It is with great excitement that I am finally able to make an announcement that has been eating at me for nearly a year now. In June of 2009 when the iPhone 3GS was released I had a flash of what the future could hold for editing, and it’s that moment of inspiration that gave birth to the product I’m announcing today.

Our new groundbreaking product, Final Cut Pro Mobile, is now available on the iPhone 3GS. It will also be available on the iPad later this year. You heard me right – the full suite of FCPS apps have been ported to the iPhone 3GS, and in some cases, we’ve been able to add additional features not found in the current offerings from Apple.

Much of our inspiration at SuiteTake.com to create this mobile suite was inspired by the growing interest in editing projects outside of the office. While the edit suite has been the traditional place to get your project done, technology no longer limits us to just a single location. And it was with that vision in mind that we marched forward with the project. Here is a quick overview of what the new suite includes.

Final Cut Pro M

Starting with the current version of Final Cut Pro 7 from 2009, we included all of the same new features as well as the under the hood improvements from Apple. But we’ve also added some features that are only possible on the iPhone.

For example, with a single swipe of your finger – you can save your project, duplicate it, or permanently delete it – all with the same gesture. Swiping at different speeds determines which of the functions is selected. Now that’s efficient!

Need a quick rough cut of the footage you’ve imported? Just shake your phone up and down 3 times and the built-in accelerometer will create a rough cut using the current ins and outs of each clip. The phone will use our patented Content Detection™ algorithm to analyze dialog, body language and facial expressions. It will then systematically assemble the clips in the most pleasing and logical way.

Motion M

Complete with Open GL acceleration, 3D shadows and real-time playback, you can create graphics at uncompressed 4K or HD resolution while browsing the iTunes store, surfing the web or taking a call from your client. And all of this while you’re outside of the standard ball-and-chain edit suite. Be inspired – be Mobile!

While the standard motion templates that you’re used to are included, we’ve also added the ability to buy templates through the App Store, right inside of Motion M. Using your iTunes account and 3G networking you can download the latest templates where you want, when you want.

Soundtrack Pro M

Using your iPhone earbuds you can mix your latest soundtrack while listening to your favorite iPod playlist, checking your messages with  Google Voice and browsing SFX from the SoundTrack library.  All while walking through the busy city traffic to catch your bus to the beach.

But it’s not just about multi-tasking. SoundTrack Pro M can mix up to 256 tracks of audio in real time, has new MIDI functions available through the dock connector and now includes a cool iTunes-like screen saver to help you  see your audio as you mix. This is part of our new SeeHearMix™ technology.

Color M

Who says you need a $10K monitor to color grade your latest film? Don’t let the monitor industry make a fool out of you any longer! Using the precision color LCD touch screen on the iPhone you can grade like a pro using just your fingertips.

What’s that? You don’t have time to do the grading yourself? Again we tied into the Apple App Store and you can now purchase and download preset looks based on the type of project you’re grading. Some of the categories include Corporate Training Video, Broadcast Reality Show, Broadcast Sitcom, Over Produced Documentary, Low Budget Film, B-Movie, Direct to DVD, Flip Cam to Film Look and Barely Good Enough For YouTube. Each preset will optimize the look and feel of your video based on your target audience.

DVD Studio Pro M

Apple may not have updated DVD Studio Pro, but we sure did.

Need a DVD and need it while on the go? No problem! Plug in your favorite DVD burner and create a Standard Def or Blu-ray DVD on the spot right from your iPhone using our patented USB-BlazeBurn™ technology.

Don’t have a DVD burner? That’s OK too. Master directly to our new SuiteTake.com Print-On-Demand DVD service. Most DVDs will upload over 3G in just 2-3 weeks, and you’ll receive your DVD copies within one calendar year. Let’s face it, you didn’t really need it that fast anyway.

iChat Theater M

Using the iPhone 3GS camera,  you can now chat with your client live while watching your latest cut. You can even conference in up to three other members of the “creative team” to watch and comment on the playback of your sequence while referencing a live timecode window. Getting unwanted needless feedback has never been so easy.

And Finally, Compressor M

Compressor is more then a compression engine – it’s a publishing factory. Set up automated processes that will convert your final video to the proper format and upload it to iTunes, YouTube, Vimeo, FaceBook or just a standard FTP site.

As an exclusive to the Mobile FCP Suite, you can even export directly to another iPhone no matter where they are in the world. And all of this over 3G. Take that AT&T!

Need more speed while compressing? Using iPhone QMaster integration you can cluster up to 50 iPhone 3GSs together to cut compression times by up to 8.9%. (Estimated, actual savings can vary. In some cases render times can actually increase up to 75% due to some unknown reason that we’re still baffled by. Due to the increased radiation output of the phones during the render process, women who are pregnant or are hoping to ever become pregnant should limit their exposure to FCPm Qmaster. Do not taunt Qmaster under any circumstances.)

And with our new Social Media plugin architecture, you can send custom notifications to Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace and even the Creative Cow Forums. Now all of your fellow editors will know just how frustrated you are by that request to make “one more small change”. Partner deals with Gowalla, FourSquare and DropBox are in the works for late 2010.

I am proud to say that I think we’ve really hit this one out of the park. And we’re just getting started. Since I started using FCP Mobile I’ve realized that having a full size computer is a thing of the past. I used to say I would never give up my Mac Pro. Now I’m starting to ask myself if it even makes sense to have an office. Since I started using FCPm I have barely bothered to show up to work at all.

Still not convinced?

Check out the cover story in the next issue of MacWorld magazine for a full hands on review or read our Press Release.

Can’t wait?

Head over to the App Store and download it now. We hope you’re as excited about it as we are.

OH WOW! BREAKING NEWS!! In case you you didn’t hear last night, there has been some exciting news in the world of post production in the wake of the Apple announcement of the iPad. Lovable video game company Nintendo has just announced they would like to join the editing world with the release of the Nintedit System!

Whether or not this ends up being any kind of major player in the editing world is still in question, but I was blown away at the potential capabilities of the system, yet completely shocked in general that they are even deciding to make this. I’ve loved Nintendo for years, dating all the way back to NES, and I think it’s crazy that they would try and make this jump into post-production. I guess they wanted to make the case that video editing should be fun and universal, and shouldn’t be left alone to the technical folk.

Shigeru Miyamoto, the brains behind Nintendo, made the announcement at the Kyoko Electronic Convention in Japan last night.

“Konichiwa! This all began when I had shot a video of my daughter’s birthday party, then I realized that I had too much footage, and it needed to be cut down to a reasonable length. I don’t own any personal editing software. Then I noticed most of my daughter’s friends playing with the Wii, and there were several girls sitting on the futon watching, with nothing to do. Well, what if these 8-year-old girls could not only edit this video for me, but have the same level of fun editing as the the other children playing the Wii?”

That sounds pretty insane to me that editing could be as much fun to an 8-year-old girl as playing the Wii, but he goes on to elaborate how this could potentially work.

“The only way to make editing fun for children and the elderly is to make it universally appealing. Normally you would have to go through school, or at least read the manual to an editing program to learn how to use it, but not with the Nintedit System! Through a series of new innovative gadgets and extremely fun mini games, literally anyone can edit.”

I was extremely curious as to what kind of gadgets and mini-games could possibly be involved with editing. And also how this whole thing works to begin with:

“To import the footage you shot on virtually any camera, you must go through a series of fun, beach-related mini-games to see how much of the footage you get to use. For instance, the better you do at playing Nintedit Import Volleyball, the more of the footage that you shot you get to use! It’s a very intuitive game though, so most people will get most, if not all, of their footage. It is a plastic, full sized volleyball that is tethered to your arm with a cable, it has 112 groundbreaking motion sensors built inside of it, so you can play it anywhere you have room to play it, but within 10 feet of your Nintedit system, of course. But chances are the first few times you play, you will fail, and only get to use a small fragment of your footage. That unused footage will be immediately deleted from the hard drive, and will encourage you to get better at the game for future edits. Nintediting is not only fun, it is a learning experience!”

A press release after the convention also stated that these other “importing games” will be available on launch day, with more to follow in the months after release (all sold separately):

Nintedit Import Surfing
Nintedit Import Dune Buggy
Nintedit Import Hacky Sack
Nintedit Import Flag Football
Super Import Brothers
Donkey Kong’s DVCAM Adventure
Metroid P2
The Legend of Zelda: The VHS of Time

But what of the gadgets, and how does editing actually work?

“Basically it works like this, depending on how many clips you have earned in any of the fun Import Series games, that is how many rounds you will go through in order to edit your video. For instance, if you have won 78 of your video clips, you will have to play a challenging, yet addictive, mini-game for each and every one of your 78 clips, in order to see how, and if, your clip makes it in the final sequence. On average, in testing, we found that Nintediters were getting a little over 100 clips in each of their Nintediting experiences, so in order to make sure it doesn’t get tedious, we have created for the Ninteditor a slew of 7 mini-games to challenge them. This will ensure that no person has to play the same one game over and over again. Instead they have seven to choose from!”

He went on to break down the seven mini-games:

Nintedit Bowling:

“We did a study, and found that literally every single person on the planet enjoys Wii Bowling, excluding a few rogue individuals who we declared insane and had committed to Nintendo work camps. Do to the fact that we are using graphics technology for our system that is only as good as the Nintendo 64, you cannot use Wiimotes, as a complete lack of backwards compatibility is in play. So we have invented a new device, which works much like the nicotine patches my mother-in-law uses. It is a disposable electronic patch, that you can place on any real bowling ball. It is full of tiny motion sensors, and you must also attach them to a set of real bowling pins. Then you can set up your own personal bowling alley in your living room! The amount of pins you knock over determines how many seconds the video clip will play in the Nintedit timeline. We have taken virtual bowling to a level more real then you can imagine! $7.99 for a pack of 3 bowling patches. Bowling ball and pins are not included with the Nintedit System.”

Scissor Harvest:

“In order to reduce the size of a video clip, you must use the wireless, external Nintendo Virtua Scissors, which are basically real scissors, with a motion sensor built in. On the screen, harvest vines will fly at you, and you are wearing 3D glasses by the way I forgot to mention, sold separately, and you will literally run around the room frantically cutting at the virtual harvest vines with the Virtua Scissors. Each vine you cut reduces your clip by one frame. In order to achieve the most realism, the scissor blades are actually real, but of course we have added removable plastic covers to ensure small children and the elderly don’t stab themselves accidentally (laughs).”

Text Shoot ‘Em Up

“Using the brand new Nintendo Sniper Rifle, in combination with the Nintedit Alphabet Display Device, the ADD we call it, you shoot motion sensor bullet rounds at the motion sensor ADD, trying to hit the letters you desire. But you only have a limited time to shoot what you need! The letters you hit appear in that order in your video. Can you say on-screen text anyone? (audience claps) The faster and more accurate you do it, the cooler the transition of the word will be onto the screen. If you are an advanced Nintedit marksman, you can set the ADD across the street, or on a moving swing set at the local playground for some extreme challenges, or if you are a beginner, you can just have your brother or sister hold it for you a few feet away. With motion sensors, anything is possible!”

Nintedit Hero

“You basically play Guitar Hero, and if you beat the song, you get to use it for the video clip you are playing for. Getting note streaks in a row enables the song to be played over multiple clips at once. We are still in the licensing process for the music, but we have a certified 6 songs to be guaranteed available at launch day:

“The Stroke” by Billy Squier
“Happy Birthday” by Patty and Mildred Hill
“Poker Face (DJ Dirty Dave Slow Jazz Remix #3)” by Lady Gaga
“A Very Slash Christmas” by Slash
“Bitches Ain’t Shit” by Dr. Dre
“The Laverne and Shirley Theme Song” by Cyndi Grecco

We are very excited to have such wonderful artists contributing to our Nintedit experience.”

Body Motion Challenge:

“We here at Nintendo have come to the realization that Americans are horribly, horribly fat people. If you want to speed up or slow down your clip, you must strap on the Nintedit Power Belt, which is loaded with motion sensors and electric shocks, and you must run for 1 mile in order to slow your clip down by 10%, 2 miles for 20% reduced speed, and so forth. Do you want slow-motion action scenes in your video? Then you better get outside and start losing 40 lbs!”

