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.