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.)

My 2¢ on the Consumer Experience--HDTV, Apple TV, iPhone

Executive Summary of My 2¢: HDTV is great, but there are too many gatekeepers and technology hurdles--the hottest distribution platform in the future could be mobile video. (This post ended up being much longer than I thought it would be.)

HDTV
So I bought a high-def TV on Friday. I didn't want a big set that would dominate my studio apartment or cover up windows. So I decided on a 32" set, which is still larger than the 27" set that it is replacing. But once I got to the store and stood back about 8 feet, I was having a hard time distinguishing the advantage of high-def. They have these videos at Best Buy that do a split screen of high-def and a simulated standard-def. Well at 32" and 8 feet, the advantages weren't that great. (I wrote recently about some equations for how screen size and viewing distance effect perceived resolution.) I went with a $900 Sony KDL-32s3000 because it was the set that I could perceive the most difference in high-def that was under a 1K. I found that basic 32" sets weren't as sharp as the more pricey Sony. I wanted to feel like I wasn't just getting a slightly larger, brighter set.

I've watch a decent amount of video so far, and I'm happy with the set. I watched a couple of DVD's and they looked good. The DVD's look much larger because 1/4 of the screen isn't lost to letterboxing as was the case with my old 4:3 tube TV. Road to Perdition was on ABC last night, and it was nice to see a movie in HD. Although sitting through commercials to watch a movie is a hassle, and I don't plan on watching movies this way. PBS had a travel show on Italy, and I was totally absorbed by the Italian coastline in HD.

Old analog TV looks like crap on an HDTV. I used to record a fair amount of TV on a DVD recorder that only had an analog over-the-air tuner. Well when I hooked this recorder up to the HDTV and tried to watch some TV that I recorded, I decided I couldn't watch TV like that. The artifacts from analog TV, like ghosting of the image and noise, look just awful on a high-def display. So I replaced my old DVD recorder with a newer model with digital TV antenna. So far, the clean recordings that I get from the new DVD recorder, a Panasonic DMR-EZ27 look good even though they are standard-def recordings only. The difference in recording a digital standard-def signal is significantly better than an analog TV signal.

So I think I have dissed digital OTA (over the air) TV before. I had an experience a few years ago where I bought a digital tuner and found that I could not get channels reliably. Well my experience this time around has been very good. The digital reception is much better now than my analog reception was. Even my old rabbit-ears antenna works fine.

Apple TV
I have been thinking about getting an Apple TV after plugging it so much. But when it came down to it, I didn't think it was yet worth the $225 price. While it would be great to rent HD movies, there's not that much selection yet. There are almost 100 movies in HD, but it looks like Apple is having a harder time getting movies than they expected. They had promised 1,000 standard-def rental by the end of February. Instead, they had only around 350. It makes me worried that the studios are going to dick around with Apple because they don't want to see Apple TV succeed like the iPod did and become a dominant media platform. Not good news for the Apple TV when they can't even meet their targets for content.

I did go check out the Apple TV at the Apple Store. I thought the HD movie clips looked good although everyone says that Blu-ray leaves it in the dust on a large set. The podcast interface was cool. With the 2.0 software on Apple TV, you don't need to use your computer to download podcasts before watching. You can browse and search podcasts right on your TV, and if their server is fast enough, start watching them immediately. I think it's a pretty good model for media distribution. Unfortunately, until these media extender boxes take off, then there's just not that many boxes out there that will play video podcasts on the TV.

I was able to easily search for our show Mosaic and play it on the Apple TV. Unfortunately, 320x240 looks just awful on an HDTV. Apple has been recommending video podcasts be 640x480 or 640x360 in order to look good on an HDTV. That's about 4 times as many pixels, so much more data to serve/download. But there's something to the idea that you have 1,000's of different podcasts that you can access instantly on your TV set and it is not controlled by gatekeepers like Comcast or AT&T. (Check out this blog post "7 Ways Apple TV Changes The Game And What Podcasters Need To Know And Do About It" for some interesting thoughts on Apple TV and podcasting.)

So when it came down to shelling out $225 for the chance to rent HD movies with Apple TV, it wasn't worth it, even for an Apple fan boy like me. I'm also not ready to spend $400 for a Blu-ray player/PlayStation 3 to watch Blu-ray movies. For the time, I think DVD's look good enough on my set. If the selection takes off on the Apple TV, I'll reconsider.

iPhone
So after buying an HDTV set, I've decided that the real action is on the small-screen. This week was a big week for the iPhone with the announcement of a software developer kit. That means all kinds of third-party applications are going to start appearing for the iPhone. Apple showed off an instant messaging app for AOL. I was skeptical that they would allow IM because that seems like competition for the SMS messaging that AT&T still charges for. I think Apple is really going to open up phones as a great mobile computing platform.