Cruisin’ Volume Racer USA:

“In order to change the volume levels of your dialog and music for each of your video clips, you take the Nintedit Super Kart Meter Measuring Device and wire it to the engine of your car. If you are a woman, you may need the help of a mechanic (women in audience start booing). I KID, I KID! (winks, men in audience laugh) We use one of our most powerful motion sensors we have for this mini-game. You type in the Kart Meter how long your clip is going to be, and it gives you a countdown to begin driving. Our groundbreaking motion sensors will detect when you are accelerating and when you are hitting the breaks. The faster you go, THE LOUDER THE VIDEO WILL BE! And vice versa. Experiment by hitting the brakes and speeding up at random on the highway to see the cool effects it will have on your audio! Race against your friends, see who can get the loudest clip! I can’t stress enough, though, if you are a small child, please do not play Cruisin’ Volume Racer USA without the help of a parent, or slightly older child.”

Nintedit Dating:

“We here in Japan have a plethora of video game dating simulators. They are good and all, some are pretty erotic, but we here at Nintendo wanted to give you, the Ninteditor, the most realistic dating experience ever known to a home console system. Basically, you put in a motion sensor chip into your brain, which can be implanted by a Nintendo-trained doctor through either ear canal, and then you go on an actual date with a woman or a man. At the time we are only offering heterosexual encounters, as our computers are having difficulty measuring motion sensors amongst same sex relationships… If you can’t get a date, Nintendo will provide you with a Nintendate for a small fee. No promises they will be attractive, though (laughs). The motion sensors measure how good you are doing on your date by your brain activity, and how much you are nervously shaking. It also has speech recognition to determine if you are saying the right thing. The better you do, the better the special effects graphics will be in your video! Let’s just say if you do REALLY good (winks, starts making subtle humping motions while quietly chuckling) your video will look like Avatar! And if you strike out, your video will look as pathetic as your Friday night. So when you see your friend with a terrible looking video, you’ll know his date with Megumi last weekend didn’t go so hot! (laughs) (audience laughs)”

Well I don’t know, I’m actually kind of sold on this. This seems like it might actually be a really cool and innovative way of editing. I’m excited, I’m definitely going to wait overnight at Target again to get this on launch day!

Oh, here is Miyamoto with his final thoughts:

“Video editing is no longer for the technical. It never was supposed to be. Do you know where the best, most creative ideas come from? They come from your 5-year-old sister. They come from your 95-year-old grandmother. THESE are the people that should be editing. Nintendo wants to take editing out of the hands of the people who have loyally devoted themselves to it for decades, and put it in the hands OF EVERYONE ELSE (audience cheers). Edit with your family. Edit with your friends. Edit with your dog. Edit passionately with your lover. Editing is a universal experience. Just look at this video that my 8-year-old daughter Nintedited about her summer at Nintendo Work Camp B, in a mere 17 hours of playing time.

And this power can now be in the hands of everybody, and anybody, and they can do it with ease. For only $699. Sayonara…” (audience starts rioting uncontrollably, 39 dead, 102 injured).

With so many software programs and hardware only supported by the Intel based Mac computers, you might find that having that old Dual/Quad G5 around is becoming more and more problematic. And that may be true, especially as a production machine. More and more of the Apple and Adobe apps only support the newer processor, so upgrading starts to become difficult. Even Snow Leopard is only supported by Intel machines, so your G5 kind of gets stuck in time.

But I’m going to give you a few options to still make use of that older machine, and it will end up having more value to you than the few bucks you can fetch by selling it on eBay. Currently a Quad G5 (the last and fastest G5 made) is going for about $600, and that’s if you throw in a bunch of extra software/upgrades. And who wants to deal with shipping the beast anyway. My vote would be to keep the machine around and put it to work.

FileServer

One of the best things you can do is add more storage to the machine and have it as a file server. For example, in our office we have 3 main edit rooms, but there are many files that we use on jobs that are shared. We have a music library, stock footage, stock effects, some Editor Toolkit graphics, SFX, Custom Compressor Settings and many template items that we’ve created in house. We used to have all of these items installed on every computer in the office. Not a big deal, except when you make an update you have to make sure that every machine is updated with the same items or you quickly get out of sync. Having just one place to store it all is much more manageable.

Backup Server

Another option would be to add extra storage and make it a backup server that monitors the computers in your office and backups new files on a daily or weekly basis. You can do this using the new Retrospect 8 for the mac, or ChronoSync and Chrono Agent. Both packages work the same way, having a small client app running on your workstation, and the server software running on the backup machine. You select what you want to backup, when you want to back it up and where to. The nice part is that once it’s setup properly, you don’t have to keep remembering to back things up before you leave every night.

WIKI Server

Finally, you can install OSX Server (10.5) software and use it for workgroup management, contact files, file server and even a WIKI. We have a WIKI that we use for ECU (Edit Creations University) where we have all training materials, tips and tricks, job specific information, client FedEx numbers and even the employee manual. It’s all accessible to all employees whenever they need to reference anything, and any employee that has permission can add their own posts or revise posts that are there with new information. It becomes a very centralized location to store information, files, and video tutorials.

Creative Samples Database

Over the past 10 years I have slowly collected still images, QuickTime movies, DVD’s,  tv commercials, show opens, movie trailers and so on, of things that I found inspirational or creative. The main reason was that I wanted to have something to spark my creative juices when I was just dead in the water looking for a new idea. I don’t like to steal an idea directly, but there’s plenty you can take from any given example and than make it your own. Often just seeing something will spark an idea of your own.

I have so many samples now that I created a database called Creative Spark. Everything is processed into a friendly format and imported into the database. Once in there, it’s tagged for any number of attributes, from the type of video it is to what types of things is shows examples of (camera work, effects, text, graphics, etc.). This is the kind of thing that works great in a shared environment and it’s now accessible to any of the editors or producers in the office.

It also comes in handy when you’re trying to describe an effect or look to a client. It’s much more effective if you actually have the example right there to play for them.

TimeMachine Volume

Most people hook up an external drive for use with Apple’s TimeMachine. But by adding up to 6TB of internal space, you can do the same thing and take up no extra counter space. We have a TimeMachine volume on each edit computer that runs twice daily* to backup the active projects (and only the active projects). We’ve found this to be a very solid part of our overall backup strategy.

Whatever you decide to do with that G5, more storage is probably going to help. Today’s post will walk you through how to install more storage than you ever imagined in your aging G5 so that it’s up to snuff for you’re data needs.  Of the ideas I outlined above, all could be implemented on a single machine and play nicely, and in that case you would absolutely want to add more storage.

What You Will Need

A G5 Tower of any vintage (the photos here are from a Quad G5).

A Swift Data Kit for your model of G5. The kit includes…

Internal SATA card (you can purchase this with the kit as an add on option)

Up to 3 extra SATA drives (in addition to the 2 that your G5 normally holds)

One (1) open PCI, PCIX or PCI Express slot

Getting Started

Start by laying all of your parts out and making sure you have everything. I say this not only because it’s a good idea, but because I didn’t do this the first time and didn’t realize I was missing the SATA card until the machine was already stripped down. I was pretty bummed. TAKE 2!

Lay the mac on it’s side and take the side door off of your mac and remove the side cover and clear plastic internal cover.

Next, remove the fan assembly toward the front of the machine. It should just pull straight up.

Once the fan is out you will see a small metal screw in the near center of the bottom plate. This screw needs to be removed. Don’t worry, it’s not really holding anything in that you need to worry about.

Set the screw aside for now.

Next, it’s time to attach the brackets to your hard drives. In our case we went with 1TB Green Drives from Western Digital, but you can use larger 1.5 or 2TB drives if you wish.

The green drives are preferred for their lower power use, and it should be noted that Seagate drives are not supported, and I’ve personally had issues with Hitachi drives. To be safe, stick with WD greens. In my case I couldn’t get the computer to boot because the Hitachi drives were drawing too much power. With the WD drives this was not a issue.

Pay attention to how you connect the bracket. Your instinct may be to put the bracket on so that the bottom lip curls under the drive. However, the drive needs to curl away from the drive.

Repeat these steps until all 3 drives are brackets securely attached.

With all 3 drives mounted to brackets, it’s time to attach each of the drives to the base mount. As shown in the photos, attach each drive to the base using the supplied screws from the kit. It’s important that the drives are oriented as shown.

It seems like an odd way to mount the drives, but it’s actually very solid and the parts are well machined.

Next it’s time to insert the SATA card. We chose the Tempo Sata E4i which is recommend for our G5 model.

Take the card out of the packaging and attach the bight red cables to each of the ports. Be sure to plug the FLAT ends of the cables into the card, not the L shaped ones.

With all of the cables attached, gently insert the card into your open slot and secure it with a screw into the back of the machine.

Just leave the cables hanging out of the side of the box for now.

Next you need to hook up the power cable harness. At one in there is a Y type adaptor. What you need to do is pull the power from one of the current machine drives, and plug that power into one end of the Y adaptor. The other end of the Y adaptor goes back into that drive and you route the cable down the back of the machine. It’s basically a way to split off the power supply and share it with the drives you’re adding.

Again, leave the power cable hanging out the side of the box, but only after routing it down below the top shelf of the machine.

Now the fun part. It’s time to slide the drive assembly in. With the drive assembly right next to the computer, work from back to front hooking up both the power and SATA connections. Don’t worry about the cables being a mess, we’ll fix that later.

With everything hooked up, slowly and carefully slide the drives into the machine as shown, with the lip/screw hole part of the base facing the back of the machine.

Once you get the drives part way in, start to route the cables up and above the fan assembly and above where the cards go.

Once you have the drives in the machine, push the assembly toward the front and line up the plate so that the screw holes are aligned. Once aligned, use the longer screw that came with your kit and secure the plate to the base of the machine.

Reinset the fan assembly, close up the case and you’re good to go!

It’s snug, but it’s a perfect fit.

Time to Power Up

With a little luck, if you did everything correctly and used the recommended drives the machine will power up. Let the machine boot and use Disk Utilites to format the new drives however you would like. They can be added as 3 separate drives if you prefer, or you can raid them together. We created a raid 0 strip of the 3 to add a single 3TB volume.

If the machine turns on and off right away, chances are the power supply is overloaded. Make sure you used the correct drives. In some cases, you can try a few times in a row and it will finally start, but then you’re living on the edge a bit. Try to disconnect the power from one of the drives and see if it will start up then. If so, you may need to stick with only a 2-drive upgrade.

Why Is There An Airplane In My Room?!

Now that you’ve done all of this, there is one little down side that we noticed. Aside from it obviously sucking more power to drive all of the new storage, the fans in the machine run a LOT more. If you have this computer in a back room as a server this might not matter, but if it’s your main edit machine it might start to annoy you. We did this upgrade on 2 machines, one is a server in the back room with a bunch of other equipment, and one was to a Quad G5 that we still edit on (the upgrade shown in this example), so that we could do local TimeMachine backups once daily. The edit machine fans are audibly running a lot more and a lot louder than before. This is no real surprise when you think about all of the extra heat that’s being generated, but you should be aware of it.

Otherwise, it’s a very sold upgrade. We didn’t do any official benchmarks on the drives but the speed is much faster than any single internal drive, and more than adequate for a TimeMachine volume, file server or even video capture for all but the most high end formats.

The SuiteTake

Before you get rid of that old G5 tower, ask yourself if there’s anyway it can make your life easier by automating something for you, acting as a server or just being a internal FTP or file server. There are many tasks that don’t really need Quad-Octo-Pecto-IntelAMD-SuperHyper-Threading chips, and will run just fine on a G5. The value that can be provided by keeping the machine can far exceed any small amount of cash you might get from selling it on eBay.

Today I join the extremely rare air of millions of internet folk. Today I do something that everyone from Roger Ebert to CindyCinema.com to your Aunt Rebecca does. Today I will list my favorite movies from 2009, to the excessively high amount of 25. Why 25? Because I go to the theater almost every weekend, I’ve seen about 60 movies from this year, so listing only 10 would inhibit my urge to talk about what movies I’ve seen. Plus everybody loves a list!

