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