This past week, BBC came out with an iPlayer site that has BBC videos in h.264 Quicktime for the iPhone. Recently it's come out that there's no real chance for Flash on the iPhone--Apple says that the iPhone doesn't have enough computing power to run Flash. Since most sites are encoding videos in Flash, that leaves a pretty big hole for streaming video to the iPhone. BBC decided to start encoding h.264 video just for the iPhone. (YouTube has been doing some h.264 encoding too since the iPhone launch.) BBC's iPlayer is basically a website with a simplified interface that works well on the iPhone's small screen. It only works over WiFi now--the Edge data network is too slow to stream video, but maybe when the iPhone gets on 3G networks streaming video will be better. Oh, no BBC for you--it only works in the United Kingdom. But I think it's interesting to think about mobile distribution of video. Our Mosaic Intelligence Report and Global Pulse would be great for mobile video.

In short my thoughts at the moment are that HDTV is great, but there are too many gatekeepers and technology hurdles--the hottest distribution platform in the future will be mobile video. I think Apple is still playing a positive role for consumers in opening access to content on both the mobile end and on the TV. Maybe I'm too optimistic about mobile--the telco's also control the mobile network and I can't see them being excited about their mobile networks being filled with free videos.

Apple TV Take 2

"Take 2" is what Apple is calling the forthcoming updates to their Apple TV product. I consider this an acknowledgment that take 1 didn't cut it, and I think they have gone a long way towards overcoming the problems of Apple TV (and also have made it a more promising distribution format for Link TV while they were at it.)

There are 3 big updates to Apple TV: 1) Movie rentals (before you could only buy movies or load your own through a cumbersome encoding process) 2) HD movie rentals (finally real HD content for a device that was effectively designed only for HD displays) 3) you can add content without using a computer at all. As for one and two, these make the Apple TV a compelling product--movie rentals starting at $3 without leaving your home, or even the couch. Luckily for Apple, the consumer electronics corporations (including Microsoft) have basically wasted the last year with a battle between Blu-ray and HD DVD. It now seems Blu-ray is the winner, but meanwhile Apple has added HD movies to the Apple TV with support from all the movies studios. Currently, Universal and Paramount do not support Blu-ray and are HD DVD exclusive. On the other hand, movies are available on Apple TV 30 days after the discs are released (it's also not clear to me that every movie will be available on Apple TV.) Starting at $239 for a 40GB Apple TV, it is cheaper than any of the Blu-ray players.

In summary, I think Apple TV is now a compelling device for a significant amount of consumers. As I wrote when it first was announced last year in this post, Apple TV gets podcasts, like Mosaic, directly to the TV set. Now with the new update to Apple TV, podcasts can be browsed and watched from the sofa. In the first generation of Apple TV, podcasts had to be downloaded on a computer then synced to the Apple TV. Now we can search and browse through all of the podcasts on the iTunes Store directly on the Apple TV--then start playing a podcast immediately once you find something interesting. I think this will really help bring podcasts to the TV screen.

Visit this page for a simple demonstration on how you can browse and watch podcasts through the Apple TV.

"iTunes and Apple TV rentals and purchases: what you can (and can't) do"
One drawback with the Apple TV is that it's confusing about what kind of content you can watch where--the article gives you the lowdown on what's doable with the new rental and HD content on Apple TV

Apple TV Guided Tour Have no idea what I'm talking about? Watch this movie by Apple to understand what it does.

"The Big Picture: Apple's methodical moves show it takes time to change the world." Apple not only has to negotiate with the studios, face off competition from the consumer electronics companies and Microsoft, but could run into some trouble with the broadband providers and Google. Bob Cringely expresses concerns about Apple's approaches in this article.

P.S., I also think this means no Blu-ray support on Mac's for the foreseeable future, including Blu-ray authoring in DVD Studio Pro. That sucks.

P.P.S. Movie rentals are available in iTunes without Apple TV.

P.P.P.S. However, don't install the new QuickTime, which is required for rentals, on a system with After Effects. QuickTime 7.4 screws up AE rendering. "Thanks Again Apple"

iFlop

Just to prove I'm not a shill for Apple, here are a couple of their recent disappointments.

Back at NAB, Apple announced that Final Cut Server would be available by the summer of 2007. I gave it a positive plug at the time. Well summer came and went with nary another peep from Apple about Final Cut Server. Recently, Apple added to the FCS webpage a release date of "early 2008". I'm guessing we won't see it again until NAB 2008. Apple isn't known for vaporware, but this is a prime example.

