DVD's Bad for Archiving

Homemade DVD’s: Going, Going, Gone?

Following up my on recent post about disapperaing data on hard drives, comes a warning about the short lifespans of recordable DVD's. David Pogue, the technology writer for the New York Times, mentions some DVD's he made that after 2 years were already unreadable on many computers. I was taken aback by 2 years. I knew recordable DVD's didn't have a really long lifespan, but I was hoping for something more like 10 years.

The short takeaway is that recordable DVD's are not an archiving format. They are a distribution format.

Cool Camera Shootout

Zacuto's Great Camera Shootout '08

I recommend this video, which includes a good camera shootout.
The cameras/formats tested are:
35mm Film
Red One
Panasonic HPX3000
Panasonic HVX200 (with three 35mm lens adapters)
Sony EX3
Panasonic HPX170
Canon XH-A1
Canon 5D Mark II
Nikon D90
There's a long discussion at the start which you can skip through. This shootout I feel gives a good comparison of what you can get with these different kinds of setups, especially if you are going for a filmic or cinematic look. I recommend downloading the 1280x720 h.264 movie if you want to see more detail than you get with Vimeo's flash player. That's a good thing about Vimeo is that they give a higher-quality download option for their movies--just scroll down the page and look for the download link on the right column.

I'm most interested in the comparisons between the EX3, the HPX170 and the Canon XH-A1. The cheapest camera, the XH-A1, looked really good, and I really like how the HPX170 renders colors, more natural than the Sony camera. This test doesn't tell everything, by any means, (e.g., the EX3 is supposed to do better than its competitors in low-light), but it's a good place to start thinking about different cameras and what kind of images they create.

LCD Displays: TN Panels Not So Hot

We've recently gotten some LCD displays that I haven't been thrilled with the quality on. The first was a Dell S2409W--hey it was only $300. What did I expect? The display is crisp, but the colors are clearly washed out. It replaced a 20" Dell Ultrasharp (It think it was the 2005 model) and the colors weren't as good on the new one. Next came, a new 20" iMac. Same thing--washed-out colors. I also noticed a noticeable viewing-angle effect--as you move off-axis, the colors go off and the contrast drops. (BTW, the display on the 24" iMac is supposed to be much better than the 20".)

So I've been trying to do some research on the web. I'm not an authoritative source on this, but here's what I've gleaned. The lower-quality displays are probably using a technology called TN for the panel. These are much cheaper than some competing technologies for LCD displays. The best is supposed to be IPS displays--Apple uses IPS displays for their pricey Cinema Displays. There are other technologies out there too that are better than TN, for example our Dell Ultrasharp 2408WFP display isn't IPS, but another technology called PVA. If you really want to know the ins and outs of these LCD display technologies, there's an article at Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, manufacturers don't always tell what kind of display technology they use. One clue that you are getting a TN display is that the viewing angle will be lower than 178°. For example our Dell 2409W lists a display angle of 160° / 170°. Dell is good in that they tell you straight-up that it's a TN panel too--duh, that's why it's half the price of the Ultrasharp 2408 24".

One thing that the Wikipedia article says is that TN's displays often don't natively show millions of colors. They often use 6-bit color vs the 8-bit color needed to display millions of colors. My memory of binary math, says that 6-bit displays have about 1/4 of the info on color as an 8-bit.

So in summary, there are a lot drawbacks to the cheap LCD's that use TN displays. If you aren't doing critical color work on the monitor, then it might be OK. I wouldn't do a lot of graphics work on it. I definitely wouldn't use it to color correct your next video. LCD display technology is complex and there are many issues that go into making a good (or bad) monitor. But you should definitely know up front what you are getting when you pick a TN display.

One scenario were I think using a TN panel is OK is as a general workspace.  Say you are doing video and have a good external video monitor.  The external video monitor is where you do your color correction--so your LCD computer screen's quality isn't critical.  It may make more sense to spend you computer screen dollars on a bigger workspace than a smaller screen with a better quality image.

Comprehensive List of S-IPS Based LCD Monitors
This website lists some monitors that use a good display technology, S-IPS.

Macworld Review: Apple LED Cinema Display
Apple's new display is not only IPS, but it also uses an LED backlight, which is a whole new technology for desktop displays.

December Blogwad

I seem to do most of my blogging when I'm at home sick. Well now that I've got a cold, here's a backlog of interesting links on the web.

MacWorld Review: AppleJack 1.5
This is a piece of shareware for servicing your ailing Mac. It's a command-line utility, that helps simplify running some commands that can help fix your Mac. Includes a copy of memtest, which does a thorough check of your memory that helps diagnose bad RAM.

MacWorld First Look: boxee
boxee is an application for accessing digital media that is on your computer and on the internet. It's in alpha right now (I've run into quite a few bugs). But it's a promising concept that illustrates well the future of TV. It's got a 15-feet interface, so you can sit back on your couch and control the app with your Apple Remote. Lets you access Hulu (watch The Daily Show, 30 Rock) and (just added) Netflix support. So you can use the boxee interface to navigate and watch Netflix video that's in your Instant queue (oh, that's something that NetFlix recently allowed on Mac's--you don't need boxee to do that.) boxee runs on Mac's, Linux, and on Apple TV. You can sign up to get into the alpha release or ask a friend for an invitation. I wish Apple TV had this functionality built-in--Apple needs to up their game if they want to stay competitive with hardware and software for entertainment in the living room.

Digital Rebellion: How to keep your job as an editor
This article cover some technical gotchas that will mar your work and how to fix/avoid them in FCP. It goes over my current pet peeve--incorrect field dominance. I've been seeing more and more of this recently. Unfortunately, DV video uses a standard, lower-field dominance, that is very rare in video. Most other formats, like HDV, are upper-field dominant. You can run into a lot of problems when you mix formats in a timeline like DV and HDV. All of this is made more complex because anyone working in HD is probably not using a display that is interlaced--so it's easier to miss these problems. That's one reason why I'm not going to give up on my CRT any time soon--you've got to be checking for interlacing issues.

AppleCare Articles
Convert MP3 and AAC audio files for compatibility before importing
I've run into some weirdness recently with 44 KHz audio files in FCP--if they get rendered then the audio is from a different part of the track then it should be. Solution: convert the audio file to 48 KHz as described in this article.
Creating an Easy Setup for capturing DV with 32 kHz audio
Speaking of audio issues... For those of us still working in DV, once and a while you'll run into some audio at 32 KHz, instead of the usual 48 KHz.
Restoring a DV device connection in QuickTime 7
Can't say I've ever done this, but I've definitely run into issues with DV device connection in FCP. Maybe this will do the trick for you.

A couple of good lists of video tools:
Final Cut User: My Compression Tools
The DV Show: Big List of Video & Audio Converters Mac, PC, and online applications and tools

slashCAM: HD Camcorder Comparison
Looking for a new camera below $10K? This is a great resource. A giant database of specs that you can access in a comparison layout. Also has test shots, and some review info.

Vincent Laforet: 7 DAYS, 7 SHOOTS - EOS 5D MKII
A very beautiful-looking video shot with a Canon digital SLR camera. I haven't been blogging about video on DSLR's--there are a lot of pitfalls to this approach. But check out the video, just to get a sense of how pretty low-cost video could look.

Larry Jordan: Fixing Fluorescent Flicker
This is a nasty problem that I've seen a lot in footage that comes from developping countries. It's caused by cheap fluorescent lighting (can't say I've ever seen it in footage from the States.) This solution won't fix every bad shot, but it could help.

Kensington Mice and After Effects CS4
Oh, we've got a copy of Adobe Production Premium CS4 in house. I'm excited to check out the new 3D features (including real 3D models). One new 3D feature relies on a 3-button mouse. This article helps you set up your current mouse to work as a 3-button input device.

Studio Daily Blog: Multiuser
This looks like a handy piece of software that will set up different user settings on the same computer.

FxFactory Freebies: Pan and Zoom
A free plug-in for FCP. Looks good for stills. I'd avoid applying this to standard-def footage, as SD footage looks like crap when it gets scaled up (especially if it's interlaced.) But I'm much more open to zooming in on HD footage. Just make sure that you capture your HDV footage as native HDV and that the deck isn't downconverting it over firewire. (Caveat: watch out for our old-frenemy interlace flicker if you put your HDV footage in a DV sequence.)