So let’s get right into it. I’ll be SPOILER-FREE. Here are picks for my favorite movies from the Year 1 A.D…K. (After Dark Knight)…

*** It should be noted that at the time of writing this post I have NOT yet seen Avatar, Crazy Heart, The Lovely Bones, A Simple Man, Sherlock Holmes, or The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. All of those may or may not have had potential to make this list…

25. Paranormal Activity

After first seeing the trailer several months before its release, this was on my radar as one of my most anticipated movies for the year. After seeing the movie itself, I was slightly underwhelmed. Don’t get me wrong, I thought it was good, but I was hoping that maybe, especially with the ending, that it would be 10x crazier. But in between countless (sometimes funny, sometimes pointless) dialog scenes, there are some actual genuinely creepy moments. My advice is that if you’ve never heard of this movie, rent it when it comes out on DVD this month, and watch it without knowing anything about it, and you’ll have an incredibly fun time. Whatever you do, DO NOT watch the trailer for this movie, they mind-blowingly ruin the final scene of the movie in it! I’m not joking!

24. Watchmen

I consider Watchmen to be one of my favorite books of all time, so I was definitely excited for the movie, as opposed to being skeptical from the beginning that there’s no way they could pull it off. In the end, this satisfied me. And for the most part (I think) it satisfied fans of the graphic novel. From what I read from reviews, the main problem was that people who didn’t know the source material wouldn’t know what the hell is going on. I can’t certify this claim, but I can understand that happening. Plus it’s very long. That being said, I finally plan on checking out the 3 and 1/2 hour Ultimate Cut over the holidays.

23. The Road

This might beat out Precious as the “feel-bad” movie of the year. While Precious had glimmers of hope scattered throughout, this movie is just one long depressing journey down a road to nowhere. And at no point did Precious ever have the threat of being cannibalized by rednecks. This film about a father and son trudging along a road in a post-apocalyptic wasteland did get draggy at times, but it stuck with me for a while after I left the theater. Let me just say that despite its flaws, the good parts are great, and the tense parts are intense.

22. Drag Me to Hell

Ah, this movie brings us all back to when Sam Raimi made awesome, hilarious, and fun horror movies. Not to take anything away from the Spiderman movies, but I’ll take a chainsaw on an arm over web slinging any day of the week. And his return to horror with Drag Me to Hell proved to be almost as fun as his old stuff (almost). The only things that may have potentially hurt this movie are the lack of Bruce Campbell, and the PG-13 rating. Regardless, it’s a horror movie that doesn’t try and be scary so much (except for a dozen or so “jump scares”) as it does to be funny, gross, and entertaining.

21. Bruno

You either like what Sasha Baron Cohen does, or you don’t. That is probably what determines who will like this movie as well. I happen to find him hilarious. Bruno isn’t as funny as Borat, and neither of them are as funny as Da Ali G Show. While I hate to be in awkward situations and confrontations myself, I love watching it happen to other people. Because that’s basically what this movie is, just an 80-minute awkward confrontation. And as how it was with Borat, the deleted/extended scenes on the Blu-ray are often as good or better than what actually made the movie.

20. Extract

Mike Judge is 3-for-3 with his live-action films in my opinion. Office Space is a classic, and Idiocracy is a vastly underseen comedic masterpiece. Now with Extract, he returns closer to Office Space, while at the same time staying original. It’s about a guy who owns an extract company that employs about a dozen very stupid people. Mike Judge might very well be the best writer of “stupid people dialog” out there nowadays. Plus I enjoyed seeing Jason Bateman and Kristen Wiig get high profile roles, even if it’s in a movie that (like Idiocracy) was not seen by enough people.

19. The House of the Devil

If you knew nothing about this movie, and I showed it to you and told you it was released in 1982, you would have no choice but to believe me. That’s how great of an homage to late 70s/ early 80s horror movies this is. And that’s exactly who this will appeal to, fans of that era of horror films. It’s pretty cool. Hell, they even shot it on 16mm!

18. District 9

This movie was a nice little surprise this year, no one really knew what to expect of it. It played out as both a great sci-fi movie and an intriguing social commentary. For what it cost to make, the special effects were phenomenal and the aliens blended in seamlessly into the South African slums. I’m sure Invictus will get all the awards buzz and this will receive none, but to be honest I’ve seen Invictus, and the best movie about South Africa this year was District 9. And it won people over without a likable main character!

17. I Love You, Man

Despite coining the regrettable term “bromance”, this movie was consistently funny, and continued the trend of R-rated comedies being significantly better than PG-13 ones. If you’ve ever looked at Paul Rudd’s imdb page, you’ll notice that he is in a large amount of crappy romantic comedies and other garbage that no one really sees, and then he’s also in a small handful of good movies. This happens to be one of the good ones.

16. Moon

With shades of Kubrickian (if that’s a word) isolation and style, Sam Rockwell lives alone in a mining farm on the moon, just doing his job until his contract runs out. He’s been up there by himself for several years, his only friend is a robot voiced by Kevin Spacey. What I thought was going to be a movie about the descent into madness turned into one of the surprisingly cooler plots of the year. Like 2007’s Sunshine though, this movie may lose a little of it’s magic your TV as opposed to the big theater screen.

15. Trick ‘r Treat

I’m telling you, this movie is this generation’s Creepshow, if that means anything to you. I (like many other people who saw it) will be blown away at the fact this never got theatrical release (while garbage like Saw VI gets wide release). This mishmash of well made short stories blended into a moderately intertwined whole is probably the greatest straight-to-DVD movie I’ve ever seen. (also, some might consider this a 2008 release, but it didn’t get put out to the public until well into 2009, so it makes the list!)

14. 500 Days of Summer

I’m not a big fan of romantic-type movies all that much, but occasionally every few years one comes along that is actually a meaningful, well-intentioned, well-made film. This movie about heartache and the recovery process relates to me on many levels. And it’s easily the most cleverly constructed and edited movie about relationships since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

13. The Hurt Locker

I liked this film a lot, I wanted to like it more, but it seemed like it should have been even better for some reason. It’s almost like Generation Kill: The Movie. I could have assumed a movie about a bomb squad in the Iraq war would be an extremely tense movie, but damn! This movie got me cold-sweating a little bit in the movie theater. This is the definition of an “edge of your seat thriller”.

12. Where the Wild Things Are

I normally go to the movies on Saturday afternoons, because I don’t like crowded movie theaters, but I knew if I did that for this movie there would be a bunch of annoying kids in the theater, as I see them wandering about in droves when I go in the afternoon (but I see non-children’s movies so I don’t care). So I went at night to see this hoping that maybe the amount of children would be greatly reduced, and it was, but ironically the theater was crowded and I ended up sitting three seats away from some annoying kid. And this kid, I swear to god, fell asleep during the last 20 minutes of the movie and started snoring…! The parent didn’t wake the kid up! How rude! That kid must have been dumb anyway, because he was missing a fantastic movie. But seriously, theater etiquette people!

11. The Hangover

It’s surprising that the most universally accepted comedy of the year was also really good, it normally doesn’t work out that way. And it’s nice to see Mike Tyson getting work again.

10. Observe and Report

I can’t stress how much I love this movie. It was probably 2009’s most “love it or hate it” film, but I was blown away by how much I ended up loving it. I read a review that called it a comedic version of Taxi Driver, and I couldn’t agree more. I’ve made pretty much all of my friends watch it since it’s come out on Blu-ray. It’s easily the darkest comedy of the year, probably Seth Rogan’s best role ever, and it saddens me that the most widely recognized movie about mall cops is still Paul Blart.

9. Adventureland

I can’t tell if this is actually a good movie, or I just love it for some odd reason. I personally don’t know anyone else who has seen it, so I can’t ask them. But I just clicked with this movie to an insane degree. Maybe I just related to it because it was similar to my life right after college. Regardless, it’s the best place to enjoy Kristen Stewart without having to endure Twilight.

8. UP

For some reason I never expect much out of these computer animated movies, then I watch them, and they blow me away 100% of the time (I just saw Kung Fu Panda the other day and the same thing happened as well…). In comparison to Where the Wild Things Are, this movie had adult themes but was more adaptable to children, while Wild Things apparently makes children fall asleep. My only regret here was that I didn’t see it in 3D when I had the chance.

7. Funny People

Judd Apatow will probably forever have a free pass from me to do whatever he wants for making Freaks and Geeks, but this is my favorite of his three movies. I don’t know why people are claiming it wasn’t actually funny, it was very funny, and it was also very serious as well, I think that’s the genius of it. All of the actors fit in perfectly with the roles they were given, and it’s disappointing that people didn’t like this movie more. I’d say give it another chance. I would also like to note that the special features on the Blu-ray collector’s edition are as amazing as they are plentiful. Hours of good extra stuff, especially the Raaaaaaaandy documentary.

6. Zombieland

Is it surprising that a zombie movie is likely the most fun movie of the year? It shouldn’t be, zombie movies rule! Woody Harrelson is in top comedic form, and I’ll need to see it again before I make a statement as bold as it’s better than Shaun of the Dead, but it’s pretty close. And I won’t ruin it, but there is a big surprise cameo that does not disappoint. I’m hoping for some sequels.

5. Fantastic Mr. Fox

Wes Anderson hasn’t let me down yet. I was pretty excited when I heard he was going to be making this movie, because I knew he would do great things with it. It’s probably his most accessible film to date, I could see just about anyone enjoying it, but at the same time it’s still vintage Anderson and fits right in with his auteur style. It’s still in theaters right now, so get the cuss out there and cussing see it!

4. Star Trek

This might be the perfect blend of nerdiness and coolness. This is a Star Trek movie! Should it be this cool??? This JJ Abrams character might actually know what he’s doing. I’m not a fan of the Star Trek series, and I was able to jump right in and understand what’s going on. This looked great in theaters, and the Blu-ray looks pretty spectacular as well.

3. Up in the Air

I didn’t really know what to expect when I went to the theater to see this other than it was super ultra mega critically acclaimed. What I ended up seeing was an incredibly simple movie, that was equal parts powerful. This is perhaps the most moving film of the year, and it does it without ever being hokey. In fact, the whole thing seems very realistic. This goes to show that you don’t always need a big spectacle of a story to make an amazing movie. I’m sure this will end up winning every award known to man come awards time.

2. Inglourious Basterds

This has everything you’d expect from a Tarantino movie; witty dialog, extreme violence, stolen ideas turned original somehow. I’m sorry, I’m something of a Tarantino fanboy, I can’t help it, I eat this stuff up! I even love his segment in Four Rooms! As he himself has recently stated, this may be his masterpiece. I may agree. Wait, Pulp Fiction is probably still better, but Basterds is quite amazing. I just watched it again this week on Blu-ray, it just reinforced my love of it. I really wanted to make this my #1, but I had to go with my gut…

1. Black Dynamite

No movie this year made me laugh as much as this did. I was laughing out loud in the theater from the first scene all the way to the absolutely insane ending. I saw the trailer for it earlier this year, and was excited to see it, hoping it would be kinda funny. It ended up being ridiculously funny. I drove 45 minutes away to see it during it’s one week theatrical run, and I almost feel special for being one of the undoubtedly few people who have seen it. All eight of us in the theater sort of bonded that day, we all walked out the theater looking at each other and chuckling with stupid smiles on our faces, eight strangers. Did we then go out for drinks afterwards and regale in hilarious banter? No, of course not, I don’t talk to strangers. But in all honesty, this is the definition of a cult classic (if you can call it that this soon, I’m doing it anyway), and when it comes out on Blu-ray in February I suggest you check it out, though, it may not be for all tastes. If you find the trailer funny, then you will probably agree that this is one of the greatest things you’ll ever see. Maybe I’m just crazy, who knows?

For your possible enjoyment, here’s two other quick mini-lists:

JUST MISSED THE CUT:

35. Orphan
34. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
33. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
32. Coraline
31. 2012
30. The Informant!
29. A Serious Man
28. Invictus
27. Precious
26. The Blind Side

The WORST films of 2009 (that I saw, I mean Old Dogs and Twilight New Moon are probably worse, but I didn’t bother subjecting myself to that torture):

10. The Final Destination
9. Whatever Works
8. My Bloody Valentine 3D
7. X-Men Origins Wolverine
6. Surrogates
5. The Men Who Stare at Goats
4. Friday the 13th
3. Year One
2. Ninja Assassin
1. Jennifer’s Body (not worth it even for Megan Fox or the lesbian kiss)

2009 was a good year overall for movies, and here’s hoping for a great 2010!

Happy holidays!

What’s this? Production gear reviews on a post-production blog? Yup, that’s right. We’re not all just codecs and compression here at SuiteTake; we do actually put on our shoes and socks and get to shoot too. In fact, there’s nothing better to appreciate parking your rear in a comfy edit chair all day long then luggin’ production gear around on an old fashioned shoot now and then.