"iFlop"
While I don't agree with everything in this article from Forbes, the Apple TV has had a disappointing run. While expecting it to become the iPod of the television might have been pushing it, even Steve Jobs went on to call the Apple TV a mere "hobby". Here is one of my old plugs for Apple TV where I hoped it would become a great platform the video podcasts like our Mosaic.

For me one of the big problems is that the product is basically designed only for high-def TV's, but Apple doesn't really have any high-def content. My guess is that this isn't mainly Apple's fault. I blame the entertainment companies who I think are afraid that Apple will corner the video market like they have cornered the music download market. Universal in particular has been playing hardball with Apple on its NBC TV Shows and and is trying to organize some other record labels for a competing music service. Another big feature missing on Apple TV is movie rentals. Steve Jobs has said that people want to "own" their music (I agree), so is that his view on movies or the entertainment companies'?

Just look at the HD-DVD and Blu-ray fiasco to see an example that the entertainment companies, not to mention the consumer electronics manufacturers, just don't get it. Most of the movies studios are only supporting either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, not both formats. So if you want to watch Universal or Paramont pictures, then buy a HD-DVD player, but if you want Sony, 20th Century Fox, or Disney movies, then get a Blu-ray player. Average consumers would never buy into this crazy scheme. Each company is trying to maximize their own company's advantage to the detriment of the consumer and thus the overall market for high-def movies. For music, it took an explosion of illegal downloads, to scare the record labels into all buying into Apple's music store. Here's one advocate for doing the same thing for video ("Apple TV Fails to Tap the Net's Limitless Library").

Not that Apple is blameless in the content world. Apple will not let other hardware manufacturers make products that will work with iTunes or play content with Apple's DRM for music or video. And Apple won't add support for content from other DRM schemes on their hardware. When it comes down to it, Apple is probably just as evil as Microsoft or the entertainment companies would be. But at least Apple's products are nearly all universally strong in interface, ease-of-use, quality, and reliability.

Hardware-Accelerated h.264 Encoding

Update: XLR8YourMac.com is now keeping on top of comparisons of rendering with different Mac's as well as some encoding issues. This is good. Shows that on Quad G5's that using the Turbo.264 is slower than the CPU's although Turbo.264 does free up the CPU to do other things.

Elgato is the maker of the EyeTV product that adds Tivo-esque capability to your Mac. They've just released the Turbo.264 which is a tiny hardware encoder. It plugs into a USB2 slot and handles encoding into h.264. If you've tried encoding video for your iPod or now the Apple TV, you know how slow encoding h.264 is. The Turbo.264 promsises a substantial speedup--they cite a test where a 2GHz MacBook took nearly an hour to encode a 10 min. DV movie but handled the same movie in under 12 minutes with a Turbo.264 plugged in. The slower the Mac, the more boost in performance you'll get from the Turbo.264. It should retail for $99.

Turbo264 comes with its own app to handle encoding with batch capability. Turbo.264 also works with any app that uses Quicktime for encoding, including FCP, iMovie and Quicktime Player. One missing feature is that the maximum resolution is 800x600. Apple TV support up to 1280x720--too bad the Turbo.264 doesn't do any high-def video.

Update: A short review cites a doubling on encoding with a dual-core 2GHz G5. That's a lot slower than the improvements that Elgato cites for the MacBook with the same clock-speed Intel Core 2 Duo.

Update: Reg Hardware has a review with their own render tests from a MacBook Pro. They note some more impressive improvements.

Update: Another review from iLounge notes problems with de-interlacing from HD movies and give some more rendering results.

TubeTV--Save and Convert Online Flash Movies

This looks like a handy app. It is is for downloading and converting videos from YouTube and Google Video. Has a built-in little browser where you search and navigate to the movies that you want. It will handle conversion to H.264 for your Apple TV or iPod. It says that Macs need the Perian Quicktime Component to watch FLV movies in QuickTime.

I've written about keepvid.com before here. It's a website that helps with downloading flash fiiles from a bunch of websites.

More AppleTV Stuff

Mike Curtis has a new blog AppleTV Hacker with loads of good insights and info.

AppleTV already being hacked.
Put in a bigger hard drive.
Add Xvid support (I assume this also means Divx).
Basically the AppleTV is running OSX so if you can get inside the box then you can install support for other video codecs.

BusinessWeek points out some problems with content and AppleTV in this article:
Apple's TV Blurry Future

I generally agree with BusinessWeek. If Apple wants this to be as successful as the iPod, they have to provide good video content that people are willing to pay for. With music you could easily rip CD's that you bought, and put your music on your iPod. But that isn't the case with movies. The movie studios don't want you ripping their DVD's to your hard drive and from there to your AppleTV, and they try to stop you from doing that. So I think Apple really has to work to get more movies on the iTunes store, eventually at HD quality, to make this a success. It seems that Apple did a great job with the design of the product, hardware, and interface, but the content is still a big question.

