Fixing QuickTime 7.4

"Dealing with Quicktime 7.4"

I mentioned briefly last week not to install QuickTime 7.4. Its most disastrous after effect is to break After Effects--you can't render for more than 10 minutes. Check out the link above for info on installing an earlier version of QuickTime if you are stuck with QuickTime 7.4.

QuickTime 7.4: Downgrade working for many users; remove components for playback issues
MacFixIt also mentions removing third-party QuickTime components. This solved a problem for me recently--an old Divx component was screwing up iMovie '08.

See Timecode in QuickTime

"QuickTime Timecode Display"

A good tip over at kenstone.net about how to view timecode in the QuickTime Player. Frankly, why did it take Apple so long to implement a feature like this? Quicktime has supported timecode since at least 1999, and until QuickTime 7.1.4, we've only been able to see the timecode displayed in Final Cut Pro. Well, now you can see it in the QuickTime Player (that is if you have QuickTime Pro.) Unfortunately, probably 98% of people who have have QuickTime Pro got it free with Final Cut Pro--otherwise it costs $30. But $30 is probably worth if you have to log footage with timecode and you can't get on a system with FCP. Thanks to Stephen Olsson for the tip.

QuickTime Pro has a number of other features, like firewire capture, that are listed here.

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"

Sonnet Firewire: An Update

A few months back, I gave a plug for Sonnet's Tempo Express 800 PCI-E card that adds Firewire 800 ports. Well, I finally got a chance to try it out and found out it was a mixed bag. I found that it performed well when there was only one G-Raid2 attached. But when I added a few drives to the card, write performance for my G-Raid2 dropped from around 45 MB/sec to 22 MB/sec. This was only marginally better than the 19 MB/sec I got from an Aaxeon Firewire 800 PCI-E card. Read performance doesn't seem to be effected by how many devices are on the card, based on my tests. Luckily as I'm not capturing any high data-rate formats or codecs, 20 MB/sec is fast enough for what I do. But it does slow me down for file transfers when firewire 800 can't even keep up with my Gigabit ethernet.

Apple Updates the Mac Pro

Apple has refreshed the Mac Pro--the first full turnover of the Mac Pro since it was first announced in August of 2006. The line has switched from being dominated by Quad-core Xeon's to being dominated by Octo-core Xeon's. There was an uptick in price for the recommended system from $2500 to $2800 for an 8-core 2.8 GHz Xeon Mac Pro.

There are some other improvements in the system architecture and early results show good improvements in system performance. While adding 4 more cores doesn't double the speed, these systems look signficantly faster than older Mac Pro's, especiallly in encoding video. Check out this benchmark test from MacWorld for more info:
"From the Lab: Internal changes bolster latest Mac Pro"
I was surprised at what low marks they gave the internal hard drive that ships with the new Mac. I've always assumed that those had decent performance, but MacWorld found a significant speed bump on their multi-app test by putting a hard drive from an older Mac Pro into the current 8-core 2.8 GHz Xeon. For some good specs on hard drive performance, check out Bare Feats. Apple also has some performance comparisons with other Mac towers here, including rendering & encoding with FCP and After Effects.

There had been rumors that Apple was ready to add a Blu-ray drive for playing back high-def movies to the Mac Pro's. For PC's, adding an HD DVD or Blu-ray drive, or both, is now a common option. Nothing from Apple about Blu-ray for these new computers, but an announcement could come at the MacWorld Conference. I'm anxious to see Apple add Blu-ray disc authoring to DVD Studio Pro, as well as decent support for the HD DVD standard. Adobe's Encore already does this. Commentator Bob Cringely suggests that Jobs will ignore high-def discs because he sees them as a threat to iTunes ruling the media world in his latest column (he also thinks Apple will buy Adobe, which seems a bit far-fetched to me.)

Capture HDV as ProRes 422

"Really? Capture HDV to ProRes in FCP? Over FireWire?! Yes!"
This is a short tutorial over at the Creative Cow about converting HDV to ProRes 422 during capture. Will give you an idea about how to do this and how it works.

Note that in the comments section, the author advises against reimporting the clips from the finder in order to rename them (something that is recommended in the article itself). The reason he changed his mind is that FCP 6 lets you rename clips and then changes the name of the media files to match--pretty cool.

More notes on this process here at Little Frog in High Def:
CAPTURING HDV AS PRORES...VIA FIREWIRE

Utility Offers Import of AVCHD on G5's, G4's

I read about a nifty looking utility in a Final Cut Express review at macworld.com. Voltaic is the missing link for PowerPC users who want to cut AVCHD footage.