So yes, we do shoot here too and have come across a few nifty little production gadgets that have proved very helpful in the field: The Lite Panels Micro Pro and Chimera’s Color Correction Screens for their softboxes.

Lite Panels Micro Pro Review

First the Lite Panel Micro Pro. We had a shoot come up where we were going to need to shoot close ups of a persons foot walking across a floor in a day-for-night situation. Looking at our standard Arri lighting kit there was nothing in there that would really do the trick for casting the small pool of light we would need to illuminate the foot as it walked across the floor. All of our instruments were just too big for the task, the smallest of our lights being a 300. We looked and found the Lite Panels Micro Pro and thought it would be the perfect fit.

The Lite Panel Micro Pro in its box

First, the construction. The Lite Panel Micro Pro right out of the box feels cheep, and at around $450 from B&H, it isn’t exactly cheep. The body is all plastic, but the not the good solid and refined plastic that you’d find in a Toyota or on an iPod, the cheep brittle plastic more akin to a carnival toy. It has 96 LEDs in a grid, is powered by 6 AAs or DC in (power source sold separately, but certainly something you could get at Radio Shack), has a power control dimming knob on top and standard screw-in shoe mount on the bottom. In the box is the Micro Pro, a flimsy shoe mount with ball head a CTO filter, warming filter, and diffusion filter.

The Lite Panel Micro Pro

While the Lite Panel Micro Pro feels and looks cheep in performance it is not, it has held up well to our production demands so far (which are rather light by comparison to more rigorous demands). I suspect that a drop or good whack to a c-stand could crack the casing, however, it should be noted that an LED won’t be damaged by an impact in the same way a tungsten bulb would. The shoe mount is the real weak link in the kit. It is flimsy and poorly made. When  you tighten down the stop on the ball head it causes the positioning of the panel to change significantly due to the pressure applied to the ball and socket making it futile to position the panel and then lock it down. What I have ended up doing is to tighten down the ball head to a mid-range of tightness and then just force adjust the panel to where I want it.

The included shoe mount plain sucks

The Lite Panel Micro Pro is balanced for daylight out of the box and the filters it comes with do a fine job of correcting to incandescent. They fit onto the front of the panel via slots on either side of the casing and hold in place well. There are also slots on the back of the panel to hold the filters when not in use, although our particular unit’s rear slots are too narrowly spaced to accommodate the filters so they are bowed when placed there. Not a big deal because they do stay put but it is annoying enough to me that I usually don’t keep them there. Battery life is excellent and the Lite Panel Micro Pro simply does not heat up one bit.

The rear of the Micro Pro

We were attracted to the Lite Panel because we thought it would be able to cast an even pool of light without the usual hot spots associated with traditional on-camera lights. In performance the Lite Panel Micro Pro was capable of both. The best thing about it is the adjustable power knob on the top of the unit. There are no stops, marks, or clicks in the knob, it’s just a smooth pot all around with a solid click to turn completely off. I like this because you can dial the intensity of the light to a virtually unlimited range. And that is really how this light needs to be used.

The power knob

The Lite Panel Micro Pro is not a key light. It should not be used as a main source of light in just about any situation. If you buy this light to act as a main source of light for quick head shots or interviews you’ll likely be disappointed. Rather it excels at being that little extra, that little kicker you need to add a little splash to the details of your scene. In our case we need a little punch down on the floor and it did an excellent job at that. I’ve found that I always use the panel at about 50-65% of its max power and have never used it at full power. When potted up to full power it just becomes a big raunchy hot spot like any other on-camera light. The key to using the Lite Panel Micro Pro is to pot it to 50-65% just to add a little bit of punch or kick to your scene, and we love it for that. We have found a use for it in just about every setup we’ve done.

The standard screw mount on the ball head adapter

It should be noted that while the shoe mount adapter is a piece of garbage it does have a standard tripod screw threading on the bottom of it so it can be directly attached to a photo ball head tripod or other light stand with a screw mount and used as an off-camera light. We do this all the time. Like I’ve said, the Lite Panel Micro Pro is a great little kicker, it’s NOT a key light. It’s small size allow it to be placed in tight spots where traditional fresnels won’t fit, and lack of heat make it safe in those small spaces as well. Yes, we are disappointed in the chincy construction but we absolutely love our Lite Panel Micro Pro.

A 3-way comparison of the Lite Panel's illumination

Chimera Color Correction Screen Review

Another cool little toy we have in our kit is a color correction screen for our Chimera soft box. Chimera makes several different flavors of color correction screens for their popular softboxes. They make 1/8, 1/4. 1/2, 3/4, and full versions of CTB and CTO for all sizes of their softboxes.

We had a shoot where we were going to need to shoot indoors with significant amounts of daylight coming through windows. Geling the windows with CTO wasn’t an option with the time and budget we had, neither was renting an HMI kit. I got to thinking that there had to be something out there to color correct Chimeras. In the past we had C-47′d CTB to the inside of our Chimera in a pinch and ended up getting marginal results and melted gels. I went looking and quickly found Chimera’s offerings. We got a 1/2 blue CTB color correction screen for our softbox.

The Chimera Color Correction Screen

The construction is excellent Chimera quality. To my surprise though, the screen is little more than a regular white front Chimera diffuser cloth with a regular CTB gel sewn to the back with velcro all around to attach it. The CTB is an actual gel! Because of this I do take a little extra care of it not to crinkle it too much and remove it when packing it away for the day. I roll it up and keep it in it’s original product box.

The light quality from it is great. It’s exactly what you’d expect from precisely positioning a CTB gel at the front of your softbox. Also as expected it does cut down the amount of light output according to the thickness of gel you are using. To compensate we sometimes remove the inner baffle from the softbox. We always remove the standard white diffuser from the front of our Chimera before attaching the color correction screen but I suppose if you wanted that extra diffusion and didn’t need the extra light output you could leave it on, there is room on the softbox’s velcro strip to accommodate both.

The front and back of the screen

We’ve used our screen in many mixed light situations (that’s primarily why we went with a 1/2 blue instead of a full blue) and it makes for a healthy white balance. It has proven to be indispensable when shooting in rooms with lots of windows. With a tool like this you can actually leave the blinds open and use that available light for a change!

The SuiteTake

The Lite Panel Micro Pro is an awesome little kicker light that has proved it worth many times over in a wide variety of shooting situations. It’s construction is sub-par and shoe mount is utter garbage but gives a great even splash of light quickly and easily right where you need it. The Lite Panel Micro Pro is very useful both on a off the camera. At almost $450 it’s priced a little on the high side, but you’ll be amazed at how often you’re able to use it in the field or the studio.

Chimera Color Correction Screens are great “poor-man’s” HMIs. At about $40 bucks a pop for the mid range sizes they are within just about anyone’s budget. With one of these slick screens say goodbye to the days of pulling all the shades and hello to using available light indoors again.

And yes, we do get off our butts now and then and do a little shooting here at SutieTake!

Video compression has come a long way from the days of using Cinepak on a Quadra 950 tower and the old NuBus slots. For the most part, the wars between online formats has been settled with Flash leading the way. But behind that Flash Player is often H.264 encoded video, ever since it was introduced with Flash 9 in December of 2007. Even video powerhouse YouTube is pushing out H.264 video wrapped in a flash player. If that’s not enough, one of the officially supported video formats for Blu-ray is H.264.

So from on-line video (SD or HD) to high end Blu-ray DVD’s, h.264 is a huge player. It’s all good, right? Well, mostly. Have you ever compressed an h.264 video file? It can be unbearably long. We first started running into this bottleneck when we switched from doing mpeg-1 client web approvals (something that was very fast to compress and widely compatible) to h.264. We switched mainly because we wanted to post high resolution web approvals for our clients at higher quality, and MPEG-1 just wasn’t cutting it. H.264 really filled that need. But even a shorter video, say 10-15 minutes could take 60-90 minutes to compress on a Quad Intel MacPro, and some of our videos are more in the 30 minute range. If you have the time, leaving it running overnight is no big deal, but most of the time we’re doing these web approvals close to 5 or 6pm and they needed to be posted and sent to the client that same day. Waiting around just to finish a web post feels like a waste of time (although we did minimize this to some degree using LogMeIn as covered in my previous post).

After hearing others brag about how great it was, we finally decided to try the “to good to be true” Turbo.264 USB key from Elgato (the non-HD version). I really fought it because I had a hard time believing that a little USB key could do what my huge expensive multi-processor MacPro could not. But also because it did not integrate with Compressor, which is part of our workflow. For the price though, we decided to give it a try.

For what you end up paying, the Turbo.264 does a pretty good job. It is FAST for sure, and the output is not too bad, but it’s not perfect either. It gave us the speed that we wanted, but not the quality. One of the main reasons it’s able to do what it does so fast is that the very first thing that’s done is resize the video frame, and then pass it off to the USB key for processing. This is key, because the rest of the processing is done on a lower resolution frame instead of working with the original uncompressed frame. Great for speed, but not optimal for quality. But for many people, this might just do the trick depending on your needs and budget. You end up seeing compression artifacts in places that you wouldn’t when using compressor with similar settings, typically areas of fast movement, effects or dissolves. But it did take care of the time bottleneck that we were having. So we decided to sacrifice some quality for the sake of actually getting home on time but continued to look for other options.

Then I read a press release about a new product from Matrox called CompressHD, and I had a warm and fuzzy feeling all over. I contacted Matrox and asked them if it was possible to get a review unit and they were nice enough to send it out a week later. While it’s 4-5x the cost of the Turbo.264 USB key, (depending on which one you compare it to, the first SD key or the more recent HD version) it has some great benefits that make the cost worthwhile.  I’ve been using it for nearly 2 months now and it has taken the pain out of h.264 encoding.

Installation

Installation is easy, but for most editors the biggest problem may be finding an open card slot on your MacPro. We decided to sacrifice a SATA card to make way for the CompressHD card. All it needs is a PCIe slot. Once installed I started the computer and installed the software, and after a quick reboot it was good to go.

Integration with Compressor

The biggest selling point (aside from the speed)  is the seamless integration with compressor. Inside of compressor there is a new preset folder called “Matrox MAX H.264 Settings”. If you take a look at what’s inside, you’ll find that the presets are very similar to what you’re used to seeing in the Apple Settings.

If you’re used to using compressor, not much changes in your workflow for creating h.264 files. You pick one of the Matrox presets that fits your needs, apply it and submit just as you did in the past. However, much of the processing is now handed off to the CompressHD card. The only thing handled by compressor now is the decoding of the video frame, everything else is handled by the CompressHD card. The card has 2 processors that are optimized for different functions. One chip handles resizing/scaling, and the other handles the color space, compression and output. So what you end up with is this nice little video assembly line and each frame is passed from chip to chip to perform it’s designated function.

But what if you don’t want to use one of the presets included? What if you have specific needs of your own? No problem! You can create your own settings and still take advantage of that nice processing power. As an example, here is a setting that we created to use for web approvals.

What is the difference between the Apple h.264 presets and the Matrox ones? Nothing really. The Matrox folder was created for convenience and to streamline your experience. You can choose any of the Apple h.264 presets and they too will access the card.

If you want to compare performance with and without the card, there’s no need to pull the card out and then put it back in. Open up the control panel and you can turn the card on and off. This is what we did for the comparison tests. We’ve been running version 1.6 of the software, but the current version is 1.8 and is now Snow Leopard compatible. However, we’re still using Leopard and do not plan to upgrade until sometime late next summer.

Performance

Once we got this card in the machine, we just couldn’t wait to start compressing something… ANYTHING, just to try it out. It’s not that compression is all that interesting, but I really wanted to see how this baby performed. It was like dropping a new engine into a used car, we just wanted to hear the engine fire up. Here are the details on how we tested the card.

All tests were performed on a 3.o ghz Quad Core Intel MacPro with 12 gigs of RAM. We ran each compression twice. Once with the CompressHD card enabled, and once without. During these tests there were no other operations being performed on the machine, but only for the sake of making sure we were comparing apples to apples when we got the final numbers. One of the main reasons to use this card is that it handles so much of the work load, you can continue to work and even do processor intensive functions on the computer while having little or no effect on the compression times that the card puts out.

We used version 3.05 of compressor, that is part of Final Cut Studio 2. If you’re running the latest version of Final Cut Studio (we call it 3 because Apple forgot to give it a number) you will already have the ability to create Blu-ray movies within compressor. In our case, the card actually adds that ability to compressor, since this version of compressor does not directly support Blu-ray (only the now dead HD-DVD standard).

