Check Your G5's for Leaks

Several of the Power Mac G5's used a liquid cooling system. It's basically like having a radiator around your processors. Most of the G5's were air-cooled. I think it was only the dual 2.5 GHz released in 2004, the dual 2.7 GHz released in 2005 and the Quad G5 that had the liquid-cooling system.

I remember thinking at the time that I would avoid these systems because of concerns that the liquid cooling would eventually leak, damaging the computer. Well, we got a good deal on a dual 2.5 GHz in the summer '05 and it has been used to edit Mosaic since then. Knock on wood, no problems yet. I also use a Quad G5 now.

Xlr8yourmac.com is keeping track of reports of leaking G5's. Very disheartenging. These leaks cause major problems and Apple is not being too helpful with the very expensive repairs. Worth keeping an eye (or in some cases an ear) out for any potential problems--the sooner the leak is discovered, the better.

Photos here at hardmac.com. Warning, these are graphic images that some readers may find distrubing. Enough to keep me up at night.

Backing Up Projects

"DVD-Rs for Media Back-up in FCP"
This is a good article over at kenstone.net that I found over at freshdv.com. Good tips on archiving projects.

There's a lot in the article about what's the biggest size file that will fit on a single-layer DVD. I guess that's important if your project has long, uninterrupted footage or your dealing with codecs that are more data-intensive than DV. Usually I find in my project that the media manager will cut my media files down to size. However, sometimes I'm preplexed when the trim clips feature doesn't work with media manager and I think it should.

Neither Fish Nor Foul

Sony just announced a new HDV camera that is sort of a maddening combination of pro and consumer features. It's called the HVR-HD1000U.

The positives:
-Only $1900
-Shoulder-mounted (Sony's first for HDV)
-Either viewfinder or LCD screen apparently usable while shoulder-mounted

The drawbacks:
-The same CMOS chip used in their consumer cameras
-I don't see any XLR sockets on that thing
-No announcement for progressive shooting modes like on the V1

After working on a shoot this weekend in the bright California sun, I remembered the benefits of a good viewfinder (not sure if this is indeed a decent viewfinder.) Shoulder-mount is great for handheld shooting, but you have to deal with the bigger body size when lugging it around. No XLR audio is sort of a deal-breaker for me. Seems like this is mainly for wedding videographers. Available in Dec.

Update: Here is a good overview of what's lacking on this camera (e.g., good zoom lens), as well as something that I didn't know--Sony showed a pro HDV shoulder-mount mockup at NAB. Where's that, Sony? Also from the same site, a good, thoroughly-negative review of what's missing from one of Panasonic's "pro" cameras AG-HSC1U.

Bad Firewire Ports on Decks

We just got a bad firewire port on a Sony HDV deck (HVR-M10U). It looks to me like a wear-and-tear issue--the deck gets moved around a lot with lots of folks pluging in cables and taking them out. I was talking to our repairperson from Advanced Systems Group, and he offered some advice on how to deal with firewire on decks.

Our repair guy, Al, says that he has seen a lot of firewire ports on decks go bad. I think he was describing a different kind of problem--our port looks rather mangled, which IMHO is the cause of the problem (a cable won't even fit into the port.) But he says that the firewire port on decks often die without any visible wear-and-tear (especially 4-pin ports, which is what Sony uses on its prosumer and consumer gear.) Here's a a workflow that Al recommended to help prevent dead firewire ports:

Connecting a deck with firewire to a computer
-Make sure nothing is plugged into the deck, especially a power cable
-First plug the firewire cable into the computer
-Then plug the firewire cable into the deck
-After that, plug in the other cables and power up the deck

Apparently, one possible cause of bad ports is trying to plug a firewire cable in backwards, which I think is easier to do on a computer with a 6-pin connector. If you plug a firewire cable in backwards either on the deck or on the computer (when the deck is plugged in on the other end) then this can kill the port on the deck. You may think this is hard to do, but I've heard first hand of an anonymous someone who did this on a hard drive (thus, killing the firewire port on the hard drive.) I have an old G4 that had lots of problems with firewire 400 ports going bad.

I've heard that firewire 800 is a lot more resilient to these types of problems. That's one reason why I always try to use firewire 800 interface--if a hard drive has both a firewire 400 and a firewire 800 port, I always cable with the firewire 800 port if possible. Despite what the terminology implies, only under ideal situations do I find that I really get a lot more performance out of firewire 800 than firewire 400 (see my post "The Trouble with G-RAID's"), but for me it's worth it to use firewire 800 for the added peace of mind.

If you want to get all nerdy on firewire problems, I'd recommend this article "FireWire Port Failures in Host Computers and Peripheral Devices" over at the Wiebetech site.

iMovie 6 for Free

Apple released iMovie '08 (skipping '07 all together) as part of the new iLife '08 suite. Apple has really changed the application--some say for better, others for worse. I like that it provides a way to catalog video like you can catalog photos in iPhoto. I have a new niece, and my Mom is going bonkers recording movies on her flash-memory camera/camcorder. This new iMovie will be great for sorting through all those movies easily.

