It’s Not The Camera…

Speedskater and part-time videographer Julia Smith writes, regarding the image you see here:

“This setup with cameraman yields this kind of work:

US Champs 2009 Short Track Men 500m A Final (normal version)
US Champs 2009 Short Track Men 500m A Final (HD version)

I keep telling Tony he has camera chops.”

No kidding.

Play Ping-Pong for Faster File Flipping

Just a quick note: If you’re moving heavy data around, disk seeks can be a huge drain on performance. I was flipping Red One clips from .R3Ds into REDCODE-native .MOVs using FCP’s Log and Transfer function today. This operation is basically a file copy, with a bit of re-wrapping in the middle; it’s I/O-limited, not CPU- or GPU-limited.

• With the sources and destinations on the same SATA drive, I was seeing clips flip at the rate of about 17-19 Mbytes/sec.

• When I sent the flipped clips to a second SATA drive (of the same make, model, and degree of fullness), the flip rate went up to 33-38 Mbytes/sec, about twice as fast.

In the same-disk case, the heads had to seek back and forth between the .R3D being read and the .mov being written; in the two-disk case the source disk could simply move sequentially through the files being read while the destination disk wrote files one after the other. Not only was it faster, it was quieter—both disks emanated a purposeful hum and the occasional chuckle, rather than the frantic chattering of frenetic seeking.

So, if you’re flipping lots of clips, or doing other transformations that get bogged down by I/O, having sources and destinations on separate physical drives (not just two partitions on one drive!) can save you a lot of time.

Also, for you FCP fans: I have an article on FXScript over on the Apple Channel, part of my Wilt-sells-out series. Enjoy. (If you don’t use FCP, don’t bother; it won’t do you a lick of good.)

Mark Schubin on “The Fandom of the Opera”

Mark Schubin discussed the intersection of TV technology and opera, and live broadcasting of the NYC Metropolitan Opera (Mark’s Emmy-winning day job), following the 2009 HPA Tech Retreat. By popular acclaim, he has posted his HPA presentation in PDF form (alternate link: http://data.memberclicks.com/site/hopa/2009_TR_Pres_Schubin_MetOpera.pdf), and a link to a SMPTE Toronto Section webcast of his very similar presentation last December.

The webcast is a WMV-format linked slideshow and video stream; it works fine in Windows. On Mac it doesn’t work at all in Safari 4 beta (at least on my PPC Mac; YMMV), while in Firefox the video opens up in a QuickTime Window (assuming you have the Flip4Mac WMV plugins), unlinked from the slideshow; best to download the HPA preso PDF and flip through it while Mark talks, or manually advance the slides on the website.

The webcast is an unedited meeting recording; Mark’s talk starts at the 21-minute mark. It’s worth the wait; Mark is an entertaining speaker, and the presentation is amusing, informative, and at times terrifying: you’ll never feel justified complaining about technical hurdles or short turnarounds on your live broadcasts ever again, after seeing what Mark & Co. go through on a weekly basis.