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Hello Casablanca MacroSystem Newsletter Subscribers,
We hope you are having a great summer and the weather changes have been good to you.
We have a SALE on three Casablanca 4 Macrosystems (while supplies last) (hurry, limited quantity):
1.
The Casablanca 4 Macrosystem Studio Pro is $500 off $3499, for a sale price of $2999!
2.
The Casablanca 4 Macrosystem Saphir II is $500 off $4499, for a sale price of $3999!
3.
The top of our line, our Casablanca 4 Macrosystem Studio Pro Ultra is $500 off $5999, for a sale price of $5499!
For more information on all the Casablanca 4s: http://www.macrosystem.us/Casablanca_4_Turnkey_Edit_Systems.php
All sales are through our Value Added Resellers, who edit for a living and can get you into the right system with a few questions like the format you normally shoot, edit, and deliver in.
We prep the systems for turnkey operation, ship it, and cover the warranty and repairs. We also handle all the other operations.
All systems come with Bogart for Windows Gold 10, Arabesk 7, Bonus FX, Fonts Packs 1 to 4, HD Back Up Sentry, and 2 free software titles of choice.
The more you pay, the faster the hardware, and the more time you save rendering projects at the higher resolutions and data rates (SD & DV OK) (see below).
For a Professional Production House doing full time 2K HD, and 4K UHD, you should get number 2 or 3.
It takes about 8 hours for us to setup a turn-key system Casablanca 4 MacroSystem.
We update Windows 10 and all the drivers and install all the latest and greatest Casablanca software in Demo Mode or Activate it if it is included or one of your 2 free SW picks.
That way you can try all the SW before you buy. All you have to do is contact your Value Added Resellers, and they can charge your card and give you the 12 digit license code to remove the logo from the video.
We capture hours of training videos of various formats into the first 5 Projects, and then burn them to DVD and Blu-Ray discs and export them to a hard drive.
We capture and export video from the various test inputs/outputs, and formats to make sure there are no problems.
When the system has passed over 50 tests, and is ready to ship, we make a system recovery USB thumb drive and include it with all the other accessories like keyboard, trackball, card reader, discs, manuals, and cables.
We very carefully pack and ship it and have never had a problem with the 200 plus units we have sold. In the unlikely event you have an issue, we can remotely connect to your system over the Internet and fix it.
If you are coming from our DV systems, there is much to learn. An open Bogart Windows system does so much more than the closed systems of the past, but there is a learning curve if you lack Windows experience.
If you have Windows and Bogart S-series HD experience, the transition is easy. But most do not have a lot of Windows experience, so we commissioned Chet Davis, the Casablanca Expert to create an online course, which is included.
It takes 3 hours if you go straight through it, but it is organized with 21-chapter buttons, so you can go back and quickly refer to it 24 x 7 x 365, whenever you have a question.
The one thing you should not do is book a huge job with a short delivery date. Learn the camera, the best format for the job, and the Bogart Windows 10 system first and then do the job, but still give yourself plenty of time before the deadline.
If you are migrating to the new higher definition cameras and all the new Enhanced Definition, HD, full HD, and UHD formats, then the learning curve is much higher than the editor. It is imperative that you select the right camera and right format for your jobs.
The sweet spot for picture quality, while minimizing the data processing time, is Full HD (1920x1080p60) in the AVCHD format at 28Mbps. 35 minutes will fit on an 8Gb card. If you have longer shots use bigger cards. Your camera will require a Class 10 or higher speed card.
Some of these pro cameras have data rates of 50 to 200 Megabits per second. If you are into long form video productions like weddings these data rates will bog you down, but short form productions are quick with the higher data rates.
The sweet spot for speed is 1280x720p60 but not all cameras shoot this. For that matter, not all cameras shoot Full HD, so check your camera. If you already have a camera try short clips of the different formats, and then try them on the Casablanca,
and choose what works best for you as far as picture quality and time to do a project.
If you edit as a hobby, you can do other things while it imports, captures, exports, or renders, and you may not need a super-fast Casablanca. But if you are a busy production house pay for faster equipment now or get 2 Casablancas: one faster and one slower.
The faster system will do the time-consuming imports, captures, exports, and discs, and the other one to do the editing. The high-end systems include Disc Juggler SW, but it is $99 for the first copy and $75 for additional copies on the Studio Pro or below.
Disc Juggler is like Store and Share software on the Bogart standalones. If you have never used it, all the footage stays on the external USB drive. So, once you import or capture your footage on the fast one, then move the external USB drive to the slower unit to edit with.
And then you can start the next project capture import process on the fast one. At some point you will finish the edit on the slow system and move the drive to the fast one for export to the Internet, hard drive, ISO file imports/exports, thumb drives, DVD, or Blu-Ray discs.
This work flow is for long wedding projects at higher data rates and resolutions. If your projects are short or low data rates and resolutions, this work flow would probably be overkill.
Arabesk 7 is included and has 10 Disc projects, but if you are running out of room, you can also export an ISO disc image file from inside of Arabesk to an internal or external drive for archival, backup, or to free up space.
If that customer ever wants more Discs, you can import that file into Arabesk 7 and burn the exact same disc. It can not be changed or edited. For projects that are constantly getting updated, just keep that project on one of your external drives.