Our test video is 14:12 long and in 720p format using the ProRes 422 codec. The original file is 7.85 gigs in size, and we compressed it to 6 different formats as part of a single batch for each of the tests. We chose some of the most common presets that we might use, as well as one custom one that we use in house.

Here are the results.

As you can see, there is a significant difference with the card enabled.  There’s something very satisfying about watching it crank through the data so fast. It does however cut down on the coffee breaks and long walks on the beach.

One thing that I noticed is that the biggest benefit comes when you are changing resolution. This is where having the dedicated hardware really pays off. When you’re simply just converting from one format to another (say ProRes to h.264 with no other changes) the speed bump is less noticeable, but still there.

As an example, look at the Apple TV bar compared to the iPhone bar. Because the frame size for Apple TV does not need to be changed, the card just passes the frames through at the same resolution. But for the iPhone version it has to be scaled down a lot, something that the card does much faster and with better results then just using compressor.

*NOTE:  You might have noticed that the Blu-ray bar is the same on both passes. Because I was running Compressor 3 instead of the newer 3.5, Blu-ray is not supported natively. So on both passes, the CompressHD card was used. So kind of pointless for our purposes, but I left it in anyway.

Image Quality

The image quality is as good as anything coming out of compressor natively, but at a fraction of the time. In all of the tests that we did I couldn’t see a quality difference between using the card or not. Compared to video run through the Turbo.264 key, there was a noticeable difference. Again, I’m not totally knocking the Turbo.264 product, it does have its place. I use it all the time to convert movies/tv shows from the TiVo format to iPhone so that I can watch them while at the gym. But for trying to exceed the expectations of my clients the Turbo.264 key falls short. We’ve also had problems with it dealing with anamorphic footage properly without having weird scaling and cropping issues.

One thing to be aware of is that the CompressHD card will only do CBR compression, not VBR. Not a huge deal, but something to be aware of. This is also a limitation of the Turbo.264 usb key. VBR adds a much better quality to file size ratio then CBR, but in my experience this is not much of an issue. Disk space is abundant, the internet is fast and both SD DVD and Blu-ray can hold plenty of data. Not a huge deal.

Just to give you an idea, here are some file size differences based on the same source video.

Compatibility

One of my original concerns was that the card might interfere or conflict with other capture cards from AJA or BlackMagic, but it plays nicely. The codec’s that Matrox wrote are based on the Quicktime Component architecture built into QT, so any hardware or software that supports the implementation of QuickTime Component will work just fine.

Matrox Product Integration

It’s worth noting that you can get the CompressHD hardware (called the “MAX“) as part of some of the other Matrox products. For example, you can purchase a MXO2 and get it outfitted with the MAX card for just $400 more, saving you a $100 over buying the card separately. One of the great benefits of this is the ability to run this type of hardware on a laptop that has a Express34 slot, instead of just a tower. One of the down sides is that you can’t use both the MXO2 Max for editing/monitoring while the hardware is compressing. It’s an either/or situation. But for many that will be a small trade off for the ability to take this mobile.

The SuiteTake

At a street price of $499 the CompressHD is not exactly cheap, especially if you only occasionally need to compress to h.264, and time is not an issue for you. But if you encode as much as we do and don’t’ want to spend your whole week watching a progress bar, I would whole heartedly recommend getting the Matrox CompressHD. It’s a solid piece of hardware that integrates nicely with the FCP workflow so seamlessly you will forget it’s even there. That is, unless somebody takes it away from you.

No longer do I have my routinely standard nightmares about homeless people dressed as clowns doing dental work on me at the bottom of the ocean while being chased by radioactive super sharks. No folks, they have been replaced by nightmares of what I’m doing in Cinema 4D! Wait, maybe nightmare isn’t the right word. Maybe I mean dream, yeah, dream is the happy one, right? Sorry to potentially mislead you with the whole nightmare thing. I’m actually having decently pleasant dreams about my future in the 3rd dimension. For those of you who possibly read my first post on getting started with Cinema 4D without any previous morsels of knowledge of any 3D program, this is simply a followup of some of the progress I’ve made, and whether or not I’m on my way to be working on Pixar’s next one-word-titled movie, or if I failed horribly resulting in an enormous amount of embarrassment causing irreversible damage to my relationships of my family and friends.

So as the title obviously states, here is an update of my top 5 recaps of advancements I made in Cinema 4D during 2009. This is part 2 of 17 posts I will periodically make throughout my life time. Part 17 will come on my deathbed, and will focus on trying to do a pre-visualization of my upcoming funeral. I expect my last words before I die to be something in the area of “god damn these splines!”

5. Turning a Real Life Object Into a Cinema 4D Object
So after all my initial messing around in the program, I realized that a standard practice that I would probably need to do for jobs would be to turn an object in real life into a 3D computerized object. I’m cool with creating random stuff from scratch, no one has any expectation on what an imaginary object should truly look like. But creating a replica of something requires, well obviously, that it look just like it…

So I thought I’d start simple and just try and recreate a product box. Going into it I figured the first thing I’d have to do is create the shape of the box. So out of what appeared to be logical thinking, I got a ruler and measured the Tiffen UV Protector box I decided to make, resulting in some dimensions of each side in inches. But there aren’t any places to input inches into Cinema 4D… So I just plugged the inches into new photoshop documents for each side of the box, converted the inches to points, and hooray!, I can input points into the dimensions of the box in C4D.

Then I just scanned the sides of the box at high quality, and put them into the photoshop sides I created and imported them as materials. Cool beans! I have a 3D version of a box I’m holding in my hand! Slap on a camera zoom with motion blur, and I now have a product box animation. I know it’s just a box (big deal, right?), but it was still cool at my amateur level of expertise. If I keep trying to recreate things, I’ll be well on my way to making a surrogate to clean my house in the near future.

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

4. Being Able to Actually Render Stuff

One of the biggest problems I was having when I initially started learning C4D was that I was able to do some neat stuff, but I didn’t know what to do with it after I created it! I was very happy to finally learn how to render and output things, so that I can actually use them. They don’t make it very obvious to someone unfamiliar with the program how to do something as simple as export a quicktime movie. I was definitely doing it wrong initially, while trying to figure it out. I was just doing a “Make Preview” quicktime.

Then output it as a decent quality preview, and when it finishes I just do a “Save As…” in quicktime and I have a new, incorrectly outputted movie. I guess it worked for saving a quicktime of the project, but it wasn’t of the highest possible quality, and would probably be scoffed at if I attempted to use it for anything real. So then I finally figured out that you have to set all of your settings before you even consider rendering in the Render Settings, such as dimensions (I did an entire animation in the wrong dimensions, and tried to change it after the fact, yeah, I had to re-do almost the entire thing, OOPS, lesson learned), and which format of quicktime you’d like, where to save it, as well as how many frames and whether you’d like motion blur, etc. You could spend a good several minutes just going through the settings before you render each project.

After all of that it’s actually extremely simple to make a quicktime movie, because once all of your settings are set, you just click on “Render in Picture Viewer”. That title doesn’t make sense to me for making quicktime videos, but well, that’s exactly what it will do. In full resolution.

And in reference to my first post on this subject, I wasn’t able to make a quicktime of the crappy slap animation I created on my first day of messing around in Cinema 4D, but now I’m able to! Here it is in all its crappy glory!

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

3. Creating Abstract Still Photo Art
In addition to making neat animations, I was happy to learn a little about how to make cool still images as well. Photoshop is one of my favorite programs to mess around in, and it was fun to learn how to insert 3D objects correctly into still images using camera mapping, which seems similar to doing Vanishing Point in ’shop. This just gives me another option to do cool things with still images that I might have trouble doing in Photoshop. Like making a client’s logo hang out in the desert for some reason, or giving a family on a picnic a pair of pet cubes.

2. Being Able to Bring in an Illustrator File and Animate it
One thing I was excited about was being able to bring in Illustrator vector images and play around with them in 3D. It’s more complicated (or annoying) than it would initially appear, but it makes sense how it works. For instance you can’t just flat out import a complex Illustrator logo and expect it to work perfectly. You have to separate the layers first, then re-assemble them in Cinema 4D, followed by creating and adding materials to give it some colors. There is a great tutorial I watched early on (located here) on Creative Cow on how to go about separating Illustrator files correctly and doing basic camera moves. I took the logo of our friends over at CBH Video, and jazzed it all up 3D-style. I surprised them with it and their reaction was “This is pretty cool, but I’m on a conference call, so please stop yelling in my ear…”

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

1. Moving Cameras on a Spline and Creating a Scene With Stage Objects
Splines are frustrating to me. I’ve tried to draw them freehand and then straighten them out by making them B-Splines, but that only works to a certain degree. It’s hard to get them perfect. But I do realize that it’s even harder to just smoothly freehand animate a camera movement. It’s nice to have a visual line representing where the camera is heading.

Then having another camera starting at the end of the first movement and continuing in a new direction by using a stage object adds another dimension of animation. I’ve never really been that good at After Effects (I get lost somewhere when expressions come into play, then it’s like freshman year math class all over again) but I was amazed at the ease of using cameras in Cinema 4D.

In my opinion it just seems more fluid and intuitive than using cameras in AE. But I was just happy that I pretty much grasped the concepts of a basic animated scene, which points in good directions for the future of scene making. It’s harder than it looks to pull it off smoothly. Or I guess it’s easy if you’re good at C4D and you want to be a jerk about it…

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

The Suite Take

I’m still learning, I’m not all around that great at Cinema 4D yet, but I’m looking forward at getting better! I know one sure sign that I’m not that great is when I go to the C4D Forums over at Creative Cow, and the way they talk about stuff makes it seem like they aren’t even using the same program that I’m using. Then I realized I was in the MAYA forums. But then I went back to the C4D forums and it was still relatively confusing. But I tend to understand more of it in each passing week.

I’ll let you know what I do next in part 3 of 17, which will be written entirely while skydiving! (Note: part 3 may only be two sentences long and full of typos).

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the A-Series LTO drives started by Quantum, and now licensed and sold by Cache-A. This review covers the newly released Prime-Cache from Cache-A. There are two other higher end models that offer more internal hard drive space and the option of multiple LTO drives, but for most small to medium size post houses the Prime-Cache model will do just fine, and it’s the least expensive.

This review is more of an overview of some of the functions, and does not cover every feature, option or workflow, and only gives a general overview on setup. My goal is to give you a good taste of what it can do for you and your post house and leave you with an idea of the kind of value it can offer your company, both in security as well as a new revenue stream.

If you have not already done so, you may want to give my last post a quick review, as it gives a history of how we ended up here after having lots of issues with our shelved HD backup system. I know that many people use hard drives for long term archival, and it’s understandable why. It’s cheap and space is plentiful. However, learn from our mistakes and be aware of the pitfalls of going that route.

There’s also a post by Scott Roberts that covers the workflow of the A-Series drives in his own special style.

Location of Device and Setup

When picking a location for the drive, you might be tempted to place it inside your edit bay. It’s a good looking box, small and sits on the desktop nicely. For testing purposes this is what I did, just because I knew I would want more interactivity with the device while reviewing it. But while the device is virtually silent when powered on, once the tape in the drive starts to shuttle during operation it makes more noise then you, or more likely your clients, will want while editing. It’s not terrible, but considering this device is controlled over the network from anywhere in your office, it makes sense to put it somewhere else. For us that was the machine room where we keep the multiple raid drives that sound like an airplane taking off.

Setup could not be easier. It’s pretty close to a zero configuration unit. You plug the unit into a power source, add a Gigabit Ethernet connection and power it on.

By default the unit will start up in DHCP mode which should work with most networks. If you want to assign a static IP (like we eventually did) you can easily do so through the web interface to the device.

At this point a quick check of the manual will tell you how to log in using the default user name and password and a web browser. Safari and Firefox are supported, but Windows Internet Explore is not due to some incompatibilities. This is what the default screen looks like.

While the Quantum drive relied on the web interface for almost everything, that’s no longer the case. You can actually perform your archive duties without having to visit here at all. I will cover this later when I discuss workflow.

One of the great things about this device is that through the web interface, Cache-A can send your unit software updates as they’re released. This makes upgrades pretty painless. While this is pretty much expected for Macs and PC’s these days, dedicated appliances like this don’t usually make upgrades so painless. We went through several small upgrades during beta testing and it was seamless. They would tell us a new version was out, and we would use the web interface to initiate the download. It would automatically download the software, install it and then reboot the computer.

