- Feature Articles
- CodeSOD
- Error'd
-
Forums
-
Other Articles
- Random Article
- Alex's Soapbox
- Announcements
- Best of…
- Best of Email
- Best of the Sidebar
- Bring Your Own Code
- Coded Smorgasbord
- Mandatory Fun Day
- Off Topic
- Representative Line
- News Roundup
- Editor's Soapbox
- Software on the Rocks
- Souvenir Potpourri
- Sponsor Post
- Tales from the Interview
- The Daily WTF: Live
- Virtudyne
Admin
You would really try to move a file server running a 6 disk raid 0 (no redundancy!) on a cart on a film set? Good luck!
Admin
Raid 0 is just stupid.
Raid 5 is usually the all round best including economy.
Although there's a bit of a double WTF here in that surely you can just remove all that junk from redhat?
Although I'm more of a Debian/Gentoo user, surely you can just unintall crap like cups or at least remove it from start up?
Admin
Even worse.. Wasn't the bomb the trademark of the AtariST? Didn't pre-macosX macos-es show a dead (as in x-es for eyes) mac terminal?
Admin
Aw.. crap.. this was in reply to someone talking about mac errors.. Forgot to quote :P
Admin
Seems to me that letting your employee build something that ridiculously cheaper than the competition would be "doing something for the first time".
And if the reason given is "risk", the path of least risk here would be to do things exactly the way they've always been done -- which means, call up other studios and see what they're using.
I still am really tempted to just go build a startup for this. If the issue is that it seems too cheap, I've got no problem charging that much more -- but I'd rather actually throw together a professional product.
Admin
Meanwhile, in the mirror universe...
Always consider the alternatives.
Admin
Admin
Just imagine a man with a pink sock (aka a prolapse) then taking his hands and pulling it WIDE open. SMILE!
Admin
The real WTF is the a&&hole who gets all uppity about a simple typo.
Admin
Well, you got the cheaper right. The rest is FUD.
Admin
I feel your pain, brother.
Admin
Sure, but it's a rental. It's probable that the maker would be annoyed and cause trouble. Not to mention, management probably didn't want him messing with the 'professional' solution.
Admin
Sure, but it's a rental. It's probable that the maker would be annoyed and cause trouble. Not to mention, management probably didn't want him messing with the 'professional' solution.
Admin
"You and YOUR stupid recorder"...?
I'm afraid my answer would have been words to the effect of...
"MY stupid recorder? You mean the one YOU insisted on because it's the one 'PROFESSIONALS' use? Tell you what... you're the professional, YOU use it... I quit!"
Admin
For a studio feature 35 million is kinda low budget sad but true. although Studio Features have a great deal of oversight over those sorts of things. I have a friend who is an AC. (Assistant Camera Man) he was on the latest Scorsese film. After discovering that the steady cam's gate was improperly set up and was out of spec, causing focus settings to be incorrect the studio instructed production to not use that camera any more. My point is that though I do not doubt the actual essence of this story, some of the facts seem to be exageration.
Now in the interest of full disclosure I am not an expert at the camera department, I am a Gaffer and electrician with 25 years of film making experience however on studio and indie productions. I did post a link to this story on a film making board and this was the response from someone who knows more about these particulars then I.
"Well if it was a studio film it would be at the low end of the scale, The whole article and the comments felt just off. How would a 35mil feature shoot for only 5 weeks, and if that was just the green screen, it is still hard to judge what was really going on. The configuration seemed totally bogus also, they talk about video capture cards? wtf and at 35 million they would be using the Panavision Genesis or the Thompson Viper and they can use Dual-link HD-SDI SMPTE 372M to HDcam SR, or they could use a SSR recorder and dual copy to external drives also as backup protection. Maybe I am taking this the wrong way but the article just doesn't ring true"
Admin
I think that was too subtle for this crowd. Should have used Vista instead I guess.
Admin
This is what I'm thinking.
The stated cost of downtime is $5000/hour therefore if Phils 27k unit is roughly half the cost of the professionals it only takes 5.5 hours of total downtime to make it cheaper to go with the professional approach.
Given that Phil obviously had no prior experience designing or building such a system I don't blame his non-technical boss for trusting the "professionals"
Admin
torrent plz!
Admin
It sounds a bit like it was a video assist rig with the intention of doing overlays or mixing previz or 3d effects in real time. In that case, it was probably a 35mm film, because you would be able to simulate effects with the HD rig. It also answers why they would continue using it when it was clearly not ideal. (The images aren't going to be used in the final film, so if some are missing or bad quality isn't a train smash...)
Admin
Factoid update:
There are a couple of factoids in the article which aren't bang on but Alex and I did discuss at some length to get it to this state of being broadly right; I'm not going to nitpick.
Yes I did know the gear was a trainwreck before we ended up using it. You do your best not to allow this to affect your attitude, as this can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's probably true that I was very bad at communicating the inevitability of issues with the management because of this.
That said, industry people often, with seniority, find themselves moving directly from creative roles into roles which involve both creativity and management, and bad management is common to the industry.
It was not a studio feature; it was made by a well-established indie with a long track record.
Yes I had built gear like this before.
The reason they were particularly wedded to the COTS solution was that it had the personal recommendation of a senior creative, who just was not going to let it be seen to fail. Again, that said, I did not ever expect them to go for the scratchbuild, they are very conservative with their $5k an hour costs and previous comments along the lines of "only 5.5 hours to make the COTS cheaper" are quite correct.
