Everyone who copies digital media files will probably experience this at some point: You’ve successfully set up your equipment, started offloading the first files… and notice that the copy speed is much slower than you were expecting. If you are in this situation, you will probably want to understand where the slow copy speed comes from and fix it. But what’s the best way to go about this?
In order to achieve a high transcoding speed, it is important to choose the right CPU and GPU power to work with. But in which cases should you boost CPU, and when does it make sense to focus on GPU instead? Our infographic will help you find out.
Working for film productions from two different countries can be an exciting experience for everyone involved. For Christiaan van der Knoop this was the case when he worked as DIT on the award-winning Dutch / German co-production “My Extraordinary Summer with Tess”, on which he handled on-set dailies creation with Silverstack Lab.
To convert digital film footage, every transcoding software requires two overall components: The source clips themselves, and some kind of “instructions” as to what should be created from the source clips during transcoding. In Silverstack Lab we call these instructions transcoding configurations.
When preparing for a job on which you will be responsible for transcoding, it’s important to choose the hardware with the right processing power. The type of processing power has significant influence on your transcoding performance, so choosing the right CPU/GPU-combination is important in order to optimize your transcoding speed.
The design of a DIT cart heavily depends on the specific requirements of the DIT who builds it. In the case of Frankfurt-based DIT Christian Dressler, his requirements were clear when he first planned the design of his cart: A secure and stable cart that allowed him to protect this gear, but was still flexible enough to fit in narrow spaces. The solution Christian came up with was simple yet unique: Building his cart based on a flight case.
One purpose of transcoding in Silverstack Lab is the creation of viewing dailies from the camera originals. It’s common practice to upload those dailies clips to a web platform that makes them easily available for everybody necessary. ARRI Webgate cloud services is such a dailies platform. Silverstack Lab now integrates with ARRI Webgate and makes it possible to view clips and metadata directly on the dailies platform.
Integrating a video router on a DIT cart enables flexible setups that would be hard to handle otherwise (e.g. switching 5 camera inputs at one monitor), but it also introduces a new level of complexity that needs to be managed by the DIT. When working with LiveGrade Pro, this complexity can be reduced with certain setups. In this article we outline three of them.
It’s not every day that you get to work on a set with a massive robot and actors in space suits. When filming the Netflix show “Lost in Space”, that’s exactly what DIT Chris Bolton experienced.
The article will outline why it’s important to know the performance of a hard drive before using it for backing up movie data on a film set, and evaluates different methods of determining the expected copy speeds reliably.
Additionally it will outline a few additional factors that can influence copy speeds and therefore should be kept in mind when comparing numbers.
