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Preparations.

Today has been all about starting to rearrange the game room for the new gear that’ll be occupying it in about a week and a half or so.
Viewsonic Monitors
Trying to find a way to avoid buying yet another monitor, I pulled down a flatscreen we haven’t used in a while to see if I could get it to overcome a problem it has displayed in the past – namely, starting to display the bottom of a Windows display about halfway up the screen. Turns out that there’s a trick to fixing this (it’s a known bug), and now we’re working just fine. These two monitors will be the Avid edit monitors.
Avid-ready
This is the end result of today’s toil; my main computer (Zen)’s monitor is at the far right, Orac’s is the one in the middle/corner, and the one between them is a 17″ LCD that monitors either cable or the output of my existing (non-Avid) video gear. (Orac’s and Zen’s monitors can also do composite video signals – you may have seen these in action at OVGE.)
Avid-ready
And how do I handle the daunting power requirements of this stuff?
Avid-ready
Kitten power! (ZZZZzzzzzzzzz…)
Only Olivia could crash out while I’m moving stuff all over the place, creating clouds of dust and lots of noise in the process. 😆… Read more

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Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Dying A Little Digital Death

Avid = diva spelled backwardNo, it’s not that kind of little death. If only it were. I’d feel much better right about now.
Mere moments after I walked in the door at work today, we took a power hit. The UPS that’s supposed to keep our Avid powered up shrieked its monotone shriek as the whole thing went down and rebooted. And when it came back up, it showed me copious error messages claiming to have lost all media on Drive E.
This is a bad thing. This is a very bad thing.
The new PC-based Avid system stripes media across two SCSI drives, E and F. It doesn’t stripe them redundantly, however, so if you lose E, well…you’re F’ed. I called Avid tech support and they helped me out very quickly – and it turned out that the error message I was getting required manually deleting two files from Drive E and then restarting so the machine would re-index all the media on Drive E. That’s it. Turns out this isn’t that uncommon. Turns out E wasn’t F’ed. Turns out I didn’t lose any media.
Hey, Avid, thanks for the help. And please come pick up your heart attack at your earliest convenience. I’m done with it.… Read more