Refreshing Hard Drive Storage

Larry Jordan has recently been warning against the dangers of leaving drives on a shelf for periods over a year. He says that after a year, the data will start to essentially disappear. There's a way to avoid this effect of the vanishing data, and that's to have the computer read the entire disc.

Larry just posted an article on how to do this preventive action on his recent newsletter (not sure if this link will work for long, as these newsletters are only available for a limited time.) Here's the basics of the preventitive action.
-Make sure your user account has administrator access
-Open the Terminal applications, which is in the Utilities directory
-Enter this command: sudo cat /dev/rdisk0> /dev/null
Actually that command will read your entire boot drive, which is probably not the drive that has been sitting on a shelf for a year. You can run this task on different drives, but first you have to figure out the identifier for the drive (hint: it's not the name that you called the drive.)

To get the disk identifier, go to Disk Utility, also in the Utilities folder. Select the drive, not the volume--the drive's name usually starts with the capacity of the disk followed by the drive's manufacturer, e.g., Seagate, Hitachi, LaCie--the volume is what you named the drive or a partition on the drive. After selecting the disk that you want to run the maintenance on, click on the info icon at the top of the application window. This opens a new window with info on your drive, the disk identifer is the word "disk" followed by a number. If the disk identifier was disk2, then your command would be: sudo cat /dev/rdisk2> /dev/null

The command will take a while to run--we're probably talking hours. You can interrupt this procedure by hitting Control + C while in the Terminal.

Disappearing data is only one risk you run by using a hard drive as long-term storage. But this seems like something worth doing if you care about the data that you have left on a drive.

Blu-ray Burning with Toast 9

"Taming the Wild Blu, yonder... " By Bruce Nazarian

"Taming the Wild Blu, part 2..." By Bruce Nazarian

Two good articles that cover the Blu-ray burning featues of Toast 9 on Macs. The first article covers the basics of burning Blu-ray and has a good tutorial on burning a Blu-ray data disc. We are currently using Toast 8 to burn Blu-ray discs to archive movies and old FCP projects as data. For some reason, I can't get Toast 9 to recognize our burner, but Toast 8 works fine for this--this tutorial will still help if you are trying to figure out how to burn a BD with Toast 8. There's a new version of Toast 9 out, 9.0.4, which I need to try out--hopefully the problems with the BD drive will go away. Recently, I blogged about a video tutorial that covers similar ground as this article.

The second article gets you into creating a Blu-ray discs with high-def video. So you've got your snazzy HD camcorder, but how are you going to playback your next high-def project? Apple isn't really helping you out--you can't playback video from Blu-ray discs on your Mac (much less author a Blu-ray disc with their software.) But this article points out the other options, namely Blu-ray players, which already cost less than $200.

Toast 9 does basic authoring of Blu-ray video discs. Simple menus, encoding of video to MPEG-2 or H.264, and, of course, burning your Blu-ray disc (or even regular DVD if you have about 20 minutes of video or less.)

Don't forget about Adobe's Encore CS3, and now CS4, which I blogged about earlier this year. Encore has a much more sophisticated tools for authoring Blu-ray discs than Toast's. But for simple discs, Toast looks like an easy way to put your high-def video onto disc.

Just for Fun: Digital Conversion PSA Spoof

This is a funny video about how your average grandmother will handle the conversion to digital TV. The sad part is that there are really going to be a lot of older people out there who will lose their TV when the old analog stations turn off their over-the-air broadcast. Well, I guess it's a growth opportunity for Link--think of all the dishonest satellite salesman out there who will get granny to buy Dish or Directv when her shows disappear come 2-17-09.

Is Your Video Looking Rough Around the Edges?

"Am I Rendering And Viewing At The Best Quality With FCP?" By Andrew Balis

This is a very good article over at kenstone.net. This is a topic that I sort of took for granted that I knew everything that I needed to know about rendering--then I find out features that I didn't even know about. One of these is the audio mixdown vs item levels rendering. There was also a setting for HDV rendering that I had totally misinterpreted the meaning of--it would cause me to have to re-render all my HDV footage, which takes a long time.

The article points out that the quality of real-time previews sometimes isn't as good as rendered quality. I used to see this everytime I did Latin Pulse. I like to use dissolves on title clips. If I had a color-correction on the video below the title, then the title would drop to half-resolution even though the timeline said it should be "Full Quality." So I would have to go in and render all of these little dissolves or change my settings to render out everything that should playback at "Full Quality."

So if you want your video to look as good as possible and your audio to sound as good as possible, I recommend this article.

Firewire vs. USB Performance in New Laptops

So Apple has dropped Firewire from the MacBook and don't expect to ever see it againon the consumer-level laptop from Apple. This is too bad, especially since Apple really boosted the performance of the new MacBook--it would have made a decent computer for editors if it had had Firewire.

The lack of Firewire raises two big issues for video folks. First, the performance of hard drives over USB has traditionally been really poor on Mac's--usually half the speed of Firewire 400. Second, there are all kinds of other gear that uses Firewire--decks, cameras, Firestore, video monitoring/digitizing equipment. We layoff to DVCam at Link and get most of our footage from DV and HDV tapes.

One good bit of news about peripherals with the new laptops is that Apple has finally raised the performance of USB. Check out this article at Bare Feats to see the results of a comparison of hard drive performance of USB, FW400, FW800, and Sata drives on the new laptops. USB is almost as fast as Firewire 400 on the new MacBook Pro.

I still wouldn't recommend doing any serious editing with USB drives on these new laptops. I guess it could work, but Firewire was supposed to be a better standard. My guess is that you would run into problems with capturing and laying off if your media was on USB drives. But these are educated guesses at this point. This may change if Apple does a better job of implementing USB on their Mac's.

October Blogwad

"3D Objects from Photoshop in After Effects CS4"
Adobe CS4 is shipping. The thing that most interested me is you can have 3D objects in After Effects. There are a number of limitations on this. This little video shows you the basic of working with 3D objects and discusses the limitations in After Effects (the biggest for me is objects don't respond to lighting in After Effects.) More new features described here.

"Top 10 things you didn't know about the new MacBook"
New MacBook and MacBook Pro's were announced. Each model lost a Firewire 400 port. That leaves the MBP with one FW800 port, but the MacBook with no Firewire port and no way to add it. Some good things about the new laptops too (besides looking really slick.)

"Final Cut Pro: Free plugins to make all fonts available"
Why by version of 6, Apple still hasn't fixed this I don't know. But here's a text plug-in that is supposed to let you use all of your fonts in FCP.

"Final Cut Pro: My free Closing Credits plugin"
From the same guy who made the type plug-in above. The cool thing about this is that it lets you control the lines per second speed of your scroll. I basically almost always use one speed for credit rolls--120 lines pers second. (To know why read from Adam Wilt here). I do keyframe animation of Title 3D to do this, but it's a pain. This plug-in is an easier way to get the speed right, but you lose all the nice type editing features of Boris 3D.

"Build your own affordable SAN -- that works!"
Remember my crazy idea to use Jonathan's computer to build a SAN. This is where I got the idea. I'd still like to do it, but nobody wanted to give me $3K to play around with this, instead of letting editors use the computer.

"What to do if you lose your Pro App serial number"
Title says it all.

"Final Cut Pro Audio Filter Guide Part 1"
"Final Cut Pro Audio Filter Guide Part 2"
Bone up on FCP's audio filters with these helpful articles. Basically they describe what the various sliders do for the filters. However, if you're like me and not an audio person and you don't know what you are doing, then you will probably make your audio sound worse by playing around with filters. On the other hand, I learned the little I know about audio mainly by playing around with filters.

My current favorite filter is Soundtrack Pro's limiter. It works much better than the limiter in FCP. But it's a pain to export to Soundtrack Pro and reimport. It really makes sure that your peaks aren't out of control and cuts off all sounds at a consistent level without distorting it. I usually set it to -10 limit with a +10 boost.

"Another electronic slate for the iPhone"
"Finally a few timecode calculators for the iPhone"
Rejoice iPhone owners (and iPod Touch owners.) Video-centric apps for your iPhone.

