[quote="scottgfx"][quote="Bill D"]Not to make you sound old but I was in Jr high in the mid 80's :).[/quote] We're probably about the same age. I graduated high school in 1988 and was working at a local TV station that same year. The first still store I used was the Dubner DSS4. In some ways, I liked it a lot more than the Thunder. It is a huge step up from the Pinnacle Flash Graphics systems that we had. I sort of became the de-facto engineer on the Flash. I would often have to pull the cards out of the frame and re-seat the chips on the board to get it running again. Ahhhh, Good times. :)[/quote] Ok, you are right, HS 1990 for me.. :) Do you use the Thunder just for stills or is it a primary animation device as well. We are mainly using it as a SS. We do run some animations, mainly stuff that would have been a still but now they animate it b/c they can. We use an Xkeys to fire keyboard macros, works great. We key internal to thunder over external animating bgds, etc. As a pure animations device it would be brutal, still need profiles etc, for speed.. Bill

[quote="scottgfx"][quote="Bill D"]Thunder clip paused and then taken to air and then played also does look kind of nasty. Has that same shift. Sequence should work well. Bug channel is great, wish they had some keyboard shortcuts to use it though. We use an X-keys to control thunder, tough messing with the mouse while switching.[/quote] I may have asked this question elsewhere, so my apologies in advance. Do you know what type of database you are running with your Thunder? We are using the internal "Thunder" database, and I run into a lot of issues where where my browse station in the art room will get the dreaded "database lock" when I'm trying to manipulate the database. Do you have these type of issues? Do you know how your art department pushes graphics to the system? Do they have these types of problems? Thanks again for your insight.[/quote] We have three Thunders 2 XL (in control room) and one LT (in graphics). The database is ODBC, etc. Not sure if that helps. Graphic artists drop into a watchfolder which can hit all 3 Thunders or just one, they have a little program that one of the engineers wrote to handle this. There are other graphics ops that do fullscreen and that build the sequences. They have their LT machine and a Deko. LT machine has post deko running, the deko has Thunder Browse running. I think there is maybe one or two browse stations up there as well. We launched last April, and we have been pretty solid with everything. We do lose our picons every so often (few times a week). We run with the largest Picons, occasionally they disappear. A program reboot fixes the problem. Pinnacle can't find the problem. Few other things like it reboots on it's own occasionally but nothing like you are talking about.. let me know if that is what you were talking about Bill

[quote="Bill D"]Thunder clip paused and then taken to air and then played also does look kind of nasty. Has that same shift. Sequence should work well. Bug channel is great, wish they had some keyboard shortcuts to use it though. We use an X-keys to control thunder, tough messing with the mouse while switching.[/quote] I may have asked this question elsewhere, so my apologies in advance. Do you know what type of database you are running with your Thunder? We are using the internal "Thunder" database, and I run into a lot of issues where where my browse station in the art room will get the dreaded "database lock" when I'm trying to manipulate the database. Do you have these type of issues? Do you know how your art department pushes graphics to the system? Do they have these types of problems? Thanks again for your insight.

[quote="Bill D"]Not to make you sound old but I was in Jr high in the mid 80's :).[/quote] We're probably about the same age. I graduated high school in 1988 and was working at a local TV station that same year. The first still store I used was the Dubner DSS4. In some ways, I liked it a lot more than the Thunder. It is a huge step up from the Pinnacle Flash Graphics systems that we had. I sort of became the de-facto engineer on the Flash. I would often have to pull the cards out of the frame and re-seat the chips on the board to get it running again. Ahhhh, Good times. :)

[quote="scottgfx"]That's kind of what I figured. I know we haven't updated the software in a long time, so I hoping for news that someone out there had that feature. I had wondered about the loop feature. Good to know that it works. I also want a paused image at the front, so I don't think it's going to work in my case. I think I'm going to end up building sequences that run a front animation and a tag that the operator will just step through. To get my logo at the top and end, I'll just use the bug channel. That can just stay up through the entire sequence. This is a small market station where we have part-timers tag out episodic spots, and we need fairly simple, fail-safe ways of doing them. Sadly, they yanked out the Ampex Ace years ago and they run all the tapes by hand. Just like in the 1980's. :) Thanks Bill for your help![/quote] Thunder clip paused and then taken to air and then played also does look kind of nasty. Has that same shift. Sequence should work well. Bug channel is great, wish they had some keyboard shortcuts to use it though. We use an X-keys to control thunder, tough messing with the mouse while switching. Not to make you sound old but I was in Jr high in the mid 80's :).

That's kind of what I figured. I know we haven't updated the software in a long time, so I hoping for news that someone out there had that feature. I had wondered about the loop feature. Good to know that it works. I also want a paused image at the front, so I don't think it's going to work in my case. I think I'm going to end up building sequences that run a front animation and a tag that the operator will just step through. To get my logo at the top and end, I'll just use the bug channel. That can just stay up through the entire sequence. This is a small market station where we have part-timers tag out episodic spots, and we need fairly simple, fail-safe ways of doing them. Sadly, they yanked out the Ampex Ace years ago and they run all the tapes by hand. Just like in the 1980's. :) Thanks Bill for your help!

[quote="scottgfx"]I want to build a clip for the Thunder that when it reaches the end of it's playback, the last frame is a full frame and not a field. Is there a switch in there somewhere that I'm missing?[/quote] Do you mean so that when it stops it doesn't shift? If so there is no field/frame selection that I am aware of. Similar to when a profile clip stops. Is it an animation or video clip. We do preproduction using the DVEous and record into Thunder. We make a loop near the end of the clip after the dve stopped, and then loop the clip, so you never get that hitch Bill