I am one of those people. One of a few that carry more than one laptop around with me.
Why ?
Well the joking answer was always – because I could.
On a more serious note there is a why…
I all started in about 2013 during a very hectic production run. My iPhone was plugged to charge into my MacBook – now on the bottom of the pile. I received a call, lifted the phone up and my computer went black.
Being the busy me, I continued the call and hit restart on my trusty MacBook. Within seconds it began to boot but went black again – for the last time.
What happened ? A faulty USB cord shorted, the typical scenario where the wire became damaged from years of abuse, to the point that they shortened out. On a MacBook a tragic occurrence as it turned out later. The USB ports are hardwired internally on the motherboard. A short on the cable fried the power management of the computer – instant death.
Thanks to Apples philosophy, a short trip across the street brought the same model back to my command post. 15min later HDDs where swapped and I was back in business, just not with my old companion anymore.
The MacBook could be fixed, not too expensive but with a round trip to a certified repair center abroad. Since then I made sure that all my cords where in clean health, apart from carrying two MacBooks during critical times.
This continued over the years. My line of business is always time critical, with no tolerance to downtime due to illness of both me or hardware.
Workflow improvements
Having the luxury of owning multiple machines apart from the portable ones made me rethink my workflow over time, both in the studio or on the go.
Thanks to Final Cut Pro X and its companion Compressor one can make easy use of more than one machine to safe time.
Today many of my projects come in the terabyte size. Transfer times of footage can range from hours to a day or more, depending on the task.
Most drives still run slow. I have some nice thunderbolt HDDs, that I bought with the idea of speed, only to find out that the physical speed was limited by the HDD speed over the interface. Wether USB3 or Thunderbolt the speed remains largely the same. It just boils down to time for ingesting footage and getting it ready to work with.
Currently I spend about 2 days on ingest, transcoding proxy files and having a working repository on a secondary drive. I never edit of the original drive supplied by clients, this remains read only until I hand it back. Requiring for terabytes of data to migrate, transcode and find its new temporary home.
Ingest Station
For this I adopted an MacMini Server, a wonderful inexpensive unit with 8 cores, 2 internal HDDs and some external connection to my NAS storage, my ingest station. In addition it runs my main Compressor node, connecting to other nodes hosted on different machines on the network, cutting down export and compression times dramatically.
Workstation
I work largely mobile, yet I do have 2 workstations in my studio based on an iMac and a MacPro. Either station can be used for sound or film, depending on the mood.
When on the go, the work profile does not change. One edit is on going on the latest MacBook – right now the powerful 2018 model. While I keep my last years model around tool, an ad hoc network allows for compressor to perform its miracles while I can keep running on the other machine. If things really get though, I swap the drive over to the second machine and let it render out or compress independently. Specially when I work on sound the machine needs to remain clear of tasks running in the background due to latency issues on live instruments.
Stacking Tasks
This morning I decided to write this post, mainly because I noticed how important all this has become in my day-to-day work. As mentioned in an earlier posting, I am engaged in a larger project for a TV series, apart from my other ongoing projects.
One multi cam live video edit has to go out today, another one should be ready within the week. This on top of a sound design job, a production design and the TV series. Work just can’t stop or be paused because of what is happening in the moment.
While the edit of this morning took 3-4 days to become ready to work on, ingest, proxy and then multi cam synch – 7 cameras with each about 4h run time. This takes typically a couple of hours to churn out – a machine will be occupied for the duration.
This morning the next job this week went onto ingest, most likely going to finish by tomorrow morning. In the mean time I can work on one of my MacBooks, leaving one for the current TV series that I will visit later in the day.
Luxury
Most might see this a soiled luxury, but honestly I do not see how I could cope with only one or two machines in the race.
Todays heaps of data are just no match for interface speeds or processing speeds an longer. My actual time spent on a project is a fraction of all the background tasks that are running.
As soon as I get back to the studio, I will hook up the work drive to a station and begin export. Mostly to my iCloud account for temp storage. Even when not in the studio I can tasks the compressor node to fetch the project and render out the required formats, once again to the Cloud. Once complete I can just fetch a link and email it to the client, without being physically present.
This is part of the story of my multitude of computers.
SaKiE 