"at 35 million they would be using the Panavision Genesis or the Thompson Viper and they can use Dual-link HD-SDI SMPTE"
I won't mention the camera system used but this happened pre HDCAM-SR. Actually it was planned for a much cheaper system and they couldn't really afford what they were trying to do anyway.
I thought Cloverfield was F23?
P
PS - edit - and yes it is an interesting point as to whether this sort of post is part of camera department or editorial. Editorial often know more about how it works technically, but it's usually part of camera.
Admin
Am I the only one confused as to why the original story empasizes the fact that it was Windows XP Home Edition?
I see no way in which using XP Professional would have helped in the slightest here.
(Okay, I suppose it empasizes the cheapness of the setup, but the cheapness wasn't really the problem, as there are clearly ways the manufacturer could have saved money while making the system work better, such as running Linux on the laptop or even leaving out the laptop entirely and plugging a keyboard, mouse, and monitor directly into the DFR. After all, the laptop was apparently just being used as an SSH-enabled X terminal.)
Admin
I have a bro down there that was a juicer on the backlot stuff where they did the green screen exteriors. He said that although they used all sorts of cameras the A camera was an Arri 35. This is of course a hot button topic amongst the pundits but He was there and I believe him.
As to the OP yeah it sounds like a real WTF moment. I am glad all I have to worry about are C Stands and my Mole tungsten kit. pretty much idiot proof...pretty much
Admin
Wow, that truly is a golden opportunity!
Mason www.FireMe.to/udi
Admin
I've seen the one where it only has a Sad Mac, which can be triggered by pushing the "Interrupt" button on your Mac Plus while the "Happy Mac" is showing.
Now take a guess how far back my Mac experience goes.
Hey, at least with System 7, I might be able to use ResEdit and change that System Error message for "Somebody set us up the bomb!" messages!
Admin
It's been a long time, but I think the bomb was common for application related errors. If you were lucky you could recover from those with a force-quit -- good old cmd-opt-esc -- but all too often you needed the all-powerful cmd-ctrl-power.
Admin
"Plz send meh teh torrentz."
There. FTFY.
Admin
The problem is shell extensions. The system loops through all of the shell extension dll's one time for each file selected. The more files you select, the longer it takes. The more shell extensions you have, the longer it takes. If the extensions aren't well profiled in the development process and tweaked for performance(most of them), you can easily wind up waiting a couple of minutes for the context menu to appear. I have this problem on my laptop currently and the only way I can see to fix it is to rip out the extensions one at a time to find out which one is causing the delay.
Admin
It's been 1.5 years since I had to work on a mac, but I recall that (in my place of employment), they would leave the panic data on the screen when they crashed. Maybe that's a matter of how it was configured, though.
This I know is just a configuration option. By default, windows reboots immediately after a crash, but you can go into the system properties and set it so it doesn't do that. Where I work, we change it on the servers so you don't end up with a machine in an endless reboot cycle when things go really badly.
Admin
Why would you be upset with RAID 0? I would think it would be just about the only choice. The advantage of simple disk striping is that while a block is being written to one disk, you don't have to wait for it to complete before you begin writing to the next one. Isn't insanely high definition uncompressed video going to result in a very high disk write throughput? (yes). So if you want high performing disks (which don't really exist for reasonable budgets) then buy a bunch of disks with decent write speeds and stripe them (RAID 0).
Admin
My guess: Anaconda 3!
Admin
And blaming Phil for the cost overruns is a gross disservice to the completion guarantors who, when the next project lands in front of them see "Oh, these guys are using the same professional setup as our last film... hopefully they're not using that Phil guy again."
Admin
What he should have done is to simply say "This system has a single point of failure. I will not take responsibility for what happens when it breaks down." and got it in writing and let them sign it.
Admin
Sounds like the rise of the silver surfer to me. Mind you, it also sounds like every film filmed entirely in digital. Even the Star Wars films were a pita from what i hear.
Admin
Or you get a 3ware raid card and set it to raid 5 or 6; for 25k, you can do it right.
Admin
RAID 5 may have a performance penalty for updating just one block, but if you have a good 5 disk RAID 5, and you're writing four consecutive blocks, aligned to the block interleaving, the only performance penalty is in computing the checksum. At least, that's the only way I can think of for a couple of RAID arrays I've used to get the performance they've demonstrated in some certain benchmarks. (Basically, doing random access writes produced the degraded performance everyone complains about with RAID 5. Doing major data dumps, however, resulted in performance comparable to a stripe with one fewer disk (that is, discounting the parity disk.) Note that these were true hardware RAID arrays, not cheap linux boxes pretending to be hardware RAID arrays.)
The one that had me really impressed some time back was the log server that lost a drive, and showed virtually no performance loss as it synced in the hot spare - at least, until such point as someone decided to actually read one of the files in question. (The performance then, of course, did the exact same as Wile E. after he looks down.)
Admin
This is what happens when you don't protect yourself from liability. I would have been up front with the producer and told him that this is a poor unreliable set up and that I'm completely against it, and if anything goes wrong I will not take any blame for it.
Admin
My guess is the file was "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow". Shot almost entirely on green screen, and a shot for $37.7 million.
Admin
You're about a decade out of date on that, sunshine.
Admin
Nah. Now they just freeze up and the cursor changes to a little spinning multi-colored disk while you sit there and wonder how exactly this is better than a Windows PC.
Admin
i agree with it.
Admin
I manage to crash my mom's osx snow leopard mbp at LEAST once a month. (Is that TRWTF or what?). Not just bashing macs though, I get a blue screen on my Windows dual boot (on a laptop that was windows as of OEM) a little less than once a week. I get a kernel panic on my Ubuntu install about once every 3 months, always due to poor atheros support.