"Anything Worth Backing Up…"
Good thoughts on backup strategies and technologies.

"All About Video Fields"
For extra credit, read this long, tech-y article on fields. Written from the perspective of a software engineer, but all the issues come up for video editors too.

SD Cards in the Sony EX-1

This seems like some exciting bit of news. Apparently, folks have figured out how to shoot onto SanDisk SD cards with the Sony EX-1 and EX-3 cameras, instead of Sony's expensive SxS media.

The EX cameras are supposed to be great (see latest EX-3 review from Adam Wilt.). Excellent performance in terms of resolution and low-light sensitivity. Their 1/2" sensors work much better than the smaller 1/3" sensors in the Z1, Z5, Z7, HVX200, HPX170, and Canon cameras. The big problem for me with the EX cameras was shooting on the expensive SxS media. Like the Panasonic's P2 cards, these are much more expensive per GB than run-of-the-mill flash memory--e.g., $850 for 16GB of SxS Pro storage. It just wouldn't make sense when you are shooting a lot of stuff because the hassle of making sure all your footage was safe on hard drives all the time.

Well, this guy says you can use a 16GB SanDisk SD card for $60 that will do just about everything that Sony's $850 card will (the notable exception being over-cranking, used for slo-mo shots.) You just need a particular Kensington Expresscard adapter for $40 that you put in the camera.

It still doesn't make the the EX-1 ($6450 at B&H) a no-brainer for Link. That's still $60 to record about an hour at 35 Mb/s or 90 minutes at 25 Mb/s. The camera's more difficult to handle than the Z1 or Z5, or even Z7. Plus the Z5 has a 20x lens versus 14x lens for the EX cameras. And we are hardly ever delivering HD--so we usually downconvert in the deck, which is both a good and easy way to get SD footage from HD source material. If quality is what really counts, than the EX cameras are a real winner in the sub $10K range, but I think, but there are some significant drawbacks to the camera when compared to more practical, tape-based cameras like the Z5.

If you are seriously interested in this, then read the fine print here:
Overcoming the cost of SxS media: Introducing KxS.
Also, I don't know of anyone personally doing this. I would probably wait for some trustworthy sources to vouch for this before I committed to buying an EX camera.

UPDATE: Adam Wilt (a very trustworthy source) says that he's heard good things from Sony about working with off-the-shelf memory cards on the EX cameras in the comments section of this post on ProVideo Coalition.

I tried looking for the Kensington card reader, and it seems to be out-of-stock everywhere. Also read on a forum that it may have been discontinued. Not good news for this concept.

Farewell Messages to Kathryn

Hi all Link staffers,

We are doing something new for Kathryn Binovi's going away party, and I need everyone's help. I want to make the video equivalent of a card that we would give to Kathryn. So I want to get nice thoughts and reflections from the staff about Katherine. I plan to make a video that will play on a TV screen during the party. On the screen will be text with messages from Kathryn's co-workers (that's you!).

Please try your best to think of something unique to say to Kathryn--it would be nice not to have 10 messages that just said "We'll miss you" and "Good luck." Also try to keep it shortish, as the type will have to be pretty big to be legible. Feel free to recycle these messages in any actual physical card.

To make it easier for people not to duplicate each other's messages, I'm encouraging people to write out their thoughts as comments on this blog post. Please make sure to write your name at the end of your comments. To make a comment, click on the "Post a Comment" link at the bottom of this post. You don't have to log in to post a comment--just select anonymous option on the page where you write your post. But again, remember to write your name in the message.

If you are receiving this message in an email, follow the link to go to my blog where you can post your messages to Kathryn.

Thanks!
Matt

September Blogwad

Hard Disk Warning!
Larry Jordan says don't leave a hard drive sitting on your shelf for more than a year with data that you want to keep. Explains why and gives some suggestions on how to keep old hard drives from losing data.

The Freesound Project
Sound effects here. They are available under Creative Commons licenses. Not sure if that would include any of Link's work. As I understand it, Creative Commons means that you aren't doing the project for money and your work will also be available to others under the Creative Commons agreement. But I'm not an expert.

DA Font
Some fonts here some are in the public domain, others are available under Creative Commons licenses. Again, I'm not an expert in Creative Commons licensing. But public domain is obviously cool.

Ripple Training
Some good tutorials in the Ripple Training section of the ProVideo Coaltion website.
Remove the Jitters - Covers the SmoothCam feature in Final Cut Pro 6.
Photoshop & Motion - Simple way to do a quick animation on a multi-layered Photoshop document in Motion 3 by using its 3D features.
Color Workflows With Different Video Formats - Covers how to use different codecs with Color. Warning here about working with Long-GOP formats, like HDV.

HDV video to SD DVD Using Compressor 3 and DVD SP
Exporting HDV Video from the Timeline to Standard Definition DVD
Man, working with HDV can be slow. Hopefully these tutorials will save you some time if you need to make a DVD from some HDV footage. They are over at kenstone.net
Also at kenstone.net, a tutorial on making a Blu-ray high-def video disc on a Mac. Takes you from FCP through Compressor to Adobe's Encore:
Blu-ray with Final Cut Pro, Compressor and Encore

ProRes 422 was one of the big features of Final Cut Pro 6. It was essentially a QuickTime codec, but Apple wasn't going to give it away. Too bad, because it's an efficient codec and very useful, especially for high-def footage. Well, Apple is finally letting people playback ProRes 422 footage on systems without FCP 6 installed (but you still can't create ProRes files without FCP 6.) Here are the links to playback ProRes on Mac's and PC's.

Mac OS X 10.5: Creating and maintaining a bootable "universal" external disk
I didn't know you could do this:
You can make a "universally bootable" external hard disk that will work with both Mac OS X 10.5-compatible PowerPC-based Macs and Intel-based Macs.

Bluetooth Earpiece--2-way radio
Do production? Need to buy a bluetooth head set? Then consider the Dragon. It will work as a 2-way radio with another Dragon headset. They even sell a device that will allow you to link up to 5 Dragon headsets together. Probaby not the cheapest way to communicate with a crew, but it's nice that it will do double-duty as the wireless headset for you cellphone.


Making Compressor Multiprocessor Aware
This one of Larry Jordan's Tips of the Day. Uses QMaster to make virtual clusters on multi-processor systems.

Sony Announces Successor to Z1

Sony has announced a new camera in their HDV professional lineup: the HVR-Z5. It's body is very similar to the Z1. The V1 is a smaller size with the LCD located on the left size of the body, while the Z7 has a removable lens.

There's lots of nice upgrades over the Z1. The 3-CMOS imaging system is supposed to handle low-light much better. The lens is wider and has a 20x zoom and an iris ring right on the lens. Traditionally, Sony has relegated the iris control to a small wheel control on the camera's body for their low-end pro cams. There are a lot of similarities to the new Z7, like recording to CompactFlash (with optional HVR-MRC1K), an high-resolution LCD display and viewfinder, and native 24P recording onto the HDV format. The MRSP of the Z5 is $5000.

Earlier this year, I was touting the Z7 as Link's "next camera". I have to eat my words. I should have seen this camera coming--all the features of the Z7 without the removable lens. I think this camera makes more sense for Link. The built-in lens I think will make the Z5 easier to handle and lighter. The Z7 has a 12x lens versus the 20x on the Z5. And I'm guessing the Z5 will be cheaper than the Z7. Although the Z7 price recently dropped on the B&H site for $6300 to $5400.

B&H wrote an article about the prosumer version of this camera the FX-1000. It's covers some of the new features also included on the Z5 in detail.

While I am now predicting this as Link's next camera, I have no idea when we would buy one. Don't hold your breath. But the camera will be available in December.

OT: Sharing files via YouSendIt

OT means "off-topic." So this isn't something that I would normally put on my blog. But I was going to send this info to a few people, and I thought folks on the blog might have some interest in it.

I'm going to give a basic tutorial on sharing files with the free version YouSendIt. YouSendIt is a service that's available in a free version and paid version with more bells & whistles. Link has the Pro account that we pay for, but I'm going to give the example of a free account. (For using the Pro account you don't need to do all the extra steps that takes up the bulk of this article.)