The Hardware
The hardware is a combination of LTO-4 tape drive, internal hard drive, FTP server and computer all wrapped in one. It’s basically a archive appliance built around a PC running Linux. If you’re a linux nerd it’s Fedora Core10, specifically 2.6.27.5-117.fc10. While it is possible to hook up a monitor and keyboard and use the device directly, as you would any other PC, the real strength in this device is that it’s designed to be used over a network with multiple clients at the same time. You don’t need to be anywhere near the box (Except for tape exchanges obviously. I’m told they’re working on a way to change tapes via mind control but that’s probably a 2.0 software feature).

The case itself is relatively small, measuring just 11″H x 10.25″D x 4.5″W,  and it’s designed to sit on a tabletop. It’s all in black except for the Cache-A logo and power button on the front. While it’s designed to run upright to save on desk space, you can also use it horizontally, as long as the drive is right side up (the door will flip up if it is). This works well if you would prefer a rack or shelf for the unit.

On the front is access to the LTO-4 drive, a dual USB port for connecting a memory stick or external storage device and a big power button that glows blue when the unit is on. There are also a few activity lights that monitor the tape drive and hard drive usage. The LTO-4 drive will only write to LTO-4 tapes, but it is backward compatible and will read LTO-3 tapes from the Quantum A-Series drives.

TECH NOTE: This backwards compatibility is not part of the current software release but it expected in a future release. Hopefully a near future release. So if you have one of the Quantum A-Series drives, don’t let go of it just yet or you will not be able to read any of your old tapes.

The back is where you really get the idea that this is a PC. You’ll find all of the standard inputs and outputs, and a network status light that verifies it’s connected.

The appliance is designed to run over Gigabit Ethernet (1000 Bt), and at least in my tests I couldn’t get it to show up on the network even at 100BT. This shouldn’t be an issue for most post houses since you probably already have a fast network. And truthfully, if you’re going to use this device you really need a Gigabit connection.

The Workflow
In the previous version of the A-Series drives that Quantum came out with, the web interface to the unit was where you did nearly everything. Cache-A has taken a different approach. The Prime Cache creates a volume (they call this the vtape) that can be mounted directly on the desktop of the Mac, Windows or Linux. In fact on the Mac desktop you can see both the Mac share as well as the Windows Share.

So here is a simple example of how you might archive your projects.

Organize your projects/files that you want to archive on your hard drive. In our case, we have a “Projects to Archive” folder that each editor uses once he/she determines that a project is ready to be taken off line. Each project is prepped for archival by making sure there is not only a master export of the final video, but we also media manage the final sequence into a folder called “media”. This way when we come back for revisions we at least have an editable sequence that’s easy to modify.

We then create a dated folder in the form of YEAR-MONTHDAY. For example, September 21st 2009 would be represented as 2009-0921. If there is more then one folder for that same day, we just append a letter at the end – 2009-0921a.

We then organize the jobs into the folder in a way that gets each folder as close to 800 gigs without going over (yes, just like the price is right).

With each folder at around 800 gigs or less, it’s time to move some bits. There are two options here. Before we move on let me explain more about the vtape that i mentioned earlier.

The main purpose of the vtape is to be an intermediate between you and the tape drive. As the name implies (Linear Tape Open) the tape records in a linear manner. That means that unlike using a hard drive that reads and writes randomly as needed, a LTO tape is recorded from the start to the end. You can’t go back and remove a file or folder and then reclaim that space.

So help comes via the vtape.

The vtape is the name of the internal drive on the Prime Cache. It allows you to copy files from your computer to the Prime Cache and organize them however you like, and then copy them to the tape in one shot. You can even have the vtape mounted on multiple computers and have them all copying files to the vtape at the same time. This is how the device allows for multiple users simultaneously.

In our example we have chosen to do this organization locally prior to copying the files over, just because we prefer doing it that way and that’s been our work flow since getting the first A-Series drive (which had no vtape).

So back to our example…

Over your local network, mount the shared drive. If you’re on a Mac it’s under your network browser, and on Windows it’s under your Network Neighborhood. (Forgive me for not having tested this with a Windows machine, but I would have had to buy a PC to do that. I wasn’t willing to go that far for the review.)

The device shows up with the name “Archive” followed by a number. The number is the last 2 digits of your serial number. So in my case, the drive comes up as “Archive04″. You will need to type in the default user name and password as outlined in the manual (you can change this) and then you will see the volume called “vtape”. Double click to mount this to mount the hard drive on your desktop.

Here you will see two things. A file called “Eject” and a folder that represents the tape you inserted. By default, it’s a serial number that matches the tape itself. But this is easily changed to something more useful. (The serial number as a default is actually VERY useful if you have a high end system with a automatic barcode reader. It allows the drive to find tapes for you based on the barcode/tape name).

In the finder, just click on the name of the tape (the folder) and name it to whatever you like, keeping in mind good naming conventions. You wouldn’t want to call it…

“My-Really_AwesomeProject!!!!&Other%stuff***that’sImPOR$$tant”.

If you keep your names to alpha/numeric you’ll be fine.

Changing this to a more intuitive name now will help later when we get to catalog it. Once you change the name, you will hear the tape drive shuttle the tape as it changes the name on the tape itself.

As a side note, the Eject file will allow you to eject the tape  but in a somewhat confusing way. What you do is drag the file (named Eject) to the trash (you do not need to empty the trash) and the following dialog appears.

As you scan see, the dialog is a bit confusing. But if you do hit the “Delete” button, it does not erase the tape or delete anything, but in fact just ejects the tape. If this freaks you out and threatens to raise your blood pressure, just use the manual eject button on the face of the device itself. I would imagine this is a fix at some point.

With the tape inserted and renamed (you could have also renamed it after you copied files to it) you are ready to copy files over. You can copy files to the vtape itself for further organization, or to combine them with files from another machine.  Or, you can drag them directly to the tape.

If you drag them to the vtape, they are copied to the internal drive of the Prime-Cache, but not to the tape. This becomes a staging area as I mentioned. When you’re ready you can drag your vtape files directly onto the tape icon and the files will transfer. Another benefit to using this method is that you can make multiple copies of the same tape. Once one tape is done, you put a new one in and drag the files over again. In doing this you can have one on-site and one off-site copy of your data.

In our example I decided to just drag my flies directly to the tape icon, thus I went directly to the tape and bypassed the vtape drive. Well, that’s not totally true. The device still uses the drive to cache files and make sure there is always a steady stream of data for the LTO as it’s recording. But this is more of a rotating cache that once it’s done will not occupy any space on the vtape.

In our example I copied 5 gigs of files directly to the tape, in about 5 minutes. Not too shabby for coping files over a network. And remember, this tape holds 160x more data!

Remember those old Avid drives that were about 50lbs a piece and held only 9 gigs of data and cost $5,000 each!? Now you can fit 800 gigs on a tape that’s roughly the size of a wallet (albeit a fat wallet).

On the vtape you will now see a text file called TransferLog. This file has a list of every file transferred as well as a final status. This is the most important part of the log, found at the end. It confirms that your transfer was successful. If it was not, it will give you details as to what files were the problem and in most cases what the problem seemed to be.

Your file transfer can be monitored more actively through the web interface to the Prime-Cache drive. The list at the bottom will scroll as files are copied.

Now that the tape is completed, the next step is to create a catalog of what’s on it. By doing so you will have the option of later searching for files that you may want to retrieve without having the tape loaded. Once you find what you want, you just insert the proper tape and copy it back to your computer. While the Prime Cache does keep a catalog file of it’s own so that you can do this same function internally, I prefer to keep that information under my own control and accessible even if the drive is off-line. There’s also the added benefit of getting a lot more then a file list in your catalog, as you’ll see next. Other metadata is key.

For this part we use a program called CDFinder. Don’t let the name throw you, it’s not for just CD’s, it’s for any mountable disk, volume or folder – attached locally or over the network. We started using this when we backed everything up to hard drives and it has always served us well. We keep the CDFinder catalog file network accessible, so no matter where the program is launched it’s reading and writing to the same file.

This is the easy part. With your vtape mounted and the tape that you just copied to visible, you can either drag and drop the tape to the CDFinder icon, or from within the program select the tape directly.

During the catalog process, you have options as to how deep to catalog, what file types to skip, the ability to create thumbnail previews of images and so on. By default we scan everything and create thumbnails of images.

This 5 gig backup only took 2-3 minutes to catalog, and that includes making all of the thumbnail images. If you turn off some of those options it goes even faster.

Here is what you end up with when you’re done.

The new catalog, by default, will assume the name of the tape. This is where having your own naming convention is important. You are able to change the name though if needed.

Here you can see some of the icons that were created. These are actually part of the catalog file, and not being read form the tape itself. In fact, when this screen shot was taken the tape was no longer in the drive. It’s one of the advantages of using CDFinder over the Prime Cache internal Catalog.

You also have the ability to sort your catalogs into different folders. As shown here we have a few different client folders, as well as folders for our current tape library and our older hard drive library.

Now with the catalog complete, you can put your tape on the shelf and start your own archive library. Make sure to properly name the tape to reflect the same name that it had in the finder.

Performance

So for me there are two big questions in regards to performance. By far the first one is can I rely on The Prime-Cache to safely protect my data. The second question is, how long does it take to fill an 800 gig tape.

For the first question I can tell you based on my own experience that it’s virtually fail-safe. Not only is the LTO standard very robust with a 30 year shelf life, but it has a great track record and really strong road-map for the future. I also appreciate the fact that the standard is “open”, and not owned by any single company.

As to the second question, in our experience it takes roughly a minute per gig during backup. The number of files and sizes do make a difference. A single file that’s 1 gig in size will transfer a lot faster then 100 smaller files that total 1 gig in size. To fill a tape it usually takes anywhere from 6-9 hours. Obviously the speed of your machine, hard drive system and network will also play into this. We’re pretty fast on all 3 of those so I’m guessing we’re close to best case scenario.

The Prime Cache hardware/software is very solid as well. Even going back to when Quantum was making the device, the engineering team has always been very open to feedback and have worked hard to make changes that users have requested. This really shows in the maturity of this product. While it is a first release from Cache-A, they learned a lot from the early problems that Quantum had and avoided the same pitfalls. The code for the Cache-A device is rewritten from the ground up and only uses the Quantum code necessary to read the LTO-3 tapes. Cache-A has really taken this product from being some weekend hobby at Quantum to making it their flagship product, front and center.

Cost of Ownership
This is not a cheap device, but it’s also not a “dumb” LTO drive. With a standard LTO you have to not only buy the drive but also have a compute host and software to manage your backups. With the Cache-A line of archive appliances, you get all of this in a single box and more. There’s also something very nice about not having to call different companies if you have a problem, and then have them each point to the other. Cache-A makes the hardware and software, and supports it well.

One of the best reasons to choose this device is that it’s available to every computer on your network. With just a LTO drive, you may find yourself moving it from machine to machine as you need to do backups, and it because it’s such a pain you’re less likely to stay current maintaining your archive library.

So all things considered, the $7,999 price tag is not so bad for what you get. Especially if you factor in piece of mind.

Tape prices are really cheap. A 800 gig tape is going for $49.29 at Amazon.com. While that’s only slightly cheaper then a 1TB hard drive, what you’re really paying for is long-term peace of mind. You won’t get that from your dusty hard drives much past 5 years.

But even with the cost involved, the drive could be a money maker for you. How?

We have managed to turn this into a new stream of revenue. Since purchasing the drive nearly 2 years ago we’ve been charging for every project backed up. The result is over time the drive is slowly being paid for, and in about 6-12 more months it will be making us a profit. So it’s safe to say that buying this device has tuned out to be a good investment, that’s about to start paying dividends.

But it’s no longer just editing projects that need to get backed up. Now it’s P2 media, XDCam and RED footage as well. Once the project is over we also offer to create a library tape of all of the original footage. In some cases we will make more then one copy so that not only will our client have the footage, but their client as well.

Before buying any piece of gear for my business I always ask myself if it will be considered overhead, or money generating. The Cache-A Archive Appliance can definitely make you money. If it’s not, you might be leaving money on the table.

