Sub-vocalised ramblings

Oh yeah! Well:

There’s really not too much to do, to be honest. Mostly it’s little things like setting up Explorer so that you can see common metadata for files you’ll be working with. To do this you can just right click on the metadata header and select something appropriate. 

Something that goes a step further than that is an app called MediaInfo, which you can either run as a discrete application or install and have it interact as a rollover in Explorer. It gives really detailed info about codec, bitrate and occasionally even field order for video.

In terms of browsing media you can either use Explorer or Bridge, I tend to use Explorer as it’s more flexible. I keep all my media in template projects on a harddrive/dropbox so that when I duplicate a  folder to start a new project all my settings for each media type are retained. So if I have a video/source folder the default view will be Large Thumbnails, for general files it’s Details.

In terms of searching folders and projects the default behaviour is pretty good - start typing and Windows skips to the closest match. You can change this so that a search is begun based on the search string, but unless you’ve indexed your drives the setup for this can take a while.

Some of the more experienced print designers have raved about the way that Macs handly print graphics - I haven’t noticed a difference really apart from the macs came with expensive, precalibrated monitors. So if you can make that a priority I guess that helps!

Regarding graphics - you can pick up a cheap gaming card (less than £250) that will perform very well with CUDA-based apps, make sure that your machine has a spare PCIE slot and correct powersupply if you go down that route, also make sure that you are using the latest drivers which you should get notified about automatically. 

Speaking about auto-updates you’ll probably want to turn OS auto-updates off (there is a setting where Windows just reboots your machine when it likes, which is shit if you’ve got a 12 day render going) you can access this from the control panel.

Probably a good idea to turn hibernation off too, this will free up the same amount of hard drive space as you have RAM. Again, access this from the control panel under Power Settings. You might also like to turn off the power saving options for the screen so that the pipe from card to display isn’t disrupted after 5 minutes of inactivity eg if you’re capturing from tape. Same options in Power Settings.

That’s probably it off the top of my head, let me know if you have any more questions mate!

Thanks very much! I use Cinema 4D exclusively at the moment. I’m dabbling in 3DS Max too but haven’t managed to make anything yet…