First register with YouSendIt. You know you are going to have to give up an actual email address to use this service. But it's worth it. They mostly use your address to send you useful info, like a confirmation that your upload is complete. Give them your email, then wait for their email confirmation to arrive. Once you get their email follow their instructions so that they will activate an account for you.

Once you have a free account, you can send one file upto 100MB in size. The way YouSendIt works is that you are using YouSendIt to send the file to someone else via their email. Really you are just sending them a notification that they can download the file from YouSendIt. You use their website to upload the file along with the email address of the person or persons that you want to send the file to. The person then gets an email with a link to YouSendIt. When he or she gets the email, they can follow a link to start downloading your file.

Now YouSendIt likes to work with one upload--so what happens when you want to send multiple files? As an example, I'll use sending an album from iTunes. With 10 or so music files in an album, it might seems like you have to send each song individually--that would be a pain and not worth the hassle. But there's an easy workaround that I know of on the Mac to easily send multiple files.

The workaround involves using the Zip technology built into the Mac OS. Zip is essentially a way to compress files. You can zip a single file or multiple files. Because most types of media, like MP3 or video, are already compressed, zipping the files doesn't actually make them significantly smaller. However you can use Zip to take several files and bundle them together into what Apple calls an Archive. So by taking an album and zipping the songs, we create a copy of the album that exists as one file. This single file (containing multiple songs) can then be uploaded to YouSendIt in one go.

So here's an example of how to do this with an album. First find the files that you want to send. It's easy enough to do with iTunes. By right-clickng on a song, use can use the "Show in Finder" command (the third item from the top in the contextual menu.) If your mouse only has one button, then you can hold down the Ctrl button while clicking to get the same contextual menu up.

The "Show in Finder" command will open up a window in the Finder showing where the file of the song is located. So now you see your song along with all the other songs in the album. Now we want to bundle all the files in this album into one single file. To do this, select all the files in the folder, then right-click again. This time you use the "Compress x items" (where x is the number of files that you've selected), the fith command from the top of the contextual menu.

After you've compressed your files, you'll see a new file in the same folder called "Archive.zip." This is a copy of your files collapsed into a single file.


This file called "Archive.zip" is the file that you want to send with YouSendIt. You can also compress or zip a folder. If you did this, then the compressed file would be named after the folder and not the generic "Arhive" that is used when you zip or compress multiple files. You can't send a folder via the free YouSendIt, but you can send a compressed version of that folder. Again, the free version of YouSendIt just wants a single file to send.

In this example, the file is 65MB, below the 100MB limit of our free service. Most compressed music is encoded at a bit rate of 128Kbps. At 128Kbps, 100MB equals about 1 hour and 50 minutes of audio. That's enough for a single album. However I've started buying music from Amazon, and Amazon encodes their music at a hefty 256Kbps. That means a 100MB is only about 55 minutes of music. So you may not be able to fit everything in one file. So if you want to send a group of files (like an album) and the total was over 100MB, then you wold need to split up your files into more than one archive, and each archive would need to be under the 100MB limit of YouSendIt and sent separately.

Another gotcha with music is that some music has DRM protection, meaning it can probably be only played on specific computers and other devices (like iPods) that are linked to a particular person. This isn't conducive to sharing music. iTunes is the last big player that is still selling lots of music with DRM. (This isn't about Apple but about the entertainment corporations--but that's the subject of another post.) iTunes has something called iTunes Plus, which is DRM-free music that you can buy (look for the plus icon next to the price of the music). All music bought from Amazon's download store is free of DRM--so they can be shared with anyone. Amazon has a pretty good store--it's nearly as easy to use as buying music from iTunes, and it's usually cheaper. Anything you rip from a CD is obviously DRM-free.

OK back to YouSendIt. Go to their website and log in using your account. Follow the link to send a file. Enter the email address or address of the person or persons that you want to get this file. Then click on the "choose file" button and select the Archive.zip file that you just created. Then click the "Send It" button. This actually starts the process of uploding the file to the YouSendIt website. This will take some time, and it's important not to disrupt the process. So you want to leave that webpage open and your web browser running until the file finishes uploading. Upload times are generally slower than download times. On my DSL it takes about 10 minutes to upload 50MB of data, but I can download that much in a fraction of the time.

Once the file is uploaded, an email will be sent to your buddy or buddies. Then it's up to them to follow the link to download the file. With the free verison, your file will be available for 7 days. So hopefully your friends will download soon instead of procrastinating.

Oh, you will probably want to delete the Archive.zip file now that it's uploaded. It's just a copy of your existing music that's taking up space on the hard drive.

If you are like me and you've been burning files onto disc to share with people, this method offers some advantages. One, there's no physical media to move around, either by hand or by mail. Two, you are helping the environment by not using up plastic to make a copy of your files, and in the case of mail, you aren't using fossil fuels to move a physical copy of the file around. So give it a shot, and let me know what you think of my method for sharing files.

Drobo: Your Data Robot

Drobo has been around for about a year and when it first came out I judged it as "cool but not ready for primetime." Drobo is a unique RAID setup for hard drive storage. The biggest drawback was the Drobo only had a USB interface, which is not cool for video editing. Well, this summer Drobo 2 came out with Firewire 800. Data Robotics, the manufacturer, is touting read speeds of 52MB/s and writes of 34MB/s--not too shabby. They say it's good for uncompressed SD, DV, and compressed HD. They cite DVCProHD as OK, but at those data rates I'm thinking that Apple's ProRes 422 is supported too. ProRes maxes out at about 26MB/s--generally I think if the drive's speed is double the needed data rate, then you are OK.

So what makes Drobo unique? It's got a great combination of redundant data storage and the easy-to-use factor. The Drobo case holds up to 4 hard drives, and you only need 2 drives to get started. Your data is spread across the drives in such a way that if one drive failed then you wouldn't lose any data. Need more storage? This is the great part. Just slide in another hard drive of any size. Drobo incorporates you new drive into the existing RAID. If you have four drives in the case and run out of space, then no problem. Simply replace the smallest drive with a bigger drive to get more storage.

My experience with RAID has never gone beyond buying a G-Raid. Whenever I looked into setting up a RAID on my own, there were always enough drawbacks to keep me from making the plunge. It just seemed too difficult to manage all the drives. We are in drive overload anyway. Plus the added expense of more drives and SATA gear was always an issue. Granted Drobo is not cheap. At $500 without any drives, that's a hefty expense to swallow. But I think over it's life it will make up for that in the cost saved by not buying drives with cases, plus the peace-of-mind that you get with redundant storage.

There could be some drawbacks to Drobo. One is that you are putting all of your eggs in one basket. Yes, you are protecting yourself against the failure of a hard drive, but what if Drobo fails. Then you could be in real trouble and pray that Data Robotics will come to your rescue (and do so promptly). Also all of the management seems automatic. That's good if you don't want to deal with the hassle of repairing a RAID with a bad drive, but bad if the maintenance takes place in the middle of a big deadline. If a drive dies, then you don't lose any data. But then Drobo has to start shuffling around all of your data between the existing drives that are still working, and this will take a lot of time. While you are supposed to still be able to access Drobo while it does this automatic maintenance who knows what kind of performance you will get as Drobo and the drives are very busy. Will the Drobo still be able to playback and record video while it rebuilds? So while losing a drive could mean no lost data, it doesn't necessarily mean no downtime for us video editors. But overall, I'd prefer losing no data but have a slower system for a day or so, then totally losing the data.

You are also giving up some of the transportability of a G-RAID. While the Drobo can be moved, it will probably end up having all of your storage on it. If you like to put individual project on a drive, which gets moved around, then Drobo is probably too expensive for that. So it's both good and bad that Drobo can be the only drive case that you will need.

Here's an example of a Drobo system once you get the drives.
Drobo...$500
(3) 500GB Hard Drives...$325
Total Cost...$825
Total storage...930GB
That compares to my favorite type of storage a G-Raid, which gives you the same amount of storage for $355. So that's $500 up front is a lot to ask for. But I'll be thinking about his seriously in the future.

Here are some links on Drobo:
Drobo in Action
A video from Data Robotics on how Drobo works.

Drobolator
See how much storage Drobo will give you when you put different drives inside.

