Drexel Cinematheque is back! Join us 7PM on Tuesday nights in the Large Screening Room for an incredible lineup of films curated by the CINETV faculty. Full schedule below.
Sept. 27 – Testament of Dr. Mabuse
Oct. 4 – Some Like it Hot
Oct. 11 – Sorcerer
Oct. 18 – Hands on a Hard Body
Oct. 25 – Godzilla (1954)
Nov. 1 – Double Indemnity
Nov. 8 – Stalker
Nov. 15 –Mad Max: Fury Road
Welcome back everyone! Hopefully your summer was enjoyable. Over the break, the lab computers were updated to the latest OS X and new versions of Adobe CC and Media Composer were installed. Furthermore, the Screening and Edit Suite is now a full color grade station and there is a brand new pre-production station, complete with Scheduling, Budgeting, and Final Draft, in 018 that students can reserve.
Looking for something fun to do this summer? Grab your blanket, folding chairs, and cooler, and see an outdoor movie! Visit Philadelphia just published their outdoor movie guide. You can find it here.
Blackmagic RAW 1.5.2 was installed on all CINETV lab computers. This means that .braw footage can now be edited directly in Adobe Premiere! As a reminder, you are still encouraged to create proxies depending on your camera settings.
Movie Magic Budgeting and Scheduling are now available in the Advanced Post House for all CINETV students to use. Please note that you need to navigate to Macintosh HD/Users/administrator/MMData/MMBudgeting OR MMScheduling/Templates at launch in order to access template folders.
Welcome back! Hopefully your break was safe and enjoyable. The only update over break was upgrading from DaVinci Resolve 16 to DaVinci Resolve 17. As a reminder, all lab computers have the regular version of Resolve except for the Color Grading labs, which have the Studio version. DaVinci Resolve is backwards compatible, so you shouldn’t have any issues updating your projects.
The CineTV Production Hub website is now drexelcinetv.tech. Be sure to add it to your favorites! Other than the name change, everything should be the same.
We are offering LTO backups to students and staff. This offline backup helps mitigate risk from ransomeware such as cryptolocker.
LTO-6 is a tape format that holds 2.5 terabytes of data with a 30 year shelf life. An offline backup helps prevent data loss in the event that your primary and backup hard drive becomes infected by Cryptolocker.
Cryptolocker encrypts your files on infected drives rendering the files useless unless you pay a $2500 fee to the digital terorrists. All your data will be lost if your primary and backup drive is connected at the time of infection (unless you want to pay a $2,500 fee to digital terrorists).
By taking incremental backups to LTO, students will have backups that are stored in a secure, offline location. LTO (and offline backups) come in handy if your house burns down, get in car accident where both drives are destroyed, are robbed while transporting both drives. LTO-6 tapes cost around $80 for 2.5 TB of data, so this is a minimal price to spend on a project that costs $2,000- $3,000 to shoot.
At absolute minimum, we suggest backing up your source material to tape. With tapeless media, you have no “physical” backup of your footage or audio files, so if you’re primary or backup drives get corrupted, you lose everything. By backing up your audio and card footage soon after acquisition, you minimize the risk of losing everything.
Backing up project files (Premiere Pro Project Files or Avid Bins) to LTO after each use would be incredibly tedious and time consuming. A balanced approach to backing up project files would be to do a File -> Save As before opening each project and append a new date at the end. Once you are done editing, upload the file to a personal Google Drive or Dropbox account. This way you have the project file stored in a “secure” location that can be used in conjunction with the footage on LTO. However, once you lock picture (or any other major milestone), you should save the project file to LTO.
Another good thing to backup would be any kind of graphics, VFX or color correction (rendered exports and project files with source files). These materials are extremely time consuming and can break a deadline if corruption occurs. Think After Effects and DaVinci Resolve renders and project files.
Once your project is wrapped and your “final” export has been spit out, place that file on the LTO tape along with any special codecs and players required to use the file.
Email Support.Westphal [@] Drexel.edu with the subject CineTV LTO Backup to schedule a backup.
Once a backup is schedule and you have procured an Ultrium LTO-6 tape, you will meet with Chip Murphy and he will supervise the backup session.
Please know exactly what directories need to be backed up, as this speeds up the process immensely. Make sure you have the proper USB3 or USB2 cables for your hard drive.
Initializing the tape and setting up the backup queue takes about 15 minutes, but the unsupervised backup process takes hours. Please plan on having some downtime on your project while the files are backed up.
Team,
We just added support for the wavelet-based JPEG-2000 within the Adobe Suite.
JPEG-2000 support will allow for reasonably sized 4k+ image sequences that can be used for final export from Resolve/Premiere and intermediate After Effects exports. Checkout this article from Broadcast Engineering on the advantages of wavelet based JPEG 2000 versus DCT based formats such as ProRes.
-Chip
If you plan on shooting on the Red One, Red Epic or Blackmagic Cinema Camera 2.5K EF, you are going to need a digital asset manager on-set to offload data.
This 1.5 to 2 hour workshop is required to gain access privileges for any field laptop or DIT rig.
This workshop will be covering:
Please RSVP by filling out the following form. Can’t make the scheduled time, then simply fill in a date/time that works on the form.
-Chip Murphy