and smart. Click here to subscribe.

Why some computers are better than others

2009-10-09T17:08:00.001-04:00

Computers come in all different sizes these days. But what makes one computer better for one task that another? The technical answer is bus segments. Think of these like lanes of roads running to each device in your computer.

In a more expensive computer, each device has direct lane access to the processors and ram. This means that each device has direct communication, and therefore can take full advantage of speed.

In order to save costs, manufacturers combine traffic on the same lane. In this example the onboard devices such as USB, Firewire and network share with Slot 1. This means if you have a device in slot 1 that requires a lot of communication with the processors, such as a video card. Then using the onboard ethernet would probably affect the quality of your video on your monitors. This is an extreme example.

This dramatically affects the performance of your system. If you had a video capture card in slot 3, and a drives connected to a card in slot 4, you would have issues getting enough information through the bus, and therefore drop frames, or have unexplained video playback issues. This is not a reliable solution. If you put the video capture card in slot 2, and the drive controller card in slot 3, then they do not cross talk.

Traditionally the more expensive the computer, the more bus segments (or in the example, Lanes). Most manufacturers poorly document the amount of bus segments in their computers. Thus making it more difficult to make a generic white box computer reliable and guaranteed solution. Also, computer manufacturers are always changing and updating to the latest chip and revisions, so one model of computer may vary in bus segments from another, even if they appear to be the same.

Many Video and Audio software companies support specific machines to make the choice easier and the opportunity for success greater. Major manufacturers, like HP and Dell guarantee a specific model will be unchanged. This way once the model is tested and document, it is available for people to purchase.

As computers get faster, and architechture continues to change, eventually everything will have it's own bus segment.

How not to get burned using firewire

2009-10-09T17:00:00.000-04:00

Apple introduced Firwire in 1995, and toward the end of the Decade became the interface to have. Firewire, or the technical name IEEE1394 or OHCI, works at 2 different speeds. Firewire 400 was 400mb/second, and Firewire 800 is 800mb/second.

Firewire can transmit video or connect drives for data transfer. Theoretically you can connect 63 firewire devices to a system. However, my practical experience is a maximum of 4 drives on each firewire port.

A video device communicates differently than a drive. We have seen issues when you connect a firewire drive, and a video device to the same card. Both Aja and Avid recommend using an additional firewire cards.

This diagram shows how devices communicate on a Mac Pro. We see that the Firewire 400 and 800 ports on the front and back of the Macintosh connect to the same internal Firewire chip.

In my experience, if you connect a video device to any of these ports on the front or back, and a firewire drive you will have a potential for conflicts. This is displayed as dropped frames, the deck not responding, the capture aborting, or video not being able to control the video device properly.

The best way to work around this is to either add an additional firewire card to the system.

Firewire cards we have had success with:

SIIG, Inc

ADSTECH

These are best practices to ensure you have success every time you work with your video equipment.

Sources: Wikipedia