The need for this utility arises from Apple's refusal to support AVCHD on PowerPC Macs--only newer Intel Mac's can convert AVCHD footage to something that you can edit. This applies to both iMovie '08, Final Cut Express, and Final Cut Pro. Voltaic lets PowerPC users convert their AVCHD footage to AIC (Apple Intermediate Codec.) AIC is supposed to be similar to ProRes 422 with the main difference being that AIC is 8-bit and ProRes 422 is 10-bit. Also, Voltaic offers a workflow for cutting AVCHD footage recorded onto DVD's, which Apple isn't supporting now.

So what's AVCHD? If you don't know, you can check out these older posts:
AVCHD Support in FCP
AVC: More Format Wackiness
AVCHD Is a Pro Format

While we're on the topic of AVCHD, Canon has announced a couple of new camcorders, which record in AVCHD using flash memory, as well as a replacement for the popular HV20. Here's the news on that:
"Canon Debuts First High Definition Solid State Camcorders: HF10 and HF100"
"Move Over HV20, Here Comes the Canon HV30"
These flash memory camcorders are really small, and I have hopes that Canon's new camcorders will produced some good looking high-def video. I got to play around with Sony's AVCHD flash memory camcorder the HDR-CX7 recently--could be a decent B-Cam and its size makes it inconspicuous and good for travel.

Camcorderinfo.com's annual list of the best consumer cameras CamInfo Selects 2007 saw Canon take home the top honors. The HV20 was the best camcorder, and the HG10, which records AVCHD to a hard drive, was also honored. Apparently Canon's cameras do a better job of encoding video into AVCHD than either Sony's or Panasonic's camera. This isn't good news for Panasonic because unlike Sony and Canon, Panasonic is trying to use AVCHD in cameras marketed to Pros.

Upscaling Software Comparison

"Integrating DV Source Footage into HDV Projects, Part 2" by Jan Ozer

Need to incorporate some standard-def footage into a high-def project? Then check out this article. It compares results of upscaling standard def footage to HD with 5 different packages, including FCP. The long and short of it is that it looks like spending $99 on Red Giant Software's Instant HD provides some nice improvements over the built-in scaling of FCP and Premiere Pro.

The article has some very handy comparison shots of the results from different packages. Click on the image with this post to see a larger view of a comparison of Instant HD and FCP. The image shows at the top, Instant HD, and below it, FCP. The handy red circles gives you points of comparison. Instant HD doesn't help with every shot though, and it doesn't create miracles, i.e., make your SD look as sharp as if it was actually shot in HD.

Not included in the comparison is a workflow mentioned by the author in another article that I posted about earlier--using Compressor. I think a good deinterlace from Compressor would have helped with some of the jaggies that showed up in all of the FCP examples of up-rezing. On the other hand, Compressor's good deinterlacing is very slow and the workflow is more complicated than just popping on a filter, like Instant HD, right in Final Cut.

The clear winner in the comparison, Algolith by AlgoSuite, is no longer available. The company has decided to discontinue the software to focus on dedicated hardware that does real-time processing. Not tested in this article is hardware-based upscaling like the AJA Kona 3 does or the Terranex.

iPod as Control Interface

This is a cool demonstration of beta software that uses the touchscreen of an iPhone or iPod touch to control ProTools. Who knows, maybe someday you'll be mixing your audio on your phone or audio player? More info over at FreshDV

Scaling Up your Video

Integrating DV Source Footage into HDV Projects, Part 1 By Jan Ozer

This is a good article on the basic issues on scaling up footage for high-definition video. Goes over frame resolution, pixel aspect ratio, and interlace. One good tidbit mentions an advantage to using Compressor with interlaced footage:

On the other hand, when converting from interlaced DV to progressive HD, deinterlacing is a huge component of the quality equation, which could and perhaps should change your workflow, particularly for Final Cut Pro editors. That’s because Final Cut Pro deploys different deinterlacing algorithms than Compressor, which uses the glacial but ultra-high quality Optical Flow algorithm from Shake. If converting from interlaced source to progressive, you may produce noticeably better quality by scaling and particularly deinterlacing in Compressor. This means creating a separate sequence for your SD footage, rendering it out through Compressor, then re-importing the file back into Final Cut Pro. On the other hand, I found scaling quality relatively close between Final Cut Pro and Compressor, so if you don’t need to de-interlace, scaling in Final Cut Pro should work just fine.

