Thanks for the update David.

You're gonna really miss us when this all gets sorted out.

Seems the realtime engine will not be a reality - I am sure Adobe is responsible for this - something has changed. I know Cineform has probably put a lot of work and money into this to no avail. I also purchased a MX02 mini thinking matrox was going to work with cineform, but seems matrox will not cooperate (I emailed Matrox multiple times, posted on their forms - they just don't even bother to respond) so I am selling it on ebay. There is something changing in the industry. I really appreciate the work Cineform has put into firstlight and thier Codecs. I have reverted back to edius, and use first light to work on the Video as needed and then convert it to Canopus HQ. Works great and I have realtime output. But I do hope I am wrong about the Adobe thing - I would love to use it.

Marty posted a link to an Adobe blog about the Mercury playback engine. I meant to leave a temporary redirect link to that thread when I moved it, but must have done it wrong. We'd like to keep each of these topics within its own "home." Here's a link to the Mercury thread:

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/attend-w...ml#post1473457

Ahh...yeah. We back up everything on 1TB drives. Just back up all of your source footage, your project files, and you final exports. No need to trim the project. That just creates a bunch of files that are much harder to manage. At 7-10 cents a GB, hard drives are the cheapest storage medium, even cheaper than your original source tapes.

Given the choice I could forego the project trimmer forever in favor of SDI I/O in CS4.

You must shoot with a higher success ratio that I do to want to keep ALL your transcoded CFHD footage. (My source files are AVCHD and are always retained in full).

Mike's way is kinda the same conclusion we came too. Just back to big HDDs and press on. Forget the trimming. Everyday that is becoming more of a reality as the drives get bigger, faster, and cheaper.

We just mirror drives to make life easier (using MirrorFolder). When we're done, we copy the mirrored drive (for backup security), take them out for storage, and stick in new drives. Faster, easier and really not much more expensive. Trimming can also be a pain when you suddenly find yourself needing to change something in the middle and have to go after all the files.

I do something similar, but for different reasons: with four-cam multicam edits of stage shows, we use close to 100% of the captured footage anyhow, so no real "trimming" actually occurs and we don't save any space. So the whole project folder gets backed up and archived to external drives.

The nice thing about project manager though, whether you trim or just collect files together, is that it does make it easy to bring everything into one place for simple archiving.

I guess it depends on the workflow. We got in the habit of including everything in a certain file structure (fairly complex), for our 5 person workflows. That way we're all on the same page and can usually find things fairly easily...something that can turn pretty difficult with thousands of elements in play.

Not perfect for sure, but when we upgrade to a better NAS system a friend has ready for us, it should be even easier. Multi-cam, multi-project, multi-language, multi-target is no fun when you get disorganized and start to lose things!

In a better funded world, we'd be using another workflow, certainly not Premiere...since it's just not designed for workgroups. Who knows if they'll change any of that in CS5?

I am so praying CS5 and the new rt engine is going to solve all these niggly issues that keep us all awake to the wee hours in a "ready to go postal" state. I don't know how many times I have gone over the FCP senario or maybe Avid. First light really rocks and the cineform lossless codec is superb, perhaps we will end up with a solution that works as advertised in the end.