Drobo Firewire 800 Review
A short review of the new Drobo that gives more info on the benefits and setup of Drobo.

Some Bay Area Events

A couple of interesting events I thought I'd share with others.

SFCutters is doing an event on Thursday the 28th with a some focus on compression. The author of 'Real World Video Compression' Andy Beach is speaking. I was recently checking out a blog post from him that compares Compressor with some other competing encoding apps that was worth a read. Article points out some weakensses in Compressor, like the poor default deinterlacing and its slowness. Also there will be some training on the oft-neglected LiveType, and there will a presentation by Adobe on Flash CS3, which we have a couple of licenses for at Link. $10 to go and you have to pay online before you go at the link.

There's also a conference October 17 & 18 at the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley called The Conversation. It's subtitled "The Future of Cinema, Games & Online Video: New Tools/New Distribution/New Rules". Looks like a lot of interesting panels. Only problem is I think it's a bit pricey--$150. How about some non-profit discounts? I guess I could call them and ask.

How I Download Flash Videos

Here's how I download Flash video. I'll use YouTube as an example, but I've found that the method works on other flash video, but not by any means all online video.

1. Start playing the movie in Safari.
2. Open the Activity Window in Safari. It's under the Window menu.
3. Find the movie in the Activity window. The Activity window lists a lot of things, like all the graphics on the webpage (and for all open pages.) But I usually find movies because they are the largest--in the MB's not KB's. Also the movies size is usually changing--as long as the movie is downloading.

In the image below, the movie is the file 3rd item from the bottom whose name starts with v6.cache.googlevideo.


4. Select the movie file in the activity window and copy it. This will copy the location of the video.

5. Open a new browser window and paste the movie's location in the address field.

6. Safari starts downloading the video. Download window should automatically open.

7. Wait for the video to finish downloading. Then find the video file. The magnifying glass next to the file in the Download window will take you to it. In OS.10.4 it's probably on the desktop. In OS 10.5, it's probably in the Downloads folder.

8. Rename the file to add the .flv suffix if it doesn't already have the .flv suffix, e.g., get_video.flv. You might as well add a descriptive title too while you are at it.

Now to work with flash video on the Mac, I use the free Perian plug-in. It lets QuickTime recognize the file, so that you can use it in Final Cut Pro or any app that uses QuickTime.

YouTube now has better quality video available on some videos. Check to see if the video you want is in better quality before downloading. If there is higher quality video, then you'll see the link below the movie "watch in high quality."


Click on that link and then follow the instructions above to get a much better looking video from YouTube.

Earlier this summer I posted a link to a post from Final Cut User that recommends transcoding the flash to something that FCP is used to working with, like the DV codec. I haven't had any problems working with Flash video, but it could speed up your workflow if you don't have to render the movies in the timeline.

Blu-ray Burning 101

Not sure if everyone really knows about the Blu-ray burner that we have. We bought the OWC Mercury Pro 2x Blu-ray Panasonic SW-5582. It's an external burner that burns 25GB and 50GB over firewire. Right now it's hooked up to the G4 that interns have been working with.

We got it to back up data mostly. Blu-ray is more reliable than a hard-drive and 25GB is decent capacity for backing up video files. We are hoping to use it to free up some of our hard drives that are sitting around not getting used because of old projects that no one wants to delete.

The discs aren't cheap, around $10, but it's reasonable, especialy when you consider that it's a robust, easy-to-use archiving solution.

So how do you use it? I'm not going to into all of the setup here (if you are interested ask me), but there's a video that covers burning discs in the Mac's Finder and with Toast. This video shows Toast 9, but we use Toast 8, and it works pretty much the same (I think the main difference is that they tweaked the interface.)

MacVideo: Step into Blu-ray - for less than £200

I looked for that drive mentioned in the video and couldn't find it. This guy is British, and I couldn't find anything as comparably cheap or anything with the same model number in the States. Remember folks, the dollar is a currency on the wane, eventually our greenbacks aren't going to go as far when buying all those imported, electronics.

Now, you can't watch any blu-ray movies on Macs. Apple needs to add support for that both in hardware and the operating system, and as I've written before Apple has made no announcement indicating that they will support Blu-ray movie playback at all. However, you can author Blu-ray movies using Adobe's Encore software on an Intel Mac. Right now we have that up and running on the new Octo-core Intel Mac Pro that Hiawatha uses. But until Link gets a Blu-ray player or a Playstation 3, then we don't have any way to playback those Blu-ray movies. (I'm all for getting a PS3--how about some Rock Band jamming at the office?)

Here's an article from Adobe discussing workflow for encoding high-def video using Compressor to burn onto Blu-ray using Encore:
Apple's Compressor & Encore Blu-Ray

Compressor and Conversions

Compressor 2 and 3 have very powerful tools for converting and upscaling video, as well as doing slo-mo. The optical flow technology, which Apple acquired when they bought the powerful compositing application Shake (only later to kill it), is the key to the results that you can get from Compressor. The key to getting the best results is the Frame Controls settings in Compressor.

Compressor is very good at standards conversion or converting video to a different frame rate. People often call this PAL and NTSC conversion although this isn't really accurate, but it will handle the same tasks that systems that do this do--namely the scaling and frame rate conversions. Frame rate conversions in particular are difficult to do really well. There are some standalone products from Teranex that just do this for around $2500 Well Compressor does this really well, but Teranex does it in real-time and Compressor is really slow.

Optical flow can also help in up-conversion of interlaced footage. Interlacing makes it really hard to do upconversion because your vertical resolution is basically split in two. For an example of how to scale things up badly look at what Final Cut Pro does in the timeline. FCP basically throws away half of your vertical resolution as soon as you scale a video clip. So the difference between 100% scale and 99% or 101% scale is crisp video and a blurry messy. When scaled up like this over 200%, not unusual when putting in standard-def footage into a high-def project, fine detail like type also starts shaking up and down from the interlacing--it looks ugly.

Compressor is an improvement on how FCP works in a number of ways. First, it can analyze the image and decide to selectively keep detail from both fields when the video isn't moving--if visuals in a part of a frame is moving, then only that part of the frame will lose resolution. With the optical flow technology, Compressor guesses how a part of the frame is moving and intelligently creates an image with more resolution than other results. These two approaches are handled in the deinterlacing settings in Compressor--the first approach is described as Better while Best uses optical flow.

The Retiming controls are where Compressor handles different frame rates. For example going from 25 fps video from Europe to 30fps video over in North America, usually handled as 60i (interlaced) especially in standard-def. The Better and Best settings in Compressor use optical flow. Like with deinterlacing, optical flow analyzes your video and recognizes object and how they are moving--the optical flow then intelligently creates new frames that move objects smoothly without losing detail. By the way, going from 24fps, which is a progressive format, is not a problem for us folks working in 60i. You can do this right in FCP without any fancy conversion (assuming you want to keep the 24fps filmic look.)

As an example, here's what I recommended to someone doing PAL to NTSC conversion:
Resizing: Better
Deinterlacing: Better (motion adaptive)
Retiming: Better
In this case, the scaling is going down (PAL has more resolution than NTSC, so you should get good results without jumping through a lot of hoops.) I reserved the optical flow use to only retiming at the Better setting. I didn't recommend optical flow on deinterlacing to save time. But if time isn't an issue then using Best for deinterlacing should improve results.

Unfortunately, all this intelligent analysis by optical flow is very processor and time-intensive. So for example using optical flow for retiming and and deinterlacing makes my quad-core G5 slow to a crawl--I'd give a ballpark estimate of 1 minute to process 1 second of video. But if quality is important, then the results can be excellent.

There are some plug-ins that specialize in upconversion, namely InstantHD. Check here for my post on upconversion.

Here are two good articles on using Compressor. Macworld discusses standards conversions here that walks you through the whole process:
Send video abroad
This post at Digital Rebellion gives detailed info on all the settings in Frame Controls.
Using Frame Controls in Compressor

The Macworld article also recommends an interesting workflow using Cinema Tools to convert PAL to NTSC by conforming the PAL to 24fps, scaling and deinterlacing in Compressor, then adding pulldown in FCP. Interesting workflow that I've never seen used.