This article says that FCP and Compressor do an equivalent job of scaling-up video. But early this year I wrote about a tip for getting better-quality uprez with Photoshop. A tricky workflow, but if quality really matters then it's doable.
[via FreshDV]

Tutorial on Setting up Drives for Editing

Formatting & Partitioning a Hard Drive in OS X - Tiger and Leopard
By Ken Stone

A short tutorial from kenstone.net that covers the basics on setting up a hard drive for editing. Goes over formatting and partitioning. I sometimes will partition a hard drive. A hard drive's performance drops as the drive fills up, so I will often split up a disc in a faster partition and a slower partition. (One reason I like G-Raid's is that you can get good performance out of the drive even when it is full.)

Article also covers good things to know about permissions and journaling.

[via StudioDaily blog]

Breaking Stereotypes about Muslims

The One Nation, Many Voices film contest is looking for films that break stereotypes about Muslim Americans. They are offering $50,000 in prizes, including a $20,0000 grand prize. Deadline for entries is 12/31/07. So hurry up and make that film.

Adam Wilt on Sony's EX-1

"EX-1 Experiments: Shooting with Sony's XDCAM EX System"
By Adam Wilt

Adam Wilt takes a look at an engineering sample of Sony's totally-tapeless camera the PMW-EX1. Sounds like the video is very good, but he says it's really hard to hand hold the camera. Here's his summary:

Overall, the EX1 is a very promising camera: pin-sharp, sensitive imagers with what looks to be considerable latitude, variable frame rates, the benefits of solid-state recording, HD-SDI and lots of tweakability. It's painful to handhold, and the analog I/O cabling is sub-optimal, but those problems have to be set against what may yet be turn out to be the finest images in the sub-$10k field. I'll be very interested to put a production model EX1 through a rigorous evaluation.

[via hdforindies.com]

MacWorld Looks at 20" LCD Monitors

I remember when a 20" monitor was a big deal, and 2 years ago they cost around $500. Well, seems like Moore's Law is working its way into LCD displays, and prices are dropping. But there are so many models and manufacturers, it's often hard to find that sweet spot between quality and value.

MacWorld has just done a series of reviews on six 20" widescreen LCD monitors. These aren't the uber-expensive monitors for graphic professionals, and the review doesn't even include what has been my monior-mainstay: the Dell UltraSharp line. So I guess these would be considered value monitors geared more towards the consumer. Personally, I'm more worried about having a quality monitor for my video and less for my computer work-space. As long, as the color is decent, and the graphics crisp, I'm usually fine with my computer display.

With that philosophy in mind, it looks like they identify a couple of good monitors with words like "affordable", "inexpensive", and "effective" featured prominently in the reviews. The NEC MultiSync LCD205WXM monitor scored highest with a rating of 4 out of 5. The Dell E207WFP LCD monitor (not an UltraSharp) and the Samsung SyncMaster 206BW LCD monitor both got a rating of 3.5 out of 5. Also below I've thrown in some links to a HP 24" monitor (rating:4) and a ViewSonic 22" monitor (rating:3) that MacWorld has reviewed in the last 6 months.

NEC MultiSync LCD205WXM monitor 4 mice

Dell E207WFP LCD monitor 3.5 mice

Samsung SyncMaster 206BW LCD monitor 3.5 mice

BenQ FP202W V3 monitor 3 mice

Envision G2016wa LCD monitor 3 mice

HP w2007 monitor 3 mice

ViewSonic VA2026w LCD monitor 3 mice

HP LP2465 flat panel monitor4 mice
Large wide-screen LCD display offers good value

ViewSonic VX2245wm ViewDock monitor 3 mice

NEC Multisync LCD225WXM
Mac Life looks at the 22" NEC (the bigger brother to the 20" NEC that MacWorld likes) and gave it a 3 out of 5 rating. Good for office use, but not much beyond that. Complains about banding in gradients--ew, that's not good. Makes you wonder if the 22" performs worse than the 20" or if Mac Life has higher standards than MacWorld.

Firewire 800 on Mac Towers

"REVIEW: Sonnet Technologies Tango Express 800 PCIe Card"

An interesting new product review here with lots of good tidbits about a number of different factors that have been affecting firewire on the Macs with PCI Express slots. Bare Feats says that this Sonnet card brings a new level of performance to its product class after some disappointing products from some other manufacturers (I think I have one of those disappointing products.)