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That certainly helps! 😉
Try these two things…
1. Go into a new project, or create a new project. Then, try to access your library via the network panel. You might be able to copy your media over to this new project.
2. You may have a corrupt clip library file, and need to restore the backup. The backups are typically made every time you exit the software (cleanly, not a crash), and then at certain intervals. If you are not really (really) comfortable with IRIX, I would recommend a call to support. Let me know, though. I can post some steps for you up here.
-Andy
Emo,
Have you tried loading the Online Table of Contents? This is a file version of the archive header that is saved in your /usr/discreet/archive directory. Click Load OTOC, and pick the archive from the list. Smoke will try to load the slates from your archive tape, but the important stuff is in the OTOC. Then, resave to the archive tape, or better yet, make a brand new archive tape. You should be fine, then.
HTH,
-Andy
2 Octane 2s and and Onyx2 IR … no problems.
-Andy
Mario,
To animate transparency in add mode, you have to trick action.
-Switch back to blend mode
-Enter the Keyer for the layer that has your footage
-Click LUM for luminance key
-Go to blending, click on the lower left point and move it to the upper left.
-Exit the Keyer and return to action.You have now used the keyer to create an additive mix, so you do not need to switch your layer’s blend mode to add. Voila, transparency will now work.
As far as the fields issue, could you be more specific?
You may want to check two things:
1. Your composite is set up in Field Mode.
2. Your layers which have field-based footage are set to interlaced, not progressive.HTH,
Andy
My 2.336 cents…
I have smoke running on an Octane 2 and a PC running linux. The linux box does not do HDIO (for now), but it does work with HD material. I can tell you that, based on my own internal benchmarks, the linux box is 2-4 times faster than the octane2. You can probably pick up a smoke on linux for $60k-$80k, and I would bet the number is closer to $60k. So, ask yourself how much a tricked out Mac for FCP would be, and figure it out from there.
Ultimately, it’s a tool. You only have yourself to sell.
HTH,
Andy
Brian,
Sorry, typo…the command is umount (drop the n)
-Andy
Brian,
I think you might have hit on something…
If the sledgehammer was hard mounted to your octane, it could be that the system is trying to find a directory that is no longer there, and the system hangs periodically waiting for a network timeout. If the sledgehammer was mounted on your machine as:
/sledge
for example, you need to make sure that it was unmounted. Become root, or superuser, and type umount /sledge (substitute the directory where the sledge was mounted).
Was XStoner installed on your octane? If so, become root in a shell, and type xskill to kill the XStoner daemon, which runs in the background. It may have seen the sledgehammer and is still looking for it.
HTH,
Andy
Brian,
The texture button determines whether or not you are using the texture/graphics processors to do your openGL processing. In action, all of your images are basically flat polygons with your footage texture mapped onto them. That’s what makes flame so interactive (except in your case 😀 ) The SGI has rather powerful openGL processing, so a good deal of what is done in action is offloaded to the graphics processors. Turning texture off means that all of the work will be done by your computer’s cpu(s). If texture is off, then the resolution setting performs a similar function to the full/half/third/quarter res function of AE. The higher the resolution value, the lower the quality of your images while you are working. When you hit preview or process, you will see a full quality render. If you turn on “Linetest” then the lower-res result will be rendered. There are a couple of effects, displacement mapping in particular, that render differently with texture on vs. texture off. You typically get more accurate displacement with texture turned off.
You may want to check a couple of additional things:
1) In a shell, type gr_osview and press enter. This shows you how many system resources are being used. You may have something running in the background.
2) In a shell, type hinv and press enter. This will show your hardware inventory. I would be interested to see how much ram you have and what your processor situation is.
You may have something wrong with your graphics system, but I doubt it. My experience with this is that graphics usually fails.
In any event, you should call discreet support, 1-800-92-LOGIC.
HTH,
Andy
Is it the same tape as before?
Is the DBeta machine set to CTL, or TC?
-Andy
Chris,
The disk array attached to your smoke uses the parity bit as a method of data protection and redundancy. A simplified explanation of parity is this:
Say you have 7 drives in your array. 5 of them are striped as one big volume, the 6th is for parity bits, and the 7th is a spare. A bit of data can only be 0 or 1. Let’s pick a bit (we’ll call it A). Bit A exists on all 5 of the striped drives. Let’s say that bit A has a value of 1 on all 5 drives. You take the sum, 5, and write that onto the parity drive. Now, if one of your drives goes down (godforbid) the sum for bit A on your remaining drives is 4. The parity drive has a value of 5 for bit A, so bit A on the dead disk must have had a value of 1. A new bit A for the dead disk, with a value of 1, is written onto your spare disk.
Make sense?
Discreet arrays come in two flavours, software and hardware. Hardware arrays have a processor that can generate the parity in real time. Software arrays (which is what you seem to have) rely on the processors in the Tezro to generate the parity. Since all available bandwith is given to the capture process, the parity bits must be generated after the capture.
HTH,
Andy
I would like to second just about everything that was said here.
I took a job as an assistant engineer just so I could get time on a flame. And, as Pete’s flint instructor (Pete, is that you?):lol: I can tell you that over the years, I have hired several of my students who have shown promise.
-Andy
Brian,
In action –> Setup, is TEXTURE turned on?
What is in the Resolution Setting (default is 6)
-Andy
You’re right, sorry. Shape Channel has to be ON. Please disregard my last post.
Thanks,
Andy
Make sure that Shape Channel in the surface menu is turned off at all times. This is a bug in 8.3.x.
Turn off Shape Channel, and you should be fine.
-Andy