The Retiming controls in Compressor can also give you some very good slo-mo results. Here are some cool tests done that compares Final Cut Pro versus Compressor at various speeds on two shots.
"Final Cut Studio slow motion demo"
"Final Cut slow motion at various speeds"
The author brings up a good point--if you are shooting a shot to be slo-mo, then shoot at as high a frame rate as you can--60p, 60i, 50p, 50i are good, where 24 fps is bad for slo-mo. The more samples per second of the image you can acquire, the better the slo-mo will work.

$500 Shopping Spree

So what would you spend $500 on? I'm soliciting opinions. In another interesting variation, on budgetary outlays, I've been offered $500 to spend on anything I want. The reasoning is that we are charging someone around $500 to make some dubs, and the money can go towards equipment.

Well, after figuring that I couldn't slip a receipt for a Playstation or a 32GB iPod Touch past accounting, I've turned my mind towards more practical purchases.

My number one idea is to replace the tube of the Sony monitor on the A system in Edit 2. Am I the only one noticing that the image is looking greenish? $500 should cover the cost of replacing the tube in that monitor. I'd rather do it now when we have the money--otherwise I'll have to wait around until it is so obvious that the folks holding the purse strings can perceive the bad color on the monitor. That could take a while.

However, I've been thinking about other things too. A few months ago, I was making a big fuss about better production equipment. In particular, I was recommending a new tripod, an LCD field montior and a telephoto lens adapter for the Z1. An LCD field monitor is not out of the question for $500. I wanted to get a high-def one for closer to $1K, but there's a kit for a widescreen one with a resolution of 1440x234 for about $500. Check out the Varizoon kit at B&H. I don't know if this is much better resolution than the Z1's LCD viewfinder, but at 7" it is much larger--ergo easier to see. I've been griping about out of focus shots on the Z1. This should help.

Another idea for production gear is a wireless mic. Anyone recommend a wireless mic for about $500? I doubt $500 is enough for a good tripod but I'd be glad to be proved wrong.

In short, if there's some gear or software that you think would really help our work at Link for $500, please let me know. Please leave your suggestions in the comments sections--that'll let other see your suggestions and allow them to rag on them. Oh, and it's got to be near $500 or under $500--no $500 towards a new computer or something. No saving for a rainy day here--when you've got it, you spend it.

Summer Blogwad

I'm just dumping some interesting links here to check out.

Digital Rebellion: Recommended QuickTime and Mac OS configurations for Final Cut Pro
A list of recommended combos of FCP, Quicktime, and OS versions. Let's just call this why not to update your systems unless you absolutely need to. On the other hand, it sucks being caught in FCP 5.1.4 world while everyone else has moved on. That's more of a money issue than a technology issue though.

Digital Rebellion: List of QuickTime downloads
A continuation of the theme of don't upgrade if you don't have to. If you have to upgrade but it's not to the latest and (ahem) greatest, then this page will help you find the appropriate upgarde for QuickTime. Similarly, the LAFCUP has a wiki page on Quicktime updates.

Little Frog in High Def: APPLE PRO APPS UPDATE 2008-02
Good advice on downloading all updates to Final Cut Pro even if you don't intend to upgrade. The reason is that Apple doesn't make old updates available for FCP (unlike QuickTime). There are situations where you might want to upgrade but not to the latest version--if you don't have the update then Apple isn't going to help you. You can download updates through Apple's Final Cut Pro page--you don't have to upgrade through the Software Update control panel.

Final Cut User: Using FLVs in Final Cut Pro
Some good tips on using video downloaded from the web from sites like YouTube. I didn't know about using the QuickTime wrapper to help the editing of FLV's--sound like a helpful tip.

"Ten Tips For A Better Final Cut Pro Experience"
This is a good read. An experienced editor wrote down 10 good tips. Good write-up on media management. Also some interesting tips on multicam, amongst a number of other good ideas.

kenstone.net: Color Workflows With Different Types of Sources
By Andrew Balis
Want to work in Color? This seems like a good guide for getting footage in and out for your next go as a colourist.

Overview Video on Sony EX3
I don't think I've talked about the Sony EX3 because I think the MSRP was over $10K and that's my cut-off point for talking about cameras. But it lists for under $10K, and it looks like a good upgrade to the Sony EX1. I've been hearing about and seeing folks use the EX1. Seems like the XDCAM format on SxS memory cards could take off.

ProLost: On Clipping, Part 1
Very tech-y. But interesting to get a theoretical understanding of how video works. Folks interested in Red should read. It helped me understand why there is more grain in dark areas of video than in light areas. Also discusses important differences in how film and video represent light.

ProLost: Go Naked pt. 2
A good example of the guerrilla filmmaking model as described in Stu Maschwitz's "The DV's Rebel Guide." More interesting to me is that Vimeo not only streams HD, but allows downloads too of Quicktime movies (the film shown is downloadable at 1280x720). You can upload up to 500MB per week to Vimeo. An interesting way to share footage encoded in h.264--nice that it allows both streaming and downloading.

stockfootageforfree.com
Not awesome but could help in a pinch. I did about 10 searches on foreign countries, and the only video I got was touristy stuff from Cancun. Some OK shots of D.C., SF, and NYC. [via freshdv.com]

Streaming Video: Quality Comparison and Trends

There's a pair of interesting articles about streaming video at Digital Content Producer:
Encoding Best Practices, Part 1
Encoding Best Practices, Part 2

Part 1 is a report based on samples of what kind of streaming video is out there on the web. It's not a huge sample, but he does look at about 20 sites from broadcast video. So that's a good comparison for Link. Flash and Windows Media far outpace any competitors, like Quicktime and Real. One trend in streaming is growing bandwith and image resolution. Most broadcasters were streaming at a frame size of 460x325 and at a data rate of 500 kbps. Lots of good charts showing trends on this as well as frame rate and audio bit rate.

Part 2 is a quality comparison of h.264, on2 vp6, and VC-1 (Windows codec.) VC-1 gets the lowest marks. Both articles are interesting reads. I found them over at FreshDV.

Troubleshooting with Activity Monitor

Recently Activity Monitor has been instrumental in troubleshooting problems for me. Activity Monitor is part of the Mac OS and lives in the Utilities folder, which is in the Apps folder. It gives you read-outs on things going on with the computer, including what the CPU and RAM are doing.

Here are a couple of good descriptions of the RAM display in Activity Monitor:
Final Cut Studio - System Memory Usage--Larry Jordan's Tip of the Day
Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor--Apple Support

The two pages actually give somewhat contradictory advice. Larry Jordan says that if your wired and active memory is regularly half of total memory then you could benefit from a RAM upgrade. While Apple says that even if you only have 10MB of free memory you don't necessarily need more RAM.

I've been noticing some bad examples of slow FCP that I blame on memory issues. So I think it's important to keep track of your RAM issues. Here some tips to keep your RAM usage streamlined and efficient:
- If you don't plan to switch back to an app, quit it and don't leave it open
- Avoid running multiple apps at once, especially programs that can suck up memory, like FCP, DVD Studio Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop
- Only keep open FCP projects open that you need, same things with sequences
- Restart your computer at least once a day and if your system seems really slow then restart it
- Web browser and webpages can use a surprising amount of RAM--avoid browsing with lots of windows/tabs
Now all of these RAM saving tips can reduce your efficiency in working. So it's a tradeoff. If your system zips along fine, then don't worry about it. But if you notice that your system starts the day zippy and ends up later trudging along, then try to follow some of or all of these tips.

I also uncovered a problem recently with Mosaic where the Mosaic project file had become huge even though there didn't seem to be that many clips or edits in the project. The size of the project file can give you an idea about how much memory an FCP project will take up in your RAM and how many resources the computer will use to work with the project. I'm not really sure why the Mosaic project file got so large--over 300MB. But I think it hurt that the editors were just adding stuff into the same project file day after day--even if they were deleting old clips and sequences regularly. I think the Mosaic project seems to have retained data from old clips and/or timelines that had been deleted and didn't appear in the project view. So I created a new project and just copied the timeline and clips that were visible in the project window--the new project was something-like one-tenth of the size, and the system got much quicker. I also read recently that clips that are really long are more taxing on the computer than more shorter clips that have the same amount of media.