They have also simplified the edtiting process. After watching demos, it does look like it is a really fast way to put something simple together. I taught my Mom iMovie, and it was maddening for me to figure out how to cut in older versions of iMovie. But some features have been taken out it seems in transitioning to the simpler editing approach.

Apparently to compensate for high system requirements for iMovie '08, Apple is giving away iMovie 6 (the previous version) for free here. You're supposed to have iLife '08 to install it, but there are workarounds. xlr8yourmac.com has details on the workarounds (sorry, I don't have a direct link to the workarounds info on the site.)

Automatic Sync's Caption Sync

I recently tried out an interesting new service provided by Automatic Sync called CaptionSync. We needed to get a program closed-captioned for a feed to PBS stations. Captioning is usually either labor-intensive (not real-time) or poor quality (real-time.) And for labor-intensive, also assume expensive. Not only is it expensive to pay an operator to spot all of the subtitles, but the gear to encode the closed-captioning isn't cheap either.

I found CaptionSync a good alternative to traditional closed-captioning. CaptionSync is a web-based service that essentially works on voice recognition. Now, you need to provide the service a transcript--it can't create a transcript from just audio. But you send CaptionSync the audio, and then it will spot your subtitles for you. After uploading a transcript and an audio file, you wait a couple of minutes and then you get an email with your captions in whatever format(s) you asked for. My cost was $45 for a half hour, and I think that's pro-rated based on $90/hour.

There are a few tricky things with the service. They recommend that the audio you send them only include the voice to be captioned/subtitled. I was sending them a documentary, so I had to make a pass on the film and delete all the audio clips that had no voice or were in a foreign language. Some time, but not too bad. The quality of the spotting was good but not perfect. I had a problem getting one bit of dialogue recognized, maybe because the speaker had an Arabic accent. You can resubmit the job if you aren't happy with the results. For example, I accidentally left in some Arabic voice in the audio track that I sent them, and it totally screwed up the subtitles. So I made a different audio export with no Arabic and then the captions were back on track. I also was able to do some tweaking with the formatting after checking out my results. Again, not a problem to resubmit a job with no extra charge.

Now, the tricky part came in getting the closed-captioning into my program. There is software that will encode closed-captions into a QuickTime movie. It's called MacCaption, and it costs $1000 for a DV version and $2000 for an uncompressed version. No, I didn't add an extra zero. That's one to two thousand dollars just to encode the closed-captioning data into video. Obviously buying the software would blow my budget. So I figured out a work-around. Here's what I did.

I asked CaptionSync for an STL file with my captions. DVD Studio Pro uses STL files to generate closed captions. So I burned that to a DVD. Then I played back that DVD and captured the video as uncompressed. The uncompressed capture records the closed-captioning which is in the vertical interval of the video signal. Now, I don't actually want to use video from the DVD--as it has been heavily compressed and then gone through an analog generation. So I composited the video of the program on top the captured video clip with the captioning. I cut the show in the DV codec, so the program's video didn't overlap the captioning. However, I think an uncompressed clip would normally cover up the captioning because uncompressed video has more lines of video than the DV codec handles. In that case, the solution is to just add a bit of video cropping to the top of the video and the captioning will be revealed. I was working with a TV that could display the captioning while I was doing all of this--to make sure that I had the captions and they were staying in place. Then I mastered to Betacam. I think closed-captioning is supported with DVCam, but I don't know how to make that work.

My work-around was time-consuming, but it didn't cost me any more $$'s. If fit my criteria of cheap with a good-looking master and good (but not perfect) captions. If I was going to be doing this regularly I'd have to think seriously about MacCaption's software encoding of closed-captioning.

"Making 3D Text" in Motion

This seems like a handy tutorial on Motion 3 over at the Creative Cow. The technique in the tutorial lets you add some depth to type in 3d space. The whole 3D thing with cameras and lights is new in Motion 3.

The EditBlog has a post about another cool thing for Motion 3--a free plug-in called Vee You. It creates the effect of VU or EQ meters that actually reflects an audio track. You get the plug-in here.

Bad CCD's in Sony and Canon Cameras & Camcorders

This Sunday I found out my Canon Powershot SD100 digital camera was dead. It was 3 years old, and I figured it had reached a natural, if early, death. Truth be told, I was looking forward to getting a big upgrade from my old 3 mega-pixel camera with its tiny screen.

But lo and behold, I just read a blog entry at FreshDV describing a problem with CCD's in Sony and Canon gear. After some more searching, I found out my model of camera is affected by this problem. Canon will supposedly fix this problem for free, even if the gear is out of warranty. Sony has a similar arrangement (with some looming time restrictions).

Sony's bad CCD's affect some prosumer gear. Here's a list that I pulled from FreshDV:
DCR-VX2000
DCR-VX2000E
DCR-VX2100
DCR-VX2100E
DSR-250 & DSR-250/P
DSR-PD150 & DSR-PD150P
DSR-PD170 & DSR-PD170P
DSR-PDX10 & DSR-PDX10P

More detailed information on the problems and the response from Sony and Canon is here.