The Manual
The 75 page PDF manual is very detailed and easy to read. It does a good job of explaining how the device works, what a typical work flow might be, explaining what the vtape is in detail, use of the web interface and so on. I found that while it wasn’t exactly a page turner, I did enjoy reading it. But then again, I’m a bit of a manual geek. There’s just something about a new manual that makes me excited. I know, very sad. So I’ve been told.

One of the interesting features that I did not cover is the ability to hook up external devices (think USB hard drives or memory sticks) and also backup those devices through the web interface. I played around with it a bit, but did not use it enough to include in this review.

Changes Still Needed
As much as I like this device, it’s not perfect. But the small issues I have with it can be fixed over time with software upgrades. I have to admit it took me pouring through my review notes to even come up with these.

In the web interface there is a button called “Item”. Intuitively it’s hard to know what it’s for exactly. It’s actually a contextual menu based on whatever is selected to the right of it (Current Tape, VTAPE, or Catalog). But it doesn’t make immediate sense and I’m sure there’s a better way to do this, or at least a better name for it.

In that contextual menu, two of the options are Eject and Erase. But does Eject need to be right next to Erase? This just seems like a bad idea.

Erasing the vtape can take an unusually long time. You can erase it in the finder or through the web interface, but in both cases it just takes a long time (in one case it was several hours for just under 800 gigs of files). If you choose to perform this function in the web browser, there’s no way to tell if/when it’s done since there is no status. You just assume that it’s running in the background.

To be fair, I have not tested this since the last software upgrade so it’s possible that it’s better now. I know they were aware of it and working on it.

By default the system ships with a DHCP network setup, meaning you should be able to just plug it in and let it find an open space on the network. They recommend that you leave it in this mode, but we found it was better to just give it a hard IP address. There were a few times that it picked a IP address that was already in use, thus causing a network conflict. I can not say for sure that it was the fault of the Prime-Cache, only that we’ve never had this issue before. Using the web interface we easily give it a static number and all was fine after that. Generally speaking, anything that can be thought of as a “server” is something I like to have on a locked down IP anyway.

My biggest complaint is that the backwards support for LTO-3 (reading previous archive tapes) is not yet implemented in the software (thus untested). For anybody that already has a history with the device this makes upgrading pointless until this is corrected. We have nearly 100 tapes that will not work with the new drive, which means we can’t let go of our current drive until this feature is implemented. They hope to get it out before the end of this year, but there’s no guarantee. If you’re totally new to this device, then you won’t really care about this feature.

And as I already mentioned, the eject dialog is a bit confusing. Having the word “Delete” appear does grab your attention, but since the dialog presents a conflicting message it’s a bit unnerving, even if it is harmless. But again, an easy fix that I would expect to see in a future release.

The SuiteTake
At the risk of repeating myself yet again, you can not underestimate the importance of a solid reliable archive. If it’s important enough to save, it’s important enough to do it right. Especially if you’re thinking about billing your clients for this service. For all the years that we did HD backups we never charged clients for one main reason. I didn’t want the responsibility of dealing with files that were lost due to a drive failure. So we did it as a courtesy and guaranteed nothing.

New features are due to be added in October with their 1.1 software release. Some of the major features include Tape Spanning, Automatic VTAPE file removal option, Pro-Cache RAID 0/1, and Pro-Cache ExpressCard Support.

With the Cache-A series of Archive Appliances based on the LTO standard, you can reliably backup all of your files and know that they’re safe. Period. And with the new devices from Cache-A your data can be read back from a Standard LTO-4 drive as well, so you’re not locked into the A-Series drives for retrieval.

So you’re at the local drive-in, sitting in your hot rod with a swell filly named Loralane, and you’re necking her like there’s no tomorrow. Then the roller skating waitress glides up to your car and asks if you’d like the Moon Over My Hammy special, and Loralane says she won’t go to the box social with you this Saturday night unless you get her some grub.  But you reach in your pockets, pull them completely inside-out until a moth comically flies out, and it indicates to both Loralane and the roller skating waitress that you are not only broke, but you’re too poor to even afford a wallet to not hold the money you don’t have in the first place. Then she goes off with Butch from the Green Cobras on his dirt bike, and you go crying home while “Earth Angel” by Marvin Berry ominously plays from a mysterious location in the distance.

You know what your biggest problem was? That’s right, associating with those dastardly Green Cobras in the first place! Second biggest problem? You need a bunch of money! Well, if you’re in charge of your own post-production company then you are bound to have a ton of out of date equipment, because this industry is a constantly upgrading, uphill climb. And the higher you climb, the harder it will become to keep carrying all of your old stuff that you barely use anymore. So sell it!

I know, eBay is not a new concept to anybody, and I’m not one of those power sellers that make their living entirely off of selling things on eBay, so perhaps, if you wanted to be a jerk about it, you could nullify my entire philosophy on selling used goods, and go read a different article from Johnny P. Sells-A-Bunch with his fancy green star. But hey, I have a 100% positive feedback rating, that’s good, right?

One of my jobs as an assistant here is to sell old equipment and other various items in between my other tasks, when I have time. I try and squeeze in about one item a week, sometimes more, sometimes less. I’ve sold a bunch of items that have gone out of use around the office and made a bunch of scratch doing so. It’s not Donald Trump money, but it’s a decent amount of change for not doing a whole lot of work, AND it also eliminates the clutter of things you don’t need any more. Frankly, it prevents people from tripping over all the extra crap in the storage room. Hello money, goodbye lawsuits!

I would strongly suggest bailing on quasi-sentimental things, and just getting rid of them on eBay. Now, sure, you should probably keep that family heirloom pocket watch that your father gave you 10 minutes before he was tragically eaten by a great white shark, but do you really care about that wolf statue you got from your vacation in Arizona six years ago? Yeah it was a great vacation, but the only item you have is this stupid statue of a wolf, and you don’t even like wolves! You were in the airport gift shop and realized you didn’t buy any souvenirs, so you pitched out $60 for this handmade wolf statue.

Seriously, I would suggest taking a picture of it, that way you can always be reminded of the wolf through the photograph (if you actually desired to) and then try and scrape $20 for it on eBay. Do you realize that $20 can get you five Spicy Chicken Sandwiches at Wendy’s??? Or roughly NINETEEN Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers!!! What is the wolf statue getting you, sitting on your shelf…? It’s probably just getting you a nice collection of dust, and is in no way contributing to putting four Baconators in your stomach.

This might just be me personally, but I don’t really need a bunch of memorabilia to remind me of where I’ve been. Pictures are enough, just look at pictures, they don’t take up space, and they actually remind you of something more than the gift shop where you bought a wolf statue. That’s what I think of when I look at souvenirs, I think of the details of the store in which I purchased it at, not the vacation around it, that’s what the photographs are for. Maybe the wolf statue is a bad example, you probably don’t even have a wolf statue. And if you do, you probably bought it from me on eBay.

So thank you for funding two weeks worth of vanilla Frostees for me at lunch with your $20. I hope the wolf statue looks great on your mantle…

Sorry for the rant, I was just happy to get rid of that wolf statue. But the main purpose for this article is to show you a nice program that makes dealing with eBay a breeze. It’s called iSale, and it’s been around for a couple years, but it’s current version (5) is really good. I’ve used it to sell a ton of things around here on eBay, the profits of these items that we no longer use go right back into the company. Perhaps if you wanted to make a little extra money and didn’t think about selling things, this will nudge you into doing so.

Selling things not only helps you, but clearly helps whoever is purchasing them as well, since they clearly want what you are offering. iSale is pretty much a simple interface that creates good looking eBay templates, and let’s you plug in the details in a very clean and compact menu. When I buy things on eBay I do tend to get creeped out by the lame looking, one paragraph/sentence default descriptions that you see on some peoples auctions.

Clients and other various other people who have walked past me while I’m using iSale look over my shoulder and say “Wow! That looks easy! I would love to sell a bunch of junk I have, but I’m no good at using eBay…” Then I say “Yeah, can’t you see I’m trying to work here…?” And then they leave the room whispering something under their breath. I assume it’s about how awesome iSale is. All you have to do is set up your eBay account in the iSale preferences menu, and then iSale will do all the work in terms of dealing with eBay, I literally no longer even need to sign onto the eBay website. It essentially does everything the eBay auction setup does, but better, and faster. You don’t want to be stuck using eBay’s “awesome” design templates, do you?

Are you serious? That looks like something I would find on a crappy Geocities site. Well, I take that back, saying crappy Geocities site would imply that there are also non-crappy Geocities sites. The eBay templates look like standard Geocities sites.

But after the account setup, you pretty much just select a template, in which there is probably something that relates somewhat to the item you are selling:

Plug in all of the useful information in the very neat menu interface:

I think that looks a lot better and more coherent than the jibber jabber of the eBay item setup…

Then you take some pictures of your item. I always take my own pictures, it’s much better than just finding a product image online and doing a copy/paste job on it, it looks more reliable to take pictures of the actual item yourself. I like to take photos with poor lighting (yeah… that’s right… the poor lighting is on purpose… yeah…) and try to include my hand in the picture whenever possible.

Then you can drag them onto your template in the “drop picture here” areas, and you don’t get charged 15¢ for every picture after the first, assuming they can all be uploaded through your MobileMe, or FTP, or Macbay.

But just fill in the template where it tells you to fill in, and you’ve got yourself a very good looking eBay auction (probably as good as it could look, especially for how easy it was to do).

Then hit “Submit” and your auction is good-to-go!

The Suite Take

With iSale you should no longer have the excuse (in whiny voice) “But I don’t know HOW to use eBay…!” I’m pretty sure I could train my Mom to use this program if I wanted to (which I don’t). Yeah, it is $40. But if you think about it, if you upload 10 pictures of your item each auction, 9 of those pictures would cost 15¢ each on eBay, coming to a total of $1.35 per auction of 10 pictures. So the price of iSale will pay itself off in about 30 auctions! I guess if you only want to sell one or two things and then stop, maybe consider getting your nephew to help you out or something. But I highly recommend iSale if you are planning on selling a bunch of stuff on a consistent rate.

And apparently iSale 5 has a new integration with the iPhone, so you can take pictures and create the whole auction on the fly with your iPhone! I haven’t tried this so I can’t vouch for it, but it sounds pretty cool. Just throwing that out there!

So get on with it and sell that awesome wolf statue!

IMPORTANT NOTE: This post was updated on Wednesday; November 4, 2009 with new information regarding resizing partitions on the Drobo using iPartition.

As brought to my attention by reader Bradley Davidson (thanks Bradley), iPartition does not actually support the method that I mentioned, and neither does drobo directly.

In my testing, I performed the resizing operation on a newly formatted drive that didn’t have any data (since I had just lost all of my data that was on the drobo). If you try to resize a partition as outlined in this post, you WILL LOSE YOUR DATA. So don’t try it. In theory it was a great idea, but apparently this too will cause problems.

You can find more information on the iPartition website, as well as from Drobo. Like we’ve pointed out many times, we’re also learning here at SuiteTake so thanks for the feedback.

Before I start, let me just say that I am a Drobo fan. I have 2 of them (an original USB and a newer FW version) and plan to purchase more Drobo’s in the not too distant future. Overall I’ve had a great experience with the units and when I needed assistance their tech support was very helpful.

All of that being said, there is a dirty little secret that they don’t warn you about and if you’re not careful you can have your Drobo crash beyond recovery, which is what happened to me this past week. I lost nearly 4 TB of files and there was nothing I could do to get them back. If you own a Drobo, this is a must read.

Here’s what the main issue boils down to. One of the ways that the Drobo is able to expand over time is by presenting the OS with a virtualized volume of its total achievable space. So if you format your drobo drive as a 16 TB drive, (the current maximum except for on the Drobo Pro which is 32 TB) the OS thinks that it has 16TB of storage available. Thus, every program you use also sees the drive as a 16TB volume. This is true even if you have a single 250 gig drive in the drobo.

When you’re manually adding files to the drobo, this is not too big of a deal. You’re interacting with the drive and if you start to get close to filling the Drobo it will start to warn you both through the lights on the drive as well as the Drobo Dashboard software. It’s kind of hard to miss, and can actually get kind of annoying if you just try to ignore the warnings.

However, in our case we don’t often interact with the Drobo directly. It’s used as a backup drive for one of our edit suites and sits in a back room attached to a server. Every 3 hours our Retrospect server runs a script to clone all active projects to the drobo. In doing this we’re protected against any failures and at most would only lose 3 hours of work (which could still be a lot, but better than 3 months of work).