I played around with a demo unit in the Apple Store. It was hooked up to a Sony 32" LCD screen. The iTunes TV shows and movies did look soft. So far no HD content on the iTunes store and they call their movies "near DVD quality." Apple seems to limit their content to 640 pixels wide. For your iTunes movies that means the resolution of the source is only 25% of a 1280 by 720 resolution screen. So a pretty big scale up to fill the screen. I looked at some of their clips in the Apple Store and I found that I had to stand back over 15 ft. from the screen before I wasn't annoyed by the softness of the image and some of the compression artifacts. That's pretty normal living room conditions, but if your TV is bigger then you will be seeing more of the iTunes imperfections on your HD screen at the same distance.

The unit will play back 720p movies at 24fps and 960x540 at 30 fps. For encoding your own stuff and podcasts, you could use those resolutions. But for Apple, who is clearly marketing this at HDTV owners, you think they would make their own content more attractive, especially considering that those movies cost from $10-$15 a pop. It is not even meant to run on a 4x3 standard-def TV (like I have) where that iTunes Store content actually looks good. Obviously Apple has some obstacles to providing HD content--namely the movie studios and issue of big downloads on the internet.

This points out another issue, which is that standard-def rarely looks good on a high-def display. Especially normal TV, 4x3 and interlaced, it will always look crummy on a big, widescreen, and progressive display. Americans are clearly giving up on 4x3, interlaced TV's. So it will be interesting to see when broadcast TV decides to switch to widescreen and/or progressive broadcasts.

Apple TV Review: "It is classic Apple: simple and elegant."

"From PC to TV -- via Apple"

With the first units on their way to consumers, the reviews are starting to roll in. Walt Mossberg writes for the Wall Street Journal and says he's been up and running with Apple TV for 10 days. He sounds happy. No simple setup either--he has the Apple TV streaming video and audio from 3 Macs and 3 Windows over an 802.11 G network. Seems like a good review in terms of covering what Apple TV offers (and doesn't), how to use it & set it up in good layperson terms.

As I've written before, I'm very interested in the podcasting features of Apple TV. If Apple TV takes off, our show Mosaic (and any other orignal production) can be on a lot more TV's than just those folks with Dish TV or DirecTV. For more about my thoughts on Apple TV, check out these posts:
More on Apple TV and Video Podcasting
Apple TV

More on Apple TV & Video Podcasting

While iPhone has stolen all of the headlines (and probably justifably so), I think Apple TV does shine in liberating the video podcast from the computer and bringing it to the TV set. Apple's demo does a good job of approximating what the user interface is like. Click on the Podcast link down their webpage to see more or less what I saw with an actual unit at Macworld.

Granted podcasting is a distant cousin to the internet craze of the moment--YouTube. It would be a challenge to transfer all of the chaos of shared video from the computer to the TV, and I don't think Apple is going to try and do that. For the time being, I still have some hope for the medium of video podcasting to reach a broader audience, especially with consumer-friendly products like the Apple TV, not to mention the video iPod, and coming soon the iPhone.

Apple TV

Apple gave more details about their entry into the home entertainment market today. Fomerly, iTV, now Apple TV is basically a way to stream movies, TV shows, podcasts, music, and photos from a computer (Mac or PC) to your "widescreen" TV. For some reason, Apple isn't interested in people with TVs that are 4x3 aspect ratio, like myself. The Apple TV can either playback media streamed from a computer or it can play video stored on Apple TV's 40GB hard drive. You add video to the Apple TV's hard drive by syncing it with your Mac or PC using iTunes. The Apple TV supports 802.11b, g, and n wireless standards. I'm guessing g & n will stream video, but b won't, especially not high-def video. Yes, the Apple TV will support video with a resolution of 1280x720. Hopefully, they'll start selling some high-def movies soon on iTunes.

So for Link TV, this is a neat little device to watch our Mosaic podcast. It gets those QuickTime movies that are up on the internet, over to the TV. A cool way to watch Link TV if you don't have satellite TV. But for $299, that's a little pricey. For $399, an Xbox 360 gets you a gaming system with downloadable high-def movives that you can buy and rent. I hope Apple can make their video services more compelling, including high-def content and movie rentals soon. Apple TV should be available in February.

The new iPhone from Apple is really exciting. I won't go into all of the features here, but it is a widescreen video player as well. While it's not going to take over the cellphone market overnight, I could see in 3 years, there being as many iPhones out there as there are iPods now.