The 15k was me ballparking a like for like replacement of what we currently have. But realistically if I took that to my manager and said that she’d tell me to fuck off. Realistically it’s gonna be about 2-3k per machine plus a couple of monitors if needed. It’ll be a case of the most RAM we can get for the least money.
The thing with PC’s is that I’ve used apples iOS for 15 years and am fully embedded in their ecosystem now. As much as the It guys at work would love it if we switched over to PC working, I wonder if it would be too disruptive to our workflow.
Having said that, could always look at just 1 PC which can do all the heavy lifting.
Don’t work in video so don’t know, but is there a cloud alternative that would be cheaper? I.e. just provision some beefy machines in the cloud for rendering etc, and connect from a Chromebook or something? Do you need heavy hardware all the time?
That’s what I do in data projects, we sometimes spin up machines with fat GPUs etc and destroy them when done.
Has anyone here got a solution for batch converting AVI files without transcoding on Mac/Big Sur?
MPEG Streamclip has been my go-to forever as it is all so simple. It’s 32-bit so no longer works.
I use EditReady for the more ‘pro’ formats, but because of Big Sur, this now doesn’t support AVI either.
Handbrake and VLC are a no go as I have hundreds of files and with those programs, you need to set each file individually. Plus, they do conversion by transcoding.
My old Mac won’t turn on, otherwise, I’d just do it there.
only thing i can really think of would be running bootcamp + windows then using winff, ffmpeg, avconv, etc.
you can also do queues and batch conv with handbrake, thats what i do to deinterlace standard def footage and convert it to mp4, but as you say thats transcoding and not just swapping containers.
It’s a tool, just like using a different shape hammer. It’s easy to bounce between both platforms - I use both regularly - there’s a couple of small differences, like Airdrop, which all have similar Windows apps or workflows. Best way to think of it is that Windows is like an app launcher, rather than a walled garden. Put the iPride in the bin.
^ remuxing, can change to different formats by changing the container. all depends what encoding is used originally though afaik - for avi i believe it’d only be mpeg1/2/4 which can be muxed to mp4 without a reencode.
Not that I know of, but it’s not my area of expertise. About that remuxing - are you converting old DV clips or something? At the start of lockdown last year, I started plowing through my early DV tapes. Logged about 5 of them within Premiere no probs, but all capturing failed. Couldn’t even do a crash capture (play cam, hit record in Premiere). New machine doesn’t have any firewire ports on the the motherboard and i don’t think I have an old firewire card to install. It was seriously dull and tedious to be fair.
I don’t think it’d be DV tapes he’s logging as afaik they’d get captured using the DV codec and you can’t mux that to mp4 (unless Premiere has an option to change the codec but I’m solely windows so I wouldn’t know).
If you’re on Windows, there’s a great program called Scenalyzer which is what I use for capturing tapes. Has scene detection you can tweak, the ability to repair glitched files etc. There’s also stuff like WinDV which works p well. You can grab Firewire cards for a tenner off ebay, but I wouldn’t blame you for sacking off the monotonous task of capturing multiple tapes.
The plan was to upload all the old raw clips/sessions to IG or something. The awkward thing was there’s loads of broken timecode all over the place, but yeah, I can easily enough sort myself out with a new card. Most of the later tapes from 05 onwards are captured better though. Will definitely look into Scenalyzer and WinDV, thanks for the heads up.
Broken timecode is an absolute nightmare to capture, I ran into it not long back where I’d have glitches inbetween different scenes ie say I film someone do a trick, put the camera away and an hour later film something else, the start of the second segment would be glitched/unable to capture which I found out was from the mechanical nature of DV cameras due to the delay between pressing stop and the motors themselves stopping causing skips in the timecode and thus unable to read when capturing. As far as I know there’s no digital way to fix timecode errors aside from ignoring timecode breaks in certain software which is patchy at best and doesn’t really solve it.
However, if the tape plays back fine on a camera you can sort timecode issues by putting the tape in the camera, getting a second camera with a fresh dv tape and connecting them together through firewire. Hit record on the second camera, play on the first and it’ll dub the footage over to the new tape with a fresh timecode which should then capture correctly. I haven’t done it myself and obviously it’s a bit more invested both time, equipment and money wise but maybe some food for thought.
the batch conversion is because I have tons and tons of logged files from '99-'07 which were all captured on a PC as AVI files. After that, it was all MAC. I want to just be able to grab them to make insta clips, etc.
I’ve also been asked for exports from some old videos I’ve done - but because of music clearance, I need to remove the songs. I actually have a ton of old project files so I can relink the clips, mute the audio and re-export. Simple. Except I can’t relink anything which is AVI because…64 bit. Ugh.
The other thing I’ve been doing (and this is separate, really) is like Ciaran, I have been relogging old tapes. Sorta.
I basically grab my old laptop and record the entire DV tape and then chop it down afterwards. 12-14gb per DV tape and I’m finding lots of cool random bits on them…
It’s only up until about 2002 where timecode breaks exist. After that, its a pretty solid deal. Thank fuck. I can’t capture entire tapes unattended if there are those breaks as I need to press ‘capture’ again each time.
But that laptop I was using to do that is dead now, I think.
Maybe I just need to buy an old macbook and just use that for conversion, too.
Yep, similar deal with the broken timecode. Eventually worked out what not to do, often by recording over the entire tape with the lens cap on before I used it to give me an hour of clean timecode.
Haven’t tried this yet, despite having the cables -
Cam → FW400 cable → FW 400/800 adaptor → FW800/Thunderbolt cable → 2016 MBP. Might work?
I’ve got a digital to Analogue convertor. I could run the cam through that via RCA and then out of that, firewire…that would sort timecode issues. If that is what you are referring to.
…but to be honest, it’s only 20-30 tapes with those issues anyhow…the remaining 500 or so should be fine.
Or if you are talking about DV capture on a newer MBP, it isn’t the connection which is an issue. It’s the fact that DV capture is just no longer supported at all outside of FCP or iMovie…BUT…you absolutely cannot remove the automated scene detection anymore in either of those programs, which is insane. It means that any flicker or fast movement seems to be seen as a new scene and you lose a second of capture while it cuts and restarts. It’s daft and near impossible to capture some clips with flashes going off, etc.
^ rca would have some quality loss over firewire. again, as much of a pain as it is i still think bootcamping windows and using something like scenalyzer would be the best option. for example you can’t disable scene detection in either of those progs, whereas with scenalyzer:
can fine tweak it or straight up disable it if you just want a 60 min avi. if you do get split avi’s, something like avidemux will allow you to combine all the seperate files together into one .avi with no issue.
