Creating Motion Graphics

(Note: Names have been concealed to protect the helpful from becoming inundated with support calls.)

This past Saturday, while setting up for our first presentation at Post|Production World at NAB, we were having trouble getting our MacBook Pro to recognize the projector. We put it asleep and woke it back up again, and got a kernel panic: that nasty darkened screen with the “must reboot” message. From that point on, no Adobe CS3 application would run on our computer - including the installer/uninstaller, which meant we couldn’t replace the apps we needed in order to do our demos. Oddly enough, Apple’s Safari wouldn’t run either. Repairing permissions, safe reboots, and creating new users didn’t help. Fortunately, we were able to copy our files off to another computer (with special thanks to Jeff Foster of Lynda.com for the timely loan of a very large memory dongle) so that the show could go on. But if you’ve had a similar catastrophic crash involving a Mac and Adobe CS3 applications, you might want to read on to see how at least this particular problem was resolved.

It’s been awfully quiet around here lately...too quiet. But you know why: It’s the week before NAB (the National Association of Broadcasters) Convention, the largest annual industry trade show for those of us in North America), and we’re all hunkered down either a) finishing projects before NAB, b) getting our presentations ready for NAB, c) making out our shopping lists for NAB, or d) all of the above.

The video industry has saddled us users with some truly ugly numbers to deal with (such as 720x480, 29.97, and so forth) when working with digital video. Making matters worse, these numbers are often misquoted or misunderstood.

Thankfully, there are a few web sites out there with some truly valuable, correct information on digital video standards. Here are the sites we refer to most often when we need to know the inside scoop:

We’re having the hardwood floors in the office refinished. They brought in a huge electric sander that didn’t even have a plug; they wired it straight into the circuit breaker panel. Needless to say, every time they turned it on, the lights dimmed.

This brings up the subject of battery backup power for your computer workstations, commonly known as a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). In short, you should have one on each computer, keeping it and your drives alive when the power blips. You can’t work all day off of them (unless you have a truly huge one), but they’ll keep you up long enough to hit “save” - rather than suffer through a data loss.

We used to have UPSs in the 450 to 650 VA (volt-amp) range. They were fine for our Mac G3s and G4s. Things weren’t so rosy when we started getting multi-processor G5s a few years back: One power blip, and everyone was dead. We’ve had to move up to supplies with at least a 950 VA rating. Higher ratings mean longer running times, plus more future-proofing for when you buy an even more powerful (and power-hungry) computer in the future.

These beasts are a lot less expensive than they used to be, especially if you buy refurbished models. We get ours from UPS For Less, where used units are dirt cheap - roughly $100 for a 1000 VA unit (normally $500+) is a common price. Replacement batteries (which you will need every few years) can be had from a number of places; just Google them.

Here’s a dark secret about most UPS devices: The power they output is not as “clean” as the outlet on the wall; they fake the sine wave of the alternating current. This isn’t a problem with computers, but can cause noise in sensitive audio devices. If this is an issue for you, look for supplies that say they have a “true” rather than “simulated” sine wave output.

While on the subject of external disk drives (see the previous post on LaCie power supply issues), problems with data corruption are also often caused by drive cables. There’s a few ways to cure them.

The most obvious problem is a bad cable. The free cables that come bundled with drives are often chosen because they’re the cheapest, not because they’re the best. For mission-critical applications, we like cables from Granite Digital. They were pioneers of higher-quality cable in the SCSI days, and we feel comfortable continuing to use them with FireWire.

Before you rush out and buy new cables though, there’s a chance they’re not bad - they just live in a bad neighborhood. Make sure you route all of your cables away from any power supplies. Those “wall warts” and “power lumps” create electromagnetic interference which can corrupt the data signal.

Also make sure your cables are passing along all the signal they possibly can. Applying a common audiophile technique to computers, we always apply contact cleaner to the connectors on drives or computer cards when we install them. Something as simple as “TV Tuner cleaner” from your local Radio Shack may help. We personally prefer the CAIG DeoxIT products, available from places such as Amazon and Markertek. These cured many a drive problem for us back in the bad old days of SCSI drives.

We own several of the LaCie Big Disk Extreme external hard drives (view on Amazon), which is part of their “d2” line. They provide RAID 0 speed in a very quiet enclosure, which is important to us. We use the FireWire 800 interface, which we find to be faster than internal SATA in many cases.

However, others have reported problems with these drives failing. One problem is no doubt heat. These drives are tightly packed with a small fan, so they’re going to need a little help to keep them cool. This means try to place them with good airflow all around, and not buried inside a hot enclosed space. We tend to place them on the back sides of our desk (again, to further buffer the noise, but also to get them away from the hot computer), and run their FireWire and power supply cables out under the desk to them.

Another problem has been pinpointed by fellow user Danny Grizzle. He has found that LaCie’s d2 and Big Disk drives can have an issue with their power supplies. They supply 12 volt and 5 volt lines to the drive. However, the 5 volt line may drop in voltage with age. If it drops too far, the drive will become increasingly unreliable until the drive eventually dies.