Success!

My new hardware is installed.  I decanted some of the video archived on the old 2tb drive onto the new 2tb drive, so now each is half full and performing a lot better.  There’re new cards installed as well, providing me with all the USB one could ever want and a new (untested) ESATA raid platform.  I look forward to trying out two raids at once!  What an age we live in.

Also, and I find this really neat, there’s an internal port on the USB card, which I’ve plugged a 16gb patriot drive into.  This means both another internal drive (one that’s super fast) but also the USB drive has turbo boost, which I’ve enabled.  So this may make things run faster.  We’ll have to wait and see…

Now all that remains is running the cat 7 cables across the apartment to the Avid, so it can go online again.  I had to ditch the old PCI wireless card to put in the USB card, so for now it’s a stand alone system.

Curses!

Most of my beautiful hardware arrived from Newegg today and I’m eager to install it.  I have a 2 tb hard drive, ready to take some of the load off my other internal long term storage HD, I have two new PCI cards, one is an excellent USB card, the other is a ESATA and SATA RAID card, so I can add a second media array to my computer, and last but not least my wireless hub arrived, so I can remove my Z800’s current wireless card and replace it with a hub that will mean I don’t need the workstation on to use the printer (wirelessly of course) and just as importantly, I’ll have the spare PCI slot I need to add the RAID card.

Here’s the problem.  I am currently copying files from an external, 2tb USB drive to my 1tb striped mirrored RAID and it’s been going for three days and it’s only at 33%.  That means I have to wait and wait and wait for it to finish before I can install these new parts.  At least the cat 7 cables haven’t arrived yet.  When that happens I’ll really be bummed.

New Hardware

As HD files are much bigger than SD video files, I’ve started to run low on space in my z800 workstation.  Amazing.  I have two 300gb hds as my mirrored C: raid, which sounds small, but bear in mind they are 10,000 rpm drives.  Then I’ve got a 2tb internal storage drive.  I’m getting a second one.  That pretty much uses all the available slots for internal drives, though I’m considering eventually having ESATA drives plugged directly into the motherboard.  We’ll have to see about that.  I don’t think I physically have the room for that setup.  In the meantime, I had to make room for a PCI USB card, so I’ll have more PCI ports available.  How to do this?  Well, I ordered a wireless router and cat 7 cable to replace the wireless card I have in the computer right now.  In the long run I’d rather use a wire but for the time being it’s not a good idea.  I’ve also ordered an additional raid card, this one with 2 internal and 2 external sata ports, so I can add a raid for purposes of consolidating media, etc.

Quick aside: I only recently learned about cat 7 cables.  Apparently they are basically cat 6 but shielded.  This can be useful to folks who use a Drobo style raid through a cat 6.  I ordered mine so my workstation and printer can separately connect to my router.  This will mean I can scan and print without having to turn on and share my workstation.

Finished Sizzle Reel

Let me just start this by saying I hate the term “sizzle reel.”  When did it stop being called a “pitch” reel, which is what it is?  Or just a reel?  Why the word sizzle?  Are the standards for pitching so low that no longer can work stand on its own without a silly appelation like “sizzle” or “sexy” or “sizzling sexy nuclear sex sex sex?”

Anyway, I finished the sizzle reel for The Nak’d Truth, a reality show I hope gets picked up because a.) I’d be working on it in all likelihood and b.) I think there’s an audience for it.  It follows a group of strangers who live together in a nudist colony but are not normally themselves nudists.  Here is just some of the recent press:

Unthinkable?  Reality TV gets more grotesque

Big Bro Goes Naked

And here’s the site for the show itself, run by the producers:

The Nak’d Truth

Beta Site Is Live

You can now check out the beta version of my website at http://www.manpoweredfilms.com

I am still learning the software for building these things, so it may take a while before everything works smoothly, but I’m on my way to the goal I set for myself a few months ago when I sketched out the website I really want.  For now, you can use this as a base for jumping to my twitter, facebook and youtube pages.  Enjoy!