Post Production System On a Budget

Challenge: Put together a video postproduction suite based on Hollywood's networked model
Difficulty: Surprisingly easy
Estimated time: 2-4 hours
You're capturing superb content -- video, photos, music, the web. All of it – personal and event work -- needs to be turned into educational, informational or entertaining videos and video-enabled slide presentations. However, all of the content – raw and work-in-progress – is overloading your system and you are constantly running out of disk space to store and retrieve the work.

You have four options - delete content you feel won't enhance your video or be used, open your PC and install another drive, buy an expensive external drive solution or complete one project before you begin your next assignment so you can start with a clean hard drive.

Delete? Never! The minute you do, you know you'll need it!

Open the system? That's only for techies -- creative people don't do that.

Expensive external storage? How much of an additional investment can you afford for your business? How much additional budget can you get from management?

Do each project in turn? If you are an independent videographer you have to juggle projects in various phases of completion from shooting to disc delivery. If you do educational and informational videos you are always rushing to meet deadlines without an increase in budget and you need to have immediate access to content because you can often refresh and recycle good content in multiple projects.

The solution is what Hollywood's postproduction facilities do: create a video editing/authoring postproduction system of your own that uses an affordable powerful software-based editing system, such as Ulead's MovieFactory Creator, Media Server Pro or Apple's Final Cut Pro, a quality LCD flat-screen monitor (or two if possible), stereo speakers, and the real secret: an array of drives (of the hard drive and CD/DVD burner) configured in a daisy-chain stacked fashion that allows you to move content from one stage to the other directly from your desktop. The interconnected storage array cuts down on cable runs and desktop clutter. It also allows you to move quickly and seamlessly from one storage source to the other almost instantly. It even allows you to mirror content on multiple drives to always have a copy in the event of a hard drive failure.

The Basics
We're not going to spend a lot of time on the editing software or video or audio monitors; there are plenty of reviews of Ulead's products and Final Cut Pro to help you determine if you want to select a Mac or Windows-based system and solution.

About ergonomics -- Set up your system's monitor(s) and speakers on a flat surface, with the screen(s) and speakers within easy reach. Keep the monitors slightly lower than the top of your head, so you're looking slightly downward at it with the speakers on either side of the screen.

As many film and television postproduction editors will tell you, delivering a quality finished product requires a comfortable creative environment - one in which you'll be able to sit at and work for long stretches of time as you carry out the editing and authoring process. The screen should be at a comfortable viewing angle to eliminate neck and eye strain and the speakers positioned so that you can hear without having to have the volume up high, which causes ear fatigue.

The ADS Tech Dual-Link Drive enclosures provide a flexible and economic approach to building and expanding your storage library. The ADS enclosures are stackable, can hold any of the types of drives commonly used (hard drives, DVD drives, tape drives). The reason for this approach over buying an external drive solution is that you can choose the manufacturer, capacity, speed and price that is right for your budget. In most instances you can save 50% of the cost with only five minutes of work. The units come with their own internal power supply and are preconfigured to support both FireWire and USB cabling.

The main source for content for educational and event videos will be your camcorder. If the cameras use the DV format, you can download the content to the computer via USB. In this approach the camera is being used as an external drive. About 20 minutes of digital footage will create a file about 4GB in size. For added content security, you may want to transfer the raw footage to recordable DVD media (DVD+/-R). Or for convenience, transfer the content to one of the HDs that are independent of the main computer’s storage solution.

Videographers and postproduction personnel often want to include content from other sources, some of which resides on VHS tape. A converter, like ADS's Pyro AV Link, will convert analog information to the DV format. There's a myriad of other sources for content, including CDs, DVDs, streaming video from the web or television content (See sidebar on content protection). This is what makes the daisy-chained and stacked solution so useful: you can draw content out of an array of sources without constantly swapping out discs or connecting/disconnecting external drives. FireWire connections allow as many as 16 drive devices to be daisy-chained sequentially with no device ID conflicts. You probably won't need more than three to six devices especially if each ADS drive kit contains a 400GB hard drive giving you sufficient capacity to work on multiple video projects in parallel.

USB connections can't be daisy-chained, but a USB hub, such as the ADS Ultra Hub 4, will enable five to seven drive devices to be accessed instantly (theoretically you could connect up to 127 devices). Also, with FireWire and USB, unlike SCSI, you don't have to worry about terminators or device IDs. ADS's FireWire enclosures provide ports for both FW 800 and 400, so they are backward compatible with older systems that only have FW400 ports.

FireWire or USB - it's your call.

Either works perfectly and anyone who has ever tried to troubleshoot SCSI conflicts and termination errors will appreciate their ease of use.

Furthermore, most new drives enter the market as internal versions. Having cases for them in the form of format-agnostic drive housings gives you an edge on accommodating higher capacity, higher speed drives.

Position the drive stack near the editing/authoring station, but not necessarily on top of it. You can place it on the desktop or off to the side. Either the FireWire or USB hub options will result in only a single cable to the computer. (Which can also be off the desk for clean, open workspace. Leave an area between the computer and the drive stack to avoid thermal buildup.)

In a typical beginning or low volume postproduction environment, you'll have two hard drives and one or two DVD-R player/burners - one as a content storage device and one as the "final mix" platform. This approach to drive management allows you to keep your drives at the leading edge in terms of performance and capacity.

It also has another benefit: you can run multiple OS - Windows, Mac or Linux - without having to reformat/partition the computer's internal drive.

With your drive array in place, you can begin to edit in the "A/B roll" style: previewing content from various drives before assembling them at the post production workstation. Hollywood film and video editors do this with TB-capacity drives networked throughout their post facilities. You can achieve a similar installation for your organization's video service or for your event videography business.

The result is a comprehensive video postproduction facility at a fraction of the large solution approach.

Sidebar: Content Protection
There's been a lot of controversy about content and intellectual property (IP) protection in recent years. Most content that you don't create yourself is copyrighted in some way or another, and the law carries significant penalties for commercial misuse of IP.

However, the law can also be on your side. Thanks to the Digital Millennium Act of 1998, you are allowed to use copyrighted material that you have acquired legitimately for personal and possibly for educational use. The license to do so is implicit in the act of purchasing the content, in the form of DVDs, CDs, still photos or other graphics.

For more information: www.adstech.com
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