5 posts tagged “gear”
It ain't pretty and it ain't cheap, but WOW. Talk about a battle cruiser. It's basically a mobile desktop, weighing in at about 12lbs when you take into consideration the enormous power brick that comes with it. This tank of a machine has 2 displays. The second one slides into the first. It has a built-in Wacom tablet. 400 nit display. You can configure it to have 2 hard drives, RAID, Intel Quad Core, NVIDIA Quadro 1G graphics card, 4G RAM.... With this puppy, I could record an HD movie from my camera direct to disk, edit, do fx, 3D graphics, 3D modeling and title animation all while moving from one place to another.
It's now for sale at the Lenovo site but they won't ship it for a month. This isn't quite the mobile battle station I ordered but it's close - mine's the previous version without the dual display. And UPS left it out in 0 degree weather in snow country for 6 days... I'm still in the middle of fighting it out with Lenovo and UPS to return it. It's KILL'N ME!
Susan Ee
www.feraldream.com
Wow, an unintended break. It's been almost 2 months since I last posted. I didn't intend to stop blogging, I just got distracted and before I knew it, 2 months had gone by.... During that time, a Russian economist has declared that the US is disintegrating, 2008 turned into 2009, YouTube changed from 4:3 to 16:9 and then went HD. SAG is still threatening to strike - they might as well threaten to go on a hunger strike because that's about how self-destructive it would be.
So what have I been doing? At first, I went into a creative mode where all else was consumed by my obsession over making an animated book trailer for my novel, WAR GAMES. Then, I remembered I had never done animation before, ran into technical difficulties, and I geeked out. Right now, I'm somewhere between my creative mode and geek-out mode (I know, some might say I'm always in this state). I just bought Cinema 4D from someone on Craigslist who may or may not be part of the Russian mob; I also bought one of the last Comic Book Creator programs despite the fact that it looks like the makers are going out of business; ordered a new over-the-top mobile battlestation (aka "notebook computer"); sent out some DVDs of TOOTH FAIRY to film festivals; killed my power supply in my desktop which is now open under my desk with its guts spilling out; got a new terabyte (!!!) second hard drive for my desktop and a 64G (!!!) USB drive for Christmas (I hear other girls want jewelry as gifts -- can you imagine?); got my butt kicked clear across silicon valley by a group of graduates of the Stanford EE masters program in a game I never heard of before; and I ate a pound of Trader Joe's milk chocolate with almonds. There you have it -- now you're all caught up.
Happy New Year!
Susan Ee
www.feraldream.com
Buy.com has a special today on $10 for a tripod which regularly goes for $50. Free shipping. I bought 2 -- they're great for work/camera lights as well as all kinds of other things you can screw onto the top.
Susan Ee
I’m talking 3G memory, 750G hard drives, duo-type processor, DVD burner, LightScribe and upgraded graphics card.
The best way to get the most bang for your buck on a computer is to build it yourself. But I know when I’m in over my head so I turned to a computer expert who helped me bring it all together. Thanks Aaron!
Here’s my configuration (black and silver boxes entitled "Geek" in lower left of picture):
HP Pavilion a6000n computer – Fry’s has them for $550 + a $50 rebate. It has a 2.2GHz Athlon (duo-type) processor with 1G memory (expandable to 4G), 250G HD, Vista Premium, DVD burner and LightScribe to burn pretty pictures onto your DVDs.
DDR2 2G internal desktop memory – 800MHz – Fry’s has them for about $100 (buy the memory that’s one piece for each G rather than the 2 memory cards that add up to 1G – remember, you have 4 memory slots total. Also, they’re cheaper if you buy a 2G package rather than each G separately.)
500G external HD – Buy.com has one on sale right now for about $100 after rebate (they also have a 320G HD on sale now for $70). There’s a good chance you don’t even need this since the computer above has a 250G HD. That will hold many, many short films. The longer you wait for the extra HD, the cheaper it’ll get. You can also get an internal drive for faster results. It should cost about the same or cheaper.
EVGA GeForce 7600GS graphics card with its own dedicated memory of 256MB/128 bit – it cost me $100 (why is everything $99.99?) on sale at Fry’s. You can spend more on a graphics card than on a computer. If you ask a gamer, he’ll tell you to buy the most expensive graphics card you can afford. But if you’re using Adobe Premier Pro and After Effects, I’ve read that these programs don’t utilize the high-end graphics card capabilities. So this card works great for me. If this card is no longer on sale, I suggest getting whichever GeForce card is about $100 (not super low end, not super high end) on the day you shop.
Total: $800 (or $700 without the additional HD).
This package does not include a display. I had a display (big black rectangle entitled, "Geek" in picture) that I like so I use that. But if you need a new display, Buy.com has 19-20” LCD displays for about $200. You’ll probably want to get a DVI cable so you can send your work purely digitally to your screen without analog conversions (for better quality pictures). Note: if you don’t get the graphics card, you won’t have anywhere to plug in your DVI cable so don’t bother with DVI in that case.
Also, remember that Final Cut is made by Apple and it only works with Macs and will not work with this or any other PC. Adobe products (Studio, Premier, After Effects) work fine with PCs. The only real downside I've found with the HP is that it has a loud fan but it doesn't bother me.
I’ll put up instructions on how to put it all into your computer in the next few days. Stay tuned!
On the left is my trusty old
250W light from Home Depot mounted on a cheap tripod. On the right is my new 1000W light from OSH, on sale this weekend
for $33 out the door. It can vary from
250W, 500W, 750W to 1000W. Stand is
adjustable with a max of 70”.
I thought it’d be a perfect lighting solution but it’s not quite. The screw adjustments aren’t perfect and they sometimes let the stand height slip down when it’s moved. The next problem to be tackled is that these are not as tall as the pro lights and they cast shadows that show up in the frame if the actor is standing in front of a wall. Not sure that the 1000W stand is solid enough to put on top of something for added height… let’s find out!