Another things that Activity Monitor does is measure CPU usage. This was helpful recently when I was having problems with the single processor G5 computer. An intern was having problems capturing DV footage from a DV deck. I had set up an unusual firewire cabling setup, so first I tried changing that--no luck. Then I brought in a different deck. No matter what I did, I was still getting dropped frames and funky audio dropouts. I noticed that the intern had Firefox running, which I didn't think was I big deal--she was checking her Gmail. Then I opened up the Activity Monitor and I saw that Firefox was quite active. It's CPU usage was hopping all around, peaking at up to 15% of the computer's CPU usage. And it wasn't even like she was actively browsing--that's was up to 15% of the CPU just to keep up with Gmail. Well I quit Firefox and the computer started capturing fine and did about 5 hours of capture with no problems.

Now I'm lucky to have a four-core G5, and I regularly have multiple webpages, email client, and even iTunes running all while I capture from DV. But for a single-processor G5 the demands of running FCP, capturing DV, and having Gmail open were too much. So it is important to know your computer. Also remember that laying off is at least as demanding on your system as capture and almost always much more. You are almost always playing back multiple clips at once (remember all your audio tracks) and your system is probably trying to apply some real-time effects to the video and/or audio. So be even more conservative about what your computer is doing when you lay off to tape.

BTW, I recommend Larry Jordan's Tip of the Day. I don't want to visit his website everyday, so I subscribed to the RSS feed and check out the tips when I have time.

Simplify media transcription with hotkeys and AppleScript

I got inspired by this article to write my first Applescript:
"Simplify media transcription with hotkeys and AppleScript" - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

The article talks about setting up hotkeys to control Quicktime Player. A hotkey is when you assign a command to a keystroke. That way you can transcribe or log in a Microsoft Word or some other word processor and still control the movie playing back without switching applications. The article describes how to create hotkeys by using a freeware app Spark to create hotkeys that run an Applescript.

Well, at Link we tend to have stuff logged from DVD with timecode burned-in to the video. So I set up some simple, one-line Applescripts to play, pause, rewind, and fast forward DVD's.

Play
tell application "DVD Player" to play dvd

Pause
tell application "DVD Player" to pause dvd

Rewind
tell application "DVD Player" to rewind dvd

Fast Foward
tell application "DVD Player" to fast forward dvd

I checked it out with Word, and assigning the scripts to option+J, option+K, option+L, and option+space bar seemed to work fine.

If you do log/transcribe from a Quicktime movie then I blogged about a free app last year that combines logging and playback in one app, QT Movie Notetaker. The program makes time notations based on how far into the movie you are but doesn't read timecode. If you want to spend $99, InqScribe has a unified playback and logging interface and has timecode support for Quicktime movies. That's sort of the complete package for handy transcribing and logging.

Guides on Audio EQ and Compression

Here are some good guides to the concepts and practice for EQ and compression:
"Basic Guide to Understanding EQ"
"Taming Your Audio Signal with Compression"

I've always thought of myself as a visually-attuned person, but much less sensitive to sound. So while I think I have a natural proclivity to catching things with my eye, I think I have to work much harder for sound--I think I learned much quicker what looked right and how to make it that way than I was to learn when something sounded right and how to make it so.

After level changes, the next basic tool in your audio kit is EQ. Back in the day, when someone told you that she or he wanted to make something sound better in the edit room, you were going to turn to the EQ. I've done a fair amount of linear editing, and that meant using the EQ knobs on your mixer. I still turn to the mixer from time to time. It's a quick way to check out how adjusting different frequencies will affect your audio. The Mackie VLZ mixer, which most of our editors have, has low-end, mid-range, and high-end adjustments. If may not really improve the track, but it's a quick way to check if you can make something sound better by raising or lowering the level of particular frequencies (just remember to turn those pots back to unity when you're done testing--so you don't screw up someone else's audio.) Then once I've found a setting that I like, I'll recreate it with an EQ filter in Final Cut. The B&H article Basic Guide to Understanding EQ describes different kinds of EQ beyond what you'll find on your basic mixer. Shelving and cutting are also available in Final Cut Pro as filters.

Nowadays I usually find myself turning to compression first when I want to help an audio track--especially a clean track, like one recorded in a VO booth or a quiet studio. I'm pretty conservative on compression. I think it's overused on a lot of TV and radio, especially when annoying white guys are yelling to be the loudest person in the world. But even in milder forms, it can give a voice some punch. So for example, this article Taming Your Audio Signal with Compression recommends compression ratios of 2 to 4, whereas I usually keep my ratio at below 2. BTW, a ratio of 1 does nothing. Of course, this is the default setting, so if you're not familiar with compression then the first time you use it, you might think it does nothing.

Final Cut Pro does compression, but Soundtrack Pro's multipressor effect is even more powerful. I use multipressor to have a little noise gate in the effect, and I like the graph display so I can the audio levels where the noise gate is working and where the compressor is working. If I have the time then I'll often take a track to Soundtrack Pro. If it's shot in our studio, then I'll want to do some noise reduction first, then I'll do a multipressor, and then I'll apply the limiter in Soundtrack Pro. Soundtrack Pro's limiter works much better than FCP's. I like how you can see how much the limiter is working in the filter settings window. The limiter works similarly, but more crudely, than the compressor in that it can be used to give your track more punch.

I found these articles over at FreshDV. These articles are part of the B&H Pro Audio Newsletter, which you can subscribe to on their homepage. Most of what I have learned about audio I learned from the writings of a guy called Jay Rose . I keep a copy of his "Audio for Post Production" around the office, which I recommend for both beginners and experienced editors who want to dig deep into sound issues.

Maintenance Tips for Your Mac

MacWorld: "Essential Mac Maintenance: Rev up your routines"

This a good article at MacWorld.com. A bunch of tips on how to get your Mac in good condition for the long run. I highly recommend the article.

One useful tip I liked was using SMART tests to regularly check on the health of your hard drives. Apparently these tests can give you a heads-up on ailing hard drives (before you lose data.) It's not bullet-proof, but it's supposed to protect against some of the more common types of hard drive failures. Michael Kinimoto says he has had good luck with doing regular SMART tests. The article recommends installing some freeware that regularly checks your hard drive's SMART status: Smart Reporter. Unfortunately, SMART tests don't work over firewire. It may work on an external hard drive hooked up through SATA, but that depends on what kind of hardware connection you have for your external SATA drive. The Firmtek Seritek PCI and PCI-E cards I've used pass along SMART data. But at the very least, you can be checking your internal drives on your Mac.

Cheap Tip for Matching Cameras

Pro Video Coaltion: "Perfect Color Balance for Less than $7"

This sounds like a good tip for shooting, QP Card. Cheap cards with black, grey, and white swatches. Shoot these, and the in FCP use the 3-way Color Corrector to quickly color balance.

Seems like it would be particularly good for matching cameras. Under the light that you will shoot in, have all cameras record a couple of seconds of this. Then the cameras should match very well (assuming the cameras are the same models using the same settings.)

Link TV's Next Camera

"Review: Sony HVR-Z7 & HVR-S270 1/3” 3-CMOS HDV camcorders" by Adam Wilt

I don't make many predictions on my blogs, but if I had to guess I think the Sony HVR-Z7 will be Link TV's next camera. Why you ask? First, it's Sony, and folks at Link in SF seem to like Sony. Second the price is right for us--well below the $10,000 mark, now about $5700 street price. Second it's a significant improvement on the Z1 camera that we have now. The Z1 has been out for over 3 years and Sony has finally released a true successor to the Z1. It's supposed to be faster than the Z1. It's all supposed to have a good LCD and viewfinder (areas where the Z1 is seriously lacking)

I'm basing this on Adam Wilt's excellent review of the Z7 and its bigger sibling the S270. It seems like there are some other good cameras out there, namely the Sony EX1, which records only onto flash memory. But for Link the lack of tape recording is sort of a deal breaker. At least as a post guy I don't want to have to deal with the headache of worrying about all of that media on hard drives with no other backup. Plus the EX1' s SxS Pro recording cards are still pretty pricey. For big shoots, that leaves options like a hard drive recorder, lugging around a laptop to shoots, or renting more storage. So much easier to pack a bunch of cheap tapes for a shoot.

