NAB 2009 - Monday Madness

I spent Monday at NAB in the South Hall, with a brief excursion into North Hall. Here’s a little of what I saw and heard…

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.)

Events: DCS & MFM discuss CineAlta; FCPUG SuperMeet; Broadcast Video Expo

Get out, meet people, see cool things, and learn stuff. December: Learn about CineAlta cameras and different recording gammas in Cupertino. January: party with the FCP faithful at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. February: the UK’s own miniature version of IBC takes place at Earl’s Court in London. Be there, or may your pixels be ever non-square.

Green/Magenta?

Art Adams and I have observed here on PVC that the RED ONE seems unusually sensitive to green and magenta colors. The topic keeps coming up on the cinematographer’s mailing list, too, and on reduser.net. I decided to compare the R1 to several other cameras under a variety of lighting conditions. I got more than I bargained for.

Making “One Man, One Vote”

Ten years ago a fellow named Marshall Spight posted a challenge on DV-L called “Throwing Down the DV Gauntlet”, in which he said, “everyone talks about shooting serious dramatic films with DV, but does anyone actually do it?” I responded, and we wound up making a 20-minute short called “The Beautiful Thing” using Sony DCR-VX1000s, the first 1/3” 3-CCD DV camcorders. It came out so well (it was for a time the top-rated dramatic film on iFilm.com, an early and long-defunct predecessor to YouTube) that we set about making a short political drama/comedy (?), “One Man, One Vote”. This one gave us a few more challenges.

moby gratis- film music

LA-based FCP & Avid editor and bungee jumper Shane Ross posted this tidbit on his Little Frog in High Def blog: moby has released nearly 80 tracks for free use in non-profit / noncommercial films and videos, and he’ll license them for use in for-profit works, too.

If you’re a moby fan (as I am), it’s worth signing up just to listen. The clips average about two minutes running time, and range from quiet and contemplative piano pieces to lounge to spaghetti-western themes with a mobyesque twist to driving electronica (and probably more; I’ve been sitting here the last fifteen minutes listening, and I’ve only auditioned ten tracks or so). Some tracks have variants, like differing length cuts, or versions without drums. It’s all genuine moby; and if moby’s good enough for the likes of Miami Vice, Memento, Minority Report, three of the Bourne films (so far), Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and The Sopranoes, he’s good enough for you (but then, I may be biased, grin)!

Thanks for the music, moby! Thanks for the heads-up, Shane!

Aperture 2.1.1 Won’t Preview Raw Photos

I use Apple’s Aperture to import, organize, and do simple processing on digital pix. I just updated to 2.1.1, and now the image import window won’t show raw images—only dashed rectangles (JPEGS still show up properly). The raw images’ metadata is shown correctly, except for the consistently goofball pixel size of 128x128. If I select raw pix blindly and import them, they show up properly once imported, but importing them blindly ain’t fun.

Aperture 2.1 didn’t have this bug; my Nikon D200 and D300 images showed up fine in the image import window. And I’m not the only one with the problem; Apple’s discussion lists are filled with similarly unhappy upgraders, mostly those using Nikons, but I saw Ricohs mentioned as well.

I can confirm that the bug afflicts Aperture 2.1.1 on both 10.4.11 and 10.5.4.

Solutions? I haven’t seen any evidence of a solution, but several workarounds have been suggested:

• stick with 2.1,
• roll back to 2.1 using Time Machine,
• use Image Capture (or Finder drag ‘n’ drop) to read in photos,
• shoot JPEGs.

Fortunately for me, I usually shoot JPEGs, otherwise I’d be hosed! Read my tale of woe, and maybe you won’t get hosed the same way.

AJA Io HD drivers updated

AJA has released version 6.0 drivers for the Io HD, AJA’s external video I/O box and format converter connected using FireWire800.

Version 6.0 adds a bunch of new features:

• Support for true progressive (in addition to PsF) 1080p capture and playback.
• Support for 720p/23.98 and 525i/23.98.
• Stand-alone mode for format conversion with no Mac attached.
• “Plug and Play” on FireWire without needing to reboot the computer.
• Simultaneous component and composite outputs.
• Audio delay controls for better A/V sync.
• Io HD’s LCD can be set to show timecode instead of secondary format.
• Better active output format listings in Io-using applications.

It also fixes a long-standing bug with frame-level metadata in ProRes422 captures: Io HD-captured ProRes now shows up as 10-bit video in Shake (and other apps that look at frame-level metadata), whereas before Shake saw the video as only being 8-bit. (The Io HD’s ProRes has always been 10-bit, but it didn’t look that way to Shake without an intermediate render in FCP.) 

I had discovered the 8/10-bit issue back before NAB, and bothered the daylights out of AJA’s long-suffering support folks about it (with a tip of the hat to the unfailingly responsive and polite Rudy Van Kol), so the first thing I did when I saw the V6 driver was download it and test it. I can’t yet vouch for everything on the feature list, but I was able to install the software and upgrade the Io HD’s firmware just now without any problems, and I have verified the 10-bit metadata fix in Shake.

Huzzah, therefore, for AJA and version 6.0 Io HD drivers!