A short time ago we had a crew give us a call and ask for help figuring out what was wrong with the footage they’d copied off their camera cards the previous day. The first clip would open, but none of the other files did. “We don’t understand," they said, "we ran the checksums and they told us everything was okay.” Something had gone terribly wrong, and they couldn't figure out how or why.
The switch from film and analog video into digital video technologies has had a great freeing effect in every area of motion content creation. From the largest feature films to the smallest low budget content made for YouTube, digital technologies have given more people the ability to produce the stories, advertisements, training videos, or other content that they want. It’s created industries that exist today that didn’t exist a decade ago. With the quality of video that you can get on today’s phones, prosumer cameras, and digital cinema cameras, the cost of acquisition and the skill needed for operation in many cases has dropped significantly.
As the industry shifted towards digital production, it brought with it a new set of risks, risks that are far more intangible than those of film. In some cases, there are perceptions of risk where there is none because of the technologic complexity.
This is the first part of a three part series on protecting your digital assets. In this part we’re going to explore the whys and the hows of checksumming: How did checksumming become common practice? What does checksumming actually do? and Why isn’t it needed?
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Every system has one or more bottlenecks - the factors that limit all other operations or functions and controls the maximum speed things can happen. This is true in every aspect of life, whether we’re talking chemistry, physics, biology, human resources, a film set, or editing and grading footage in post-production.
We’re not going to get into the bottlenecks in film production here since they tend to have a variety of causes and are often unique the type of production you’re working on or the companies or individuals involved.
Instead we want to look at finding bottlenecks in Post-Production, understanding how each one can limit the speed at which you can work, and when it can be simple or inexpensive fixes that can increase the level of productivity.
Broadly speaking, all bottlenecks in post fall into the following categories: storage device speed, storage transfer speeds, peripheral transfer speeds, processing power (CPU and GPU), software architecture, and workflow.
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Mystery Box is starting off the year with a brand new computer designed for high-power After Effects and Davinci Resolve rendering. While establishing our new performance benchmarks, we took the opportunity to optimize After Effects, using its Memory and Multiprocessing features.
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