We just finished a good long stretch of having projects back to back without time to offload the complete ones, so the “active projects” folder started to grow beyond the size of the Drobo’s capacity. Because Retrospect thought there was 16TB of space, it just kept trying to pile the files onto the drive until the drobo finally crashed. It unmounted itself from the computer and no amount of restarting of the server and/or Drobo would bring it back.

In this case the Drobo volume gets so overloaded with files that it has no “work space” left to do it’s own housekeeping to keep track of used and unused space, as well as file redundancy. It needs a small amount of it’s own space to do this..

You might think that since it’s a space issue you can just replace one of the drives with a larger one and let it rebuild. Nope, that doesn’t work either. I was on the phone with Tech Support for about 20 minutes as we walked through the situation and finally he informed me that if I was sure that the drive had been filled beyond its capacity than there was nothing to do other than to start over and reformat the drives.

Wow! The drive system that’s touted as the safe way to store all of your most important files has one major flaw, and most people are not even aware of it!

While on my tech support call I asked the engineer how frequently he received calls about this particular problem. After a big sigh he admitted that it was nearly every day.

For us, losing the drive was not a huge issue. It was only a clone of one of the edit rooms and could be rebuilt overnight by just re-running the backup (with fewer files selected this time). But what if this was your primary repository for something important? What if it’s the one place you keep all of your work files, photos, music or something else that’s of great importance to you? I have a Drobo at home that I use as my primary holding tank for all digital video that I shoot of my twin boys, which is all tapeless media. If it had been that drive that went down in this same way I’m pretty sure I would not have been so easy going on the phone.

When to be Scared
How do you know if this has happened to you? To be totally sure you should go through Drobo tech support, but I’ll explain what usually happens.

You’ll find that the drive is not mounted on the desktop and doesn’t show up in the drobo dashboard. Even after a restart of the computer and the drobo it will not show up.

To verify it’s not the Drobo hardware, power down the unit, take out all of the hard drives and then plug it back in (with it connected tot he computer). If with all of the drives out it is able to be seen by the Drobo Dashboard software, then you’ve verified that the Drobo itself is working fine.

Next, with the cover off the front of the drive, unplug the drive (reinstall the drives if you have pulled them out) and plug it back in while watching the lights on the front (the lights along the bottom of the Drobo). There are two sequences of lights as the Drobo first powers up. It starts by building lights from left to right, until the row of blue dots are all lit. This is the boot up sequence of the drobo (which is actually running a version of linix, so yes it really is a mini-computer).

Next, all of the blue lights along the bottom will go out and then start to build from right to left. During this process the Drobo is evaluating the drives and determining where the extra space is on each drive and reading other information that it needs. This process normally completes and the Drobo mounts. In my case, the lights never finished building and it would hang every time, 3 lights before completing. Even after leaving it on for a few days it didn’t make any more progress. This is almost surly a bad sign.

So, what to do?

If this has already happened to you, there’s not much you can do (again, make sure you go through Drobo tech support to be 100% sure). The usual procedure is to power up while holding in the reset button in the back with a paperclip. This will reset the Drobo back to it’s “out of the box” state and allow you to format the drives again.

The good thing is that since you’re now aware of this problem there are a few ways to avoid the problem in the first place.

The Easy Answer

When the drobo dashboard tells you to replace a drive, or you see a yellow or red light flashing next to one of the drives, REPLACE THE DRIVE! Don’t mess around! I know I’ll take this warning a lot more serious in the future.

The Easy Answer, But With A Trade Off
When you first start to build your drobo, format it through the drobo dashboard but instead of just going to 16TB, set the size to the size your drive will be after formatted with the you plan to use. To figure out the total formatted size, you can use the online Drobolator.

The down side? Remember how you loved just adding drives without formatting and just expanding your storage space? You can’t do that anymore. Every time that you install a new drive you will need to reformat the drive to realize the additional space.

The Pain In The Ass Answer.

Format the drive as you would normally do using the Drobo Dashboard software, and go to the maximum of 16TB.

Once this is done, you need to open the drive in Apple’s Disk Utility program and repartition the drive to create a volume that is just slightly LESS than the available space that you see in the drobo dashboard.

For example, in my case I have (2) 2 TB drives, and (2) 1 TB drives installed. Once formatted it gives me a total available space of 3.6 TB

But in the finder this drive is showing up as having almost 16TB of space. Remember, this is what causes the problem.

Inside of Disk Utility you need to change this drive from one partition to 2 as shown here.

Set the first partition to just smaller than the maximum amount of free space that you have. In my case it said I had 3.6 TB, so I have made this volume 3.5 TB. In doing so I’ve just prevented the drive from being able to be overloaded. The Finder/OS will now know what the proper amount of space available is.

On the extra partition, just set it as “Free Space”. This will allow you to still expand your drive later as you upgrade the drives on your Drobo.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This post was updated on Wednesday; November 4, 2009 with new information regarding resizing partitions on the Drobo using iPartition.

As brought to my attention by reader Bradley Davidson (thanks Bradley), iPartition does not actually support the method that I mentioned, and neither does drobo directly.

In my testing, I performed the resizing operation on a newly formatted drive that didn’t have any data (since I had just lost all of my data that was on the drobo). If you try to resize a partition as outlined in this post, you WILL LOSE YOUR DATA. So don’t try it. In theory it was a great idea, but apparently this too will cause problems.

You can find more information on the iPartition website, as well as from Drobo. Like we’ve pointed out many times, we’re also learning here at SuiteTake so thanks for the feedback.

Just for the record I have NOT used disk utility to do this step (I use iPartition) but it should work in theory. Test at your own risk!

SIDE NOTE
While the official word from Drobo is that pretty much any SATA drive will work, in my experience using Hitachi drives can cause heat issues once you get 4 drives in the case. My Drobo at home is a original USB version and I’m constantly having issues with it shutting down due to overheating, even though the ambient temperature is only upper 60’s to mid 70’s. I’ve been told by tech support that Hitachi drives are known to run a bit hotter. I guess I wouldn’t disagree with that.

The better choice would be the Western Digital Green drives. They’re a good balance of performance, energy usage and heat, and they’ve never given me a problem. The latest 2TB versions of these drives have really come down to a nice price and are well worth it.

The SuiteTake?
Even with the Drobo, it’s still a good idea to have more than one copy of your data. As a rule of thumb I try to always have 2 on-site copies and one off site “cloud” copy of anything that I can’t bear to lose. In this digital age it seems we have fewer and fewer tangible objects, and it doesn’t take much to lose a great deal.

The Drobo is a great technology and offers expandability and protection that other consumer drives just can’t match. But make sure you’re aware of the downside of not tending to the drives needs in a timely manner, or next thing you know you’ll be looking for a paperclip to push in that little reset button while holding back the tears.

Hard drives the single most important piece of tech we use as digital media professionals. When you think about it, every bit of work you do is saved to these mechanical/magnetic devices spinning at thousands of RPMs. You may spend hours, days, weeks or even months on a project – and all the time you’re trusting that the drives do not fail you. If you really let your mind dwell on it you may actually start to lose sleep!

Having regular backups is important enough (that’s for another day, another post) but how about starting with a quality drive system? I’ve seen too many people buy drives for their edit systems based on price and price alone, only to be burned and burned bad. It’s like shopping around for a heart surgeon and going with the cheapest guy.

“Hi everybody!” “Hi Dr. Nick!”

I was told a story about an editor that was working on a big show for the Discovery channel for over 3 months, and 5 days before he was to master the show his drive system went down and all was lost. Every bit. There was no way to recover 3 months of work in time to make the broadcast date so they not only lost the job and all future work from Discovery, but 3 months of revenue that they had already worked for. Just pause and think about that. That’s the kind of thing that some companies can never recover from.

At Edit Creations we have a job that we do every year that lasts from January through the end of June (2 rooms, 5 days a week), creating multiple videos and various programs that all play at a show in July. Whenever we start to come down that home stretch I remember that story and start to get a bit nervous. I’m always making sure that our backups are in good shape.

This post is all about making sure the drives you buy are worthy of the work that you’re doing. Or more importanly, that you avoid the drives that are not.

Before I start, let me break it down a bit more. There are hard drive manufactures that create the raw hard drives (like Hatachi, Seagate and Maxtor to name a few) and then there are the companies that take those hard drives and create products that incorporate them. I will be discussing is the second group.

I have always been somebody that gravitates to people and companies that take pride in what they do. Having a passion for whatever you do means that you’ll turn out something better then the guy who looks at something as “just a job” or “just a way to make a buck”. There are companies like Apple and Jet Blue that provide quality products and service, because they take pride in what they do and what they put out there. They may not always be perfect or make the right decisions, but they do their best to right their wrongs. It’s evident from the moment you pick up a MBP and feel it in your hands. It’s a beautiful piece of hardware, and you can’t deny that, even if you are a lover of the PC. The same with Jet Blue. Take a flight with them and it’s very clear that they’re all about making your experience with them second to none.

The two companies I’m going to outline here do not fit this model in my opinion, and I have plenty of personal experience to back it up in both cases.

Offender #1 – Lacie
Products – Any of the “Quadra” drives

Back in 2003-2004 I invested in some of the then popular Lacie drives (they were just called Lacie drives, no quadra model name back then). The drives seemed nice on the surface. They came in multiple capacities, they were FW400, and later 800, the enclosures were a nice solid metal and if you were to hold one in your hand it felt nice and solid.

I started buying them when I noticed other editors were using them, and even started to see them during product demos and I figured if they were using them they must be good. I started to recommend them to my clients as well. I should have done my research though.

Over the next 2 years I purchased more and more drives, and eventually ended up with around 12 of them of varying sizes. Some with single drives, some with dual and one with 4 drives in a single case.

Over the next few years I started having a few issues. First, some of the dual drive systems would literally unmount themselves while editing. Our usual setup was to have one of them for the video drive and one for the project files (we were only doing DV25/DV50 at the time), and while you were editing one would just drop off from time to time. All of the media would suddenly go “off line” and we usually had to reboot to get it all working again.

The drives had their own dedicated FW800 card so they were not on the internal bus system, and thus there was no other overhead, just 2 drives hooked into a 3-port FW800 card.

Then we noticed that when doing long copies from one drive to the next (cloning a drive) we would be hard pressed to get it to finish. The drive would at some point stop copying the data, and the blue light on the front would just flash on and off while emitted a steady and slow tapping sound.

The final clincher was when the drives would just fail. The internal HD’s just started to crap out and we actually lost data (however we did have backups of everything). A quick search on google turned out tons of people having the same issue. The general consensus was that the drives were overheating. The drives are very tightly packed into an enclosure that has no fans and no air flow, thus no real way to drop the temperature aside from it transferring the heat through the metal case. Apparently, that wasn’t enough.

At the Chicago Final Cut Pro User Group I started talking to people and found out other editors had had the same problem. In one case a drive was only 6 weeks old when it died, and the editor lost all of the captured footage. I also had one client call me in a panic because I had previously recommended that he buy Lacie for his backup drive, but his drive was dead (in his case the power supply blew so we were able to save the data by taking the enclosure apart and putting the drive in a new case).

I happened to be going to NAB that year (2006) so I went right up to the Lacie booth and told them some of my stories, told them how it was all over the web and asked what they were doing to address it. Mind you, I did this in a very professional manner, since at that point I still assumed it was a problem they were working on. His reply was that “As far as we know there is no problem, so there are no plans to make any changes”. There was no interest in getting additional information from me or looking into the issue any further.

So there they were at NAB, selling drives to media professionals who make their living on keeping their data safe, pushing a product with a higher then normal failure rate.

At that point I made the decision to get all of our drives replaced regardless of cost. When I got back from NAB we listed all of our LaCie drives on eBay (the working ones anyway) and bought brand new G-Raid drives to replace them – but only after doing several weeks of research. That was probably one of the smartest business decisions I made that year. Suddenly we didn’t have any of the issues we had before, the drives generally ran faster and there were no more heat issues. Zero problems, even now. We have since moved up from the G-Raid drives to getting 2 G-SpeedXL Fibre Raids, and those too work flawlessly. The older G-Raid drives are used for travel jobs and a few are on our internal backup server running 24/7.

The difference in my opinion is that the people at G-Technology (now owned by Hatachi) only put out the best products they can. They test their drives rigorously and guarantee the number of streams you can get in real time while editing.

I remember before I decided to go with them I called their