If you have hundreds or thousands of discs to burn, you can email the ISO file to a disc duplication house for mass production.
Most people are coming from the DV world, so here is a comparison of DV data rates and resolution, to Full HD data rates and resolutions, and the size of the files.
DV is 720 x 480 = 345,600 bits, and it uses the 60 frames per second Interlaced format. This means that to cut down on data they scan all the odd lines in the first half second, and then the even lines in the 2nd half second.
Since they removed half of the horizontal lines of a 4x3 picture you must cut the 1 second frame bits by 25%, since the vertical dimension is 25% less than horizontal.
That figure is 259,200 bits per second for DV, so 1 minute is 16,271,075 or 16,272 Megabytes, and 60 minutes is 976,265 Megabytes, or almost 1 Gigabyte.
The lowest data rate on most cameras for Full HD is the AVCHD format at 28Mbps. 35 minutes will fit on an 8Gb card, so even with all the AVCHD compression and data rate savings, we are processing about 14 times the data as DV.
The next higher camera setting is usually 50Mbps, which will be about 25 times the data rate that DV has. Working with Full HD at 28Mbps and 50Mbps wont be 14 or 25 times slower than DV though, because all our systems are much faster now.
But you should charge more for HD productions because it does take longer than DV, even after getting the workflow down.
We have some refurbished Karats with 6-month warranty for sale for $1999, plus shipping:
The Karat is a Generation 3 unit from 2 years ago, so if you have a failing s2000, s3000, s4000, s4100, s6000, or Topaz, the Karat would be a great buy.
Since all these machines are Casablanca Generation 3, it means all your projects and software could be transferred to the Karat for free, if you surrender your old unit.
The best unit to get rid of now are the 10-year-old s4000s or s4000Pros. There are so many key parts no longer available on those units, that it is no longer possible to repair them.
You can trade up to our new Casablanca Generation 4 systems as well, but our easy to use software titles had to be written for Windows, so your old software would not transfer for free.
But we do offer 50% off Casablanca 4 software titles that you have on your surrendered Casablanca 3.
If it is the S4000Pro, you can keep it and still get the deal, but the unit must have been registered to you in the past.
We have two lightly used Intel i7 - 6th generation laptops (very fast), that we rarely used for beta testing, which have more than $4,000 worth of software on them.
ASUS 16.5-inch Laptop with Power Supply, HDMI output, and 6-month warranty:
Processor: Intel(R) Core (TM) i7-6500U CPU @ 2.50GHz, 2592 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s) with Turbo Booster.
Two Drives: 128Gb SSD C Drive for programs, 700Gb D drive for projects, and it has Disc Juggler SW (so hook up unlimited external USB Drives for unlimited projects).
Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), 8Gb Ram, No DVD/Blu-ray Burner (if you need an external USB drive for burning discs they are $100).
Only $2499 for this like new Laptop and the 70 software titles, plus the burner and Bogart 10 options, if you want them.
Click here for the 70 software titles that come with this unit and represent the core value of this offer. If you want the latest Bogart 10 it would be $200 extra installed.
The second unit has more hardware and software including Bogart 10, click here for the code sheet.
Lenova Idea Pad Yogi 700-15.6 -inch Gaming Laptop with Power Supply, HDMI output, and 6-month warranty:
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz, 2601 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s) with Turbo Booster.
Two Drives: 256Gb SSD C Drive for programs, 1000Gb D drive for projects, and it has Disc Juggler SW (so hook up unlimited external USB Drives for unlimited projects).
Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), 16Gb Ram, No DVD/Blu-ray Burner (if you need an external USB drive for burning discs they are $100).
Only $2999 for this like new Gaming Laptop and the 74 software titles, including Bogart 10.
We now can take over your PC remotely and fix it, or do other useful services:
We have been using the software for well over a month, and the only thing we cannot do is fix a dead machine remotely.
That requires a hardware shop visit, but 99% of cases are software issues and can be fixed remotely over the Internet.
We can also do software installation if you want us to put our software on your PC.
We setup all our Casablanca 4 Turn-key models before shipping them for our dealers all over the Americas,
and we can do that on your own PC remotely. We recommend at least a $1500 PC made in the last 2 years for EHD.
If you are working in HD or UHD professionally, then it should be at least a $2500 PC from this year.
Another service that has proved very valuable is Bogart training, or show and tell.
I can show you how to do something on your Bogart PC, and then I can watch you repeat it.
We charge $100 per hour and are available by appointment 10AM to 4PM PST on Tuesday and Thursday.
Email your contact info to: [email protected]
Also pick a couple of dates and times that work for you, and we will confirm a match.
We have some great news on PIP Studio 3 for the Casablanca 3 & 4s:
It released in Europe this month and will release next month in the Americas.
Click here for more info (if your browser can translate German).
It does so much more than anything in the past as you can see in the video.
And dont forget Bogart 10 and Time-x released recently, you can see the videos here:
http://www.macrosystem.us/Product_Videos.php
We will be closed Labor Day!
Happy Holiday!!
Gary McNally
MacroSystem Americas LLC
1 (877) 554-2846