If you want tapeless storage, the Z7 can even record to Compact Flash using the included HVR-MRC1 unit, which attaches at the back of the camera. That's a nice feature if you want the quick turnaround of material, which is a big benefit with tapeless workflows. Compact Flash is much cheaper than Panasonic's P2 and Sony's SxS Pro too.

The EX1 has 1/2" chips--the only sub-$10K HD camera with that. And it's supposed to have the sharpest picture in this price range. Too bad they couldn't match 1/2" chips along with the HDV format. The S270, which is reviewed in the same article, has one big feature that I'd like to see on the Z7--it can take large cassettes. That means 4.5 hours of HDV on a tape. But that camera is over the 10K point. But all things considered, the Z7 looks like a good camera, and from what Adam Wilt says, the champ of the sub-$10K HDV cameras.

Here's Adam's summary of the pros and cons of both the Z7 and the S270:

Pros

• Interchangeable lenses with standard 1/3” mounts.
• ISO 400 sensitivity.
• 800+ TVl/ph resolution with smooth, natural detail.
• DV, DVCAM, and 1080-line HDV recording.
• Interlaced and true progressive modes.
• Killer EVF and very good LCD; good peaking control.
• Best-in-the-business viewfinder data displays.
• Unique in-viewfinder tilt indicator.
• Z7: well balanced and easy to handhold.
• S270: no-nonsense, full-sized shoulder-mount camcorder; 4 channels of audio; 4.5 hour record times.
• Sensible ergonomics on both cameras: controls are where they should be.
• Sony Steadyshot.
• HVR-MRC1 CF card recorder included.
• Comprehensive Picture Profile tweaks, most with 15 steps of adjustment.
• Very good shotgun mike included.

Cons

• Stock lenses have only average chromatic aberration performance.
• Resolution drops with increased gain.
• Smooth Slow Motion clips have low resolution, many compression artifacts.
• Lens iris ring isn’t labeled or calibrated.
• Fastest power zoom isn’t very fast.
• MRC1: buttons lack a “hold” switch and are subject to inadvertent activation.
• MRC1: no single-frame mode in interval recording.

Good Info on Mac Backup Software

"The Evolving World of Backup"
A few years back I bought my first online book "Taking Control of Mac OS X Backups." I basically just copied my plans for backing up at Link TV from this book. A good $10 purchase.

A new version isn't out yet, but the guy who wrote the book has posted some thoughts about trends in the Mac backup realm. I would have thought that Time Machine would have thinned out the available software (you can't beat free.) But apparently, backup software is proliferating and there are lots of new features coming out.

For example he mentions some workable online backup options, namely involving Amazon's S3. Sounds interesting.

Backup is still very confusing, and it takes a real strategy to handle it thoroughly and efficiently. Until the next version of "Taking Control of Mac OS X Backups" comes out, this article has some of the best backup info that I've seen.

Final Cut Server--Extra Credit

I did a big post on Final Cut Server last month. If you have not read it, please do. It covers what FC Server is and also lays out how we could use it at Link. This article is extra credit for folks who are really interested in the software.

I went to a presentation on Final Cut Server. It was hosted by Advanced Systems Group. They had a guy from Apple there to talk about the software. Then another guy gave a spiel about how you really want an expert to set up and customize FC Server. They gave some examples where you'll want an expert--setting up a web interface to videos, interacting with automation/playout servers.

One thing I realized at the presentation is that our metadata situation with our Final Cut projects is poor to useless. I know I rarely label clips with helpful info. I try to name projects accurately with the title of a project, but sometimes I don't get it right or the project name changes. Even tape numbers are not always entered or done so accurately. What's the point of having a giant database if you can't search with confidence that you'll actually find what you are looking for? Not to mention an ideal functionality like having files indexed with useful metadata so you could do keyword searches, say "insurgent attacks" and get some dramatic footage from Mosaic.

At our office editors usually haven't collaborated. I usually took an attitude of "if I can find it/figure it out, that's all that matters." But that kind of attitude is the opposite of what's needed for asset management. Extra work needs to go into getting good metadata with your media. Since we don't have the option of hiring a librarian to organize things, that means more work for the editors probably who have to have bought into the process. If they haven't then things will slack off and the metadata won't get entered.

While Final Cut Server does everything that I wrote about in my last post on it, the Apple guy and the ASG folks were really pushing that you have to have an expert to set it up. I think I could get it to do everything that I discussed in my last post with the caveat about searching through poor metadata.

We've talked about hosting media from Mosaic on the web. Again, FC Server won't do this on its own. But it seems like it would be a good spot to organize that media. Then with automation scripting in FC Server, you could hand off the media to a website that handles the front-end, movie hosting, etc. FC Server would be where staff would import media and attach metadata to make it useful for users. FC Server could automatically hand it off to a system to handle the web part with scripting done by somebody knowledgeable.

Below are the notes that I took at the session:

Once a project is imported into FC Server you need to check in and check out. If you keep a copy locally and work with it again after import, then FC Server will think it's a new file when you try to put it back into FC Server. So basically it adds an extra step to opening a project--you have to check it out of FC Server first. Then you have to check it back in to get it to FC Server to update the media for it. Looks like more work for the editor, who has to have bought into the process--otherwise, he or she will just keep everything locally.

Showed a cool video about Radical Media
Translation done in China and FC Server handled ftp for cutting in New York. Complex workflow with steps and notification automated. Required scripting to make FC Server work with ftp server. Process also described in this white paper called "Final Cut Server in Depth" (PDF download.) Translation was added as subtitles using the title tool in Final Cut Pro. BTW, that's extra work for the translator. For Latin Pulse we do subtitles and it takes a lot of time. Translation is done first by someone with good Spanish and English, then spotting and creation of titles is done afterwards by someone who doesn't need language skills that are that strong. (Another step is me reviewing all of the subtitles, suggesting rewrites, adjusting the layout of the titles, and editing if the translation is too long to get read in real time.)

Check out Final Cut Pro projects from Server
Options to handle media when you check out a project
-Edit in place (doesn't do anything really)
-Edit proxies (good for taking a project home for the weekend or on the road)
-Disconnected use (makes a copy of the project and its media, like media manager)
Can't use project until it is checked back in. That is folks can't work on the same FCP project at the same time.

Media manager only recommended if you are creating a whole new version of a project. Again you have to play by FC Server's rule if you want it to track your stuff well.

Demo'd a web interface to log and annotate clips. But this was only a demo version and is not part of the softare. This was a "what you could do" if you are web developer or could afford to hire one. Hmm, well I'm not and we can't for what I do.

FC Server Strategy Meeting--topics for discussion
-Storage plan (for proxy files)
-Type of proxies
-Workflow strategy (what do you do with your media, where does it go, how does it get there, who does what with the media, aka Who, What, Where, Why, When, and How)
-Users
-Advanced automation
-email notifications
-Compression & distribution
-Web review (again not part of the product)
-"Customer" access to FCS

Automated backup can be done--setup rules for when to backup
For example: if file hasn't been touched in a certain amount of time, move to backup storage

Don't have to do an initial scan that sucks in all of your media, it may be better to add project by project. That way, you can be more thorough with metadata.

Annotate is where you can tag in and out markers and comments on clips. Apple guy said that this is supposed to be for transfer of this info back to FCP, but he didn't know how to do it/if it could be done now. Originally, there was going to be similar functionality to make simple edited sequences--I think those would have been transfered back through XML files. But Apple guy said no editing functionality but he "hoped" that they would add that feature because they touted it last year. Annotate is where producers could check out clips for editing and mark ins and outs for editors. It would be great if that could get into FCP. It would still be great for the producers to mark ins and outs on media directly on the clips as opposed to making notes on paper based on time code from a Beta or DV or timer from DVD. But without sending that info back to FCP, editor has to manually transfer in and out points.

Does it work with stills? Sure. FC Server is based on the Artbox software, which was originally written for still images. Also useful for getting producers to sign off on graphics. No need to drag Wendy into the editing room for her to look at something, which (I hope) she will just say OK to anyway. Yeah, for real collaboration you have to be in the same room but for quick and dirty this would be really nice to speed things up.

Suggestions from presenters that FC Serve can read After Effects files to get the links to the media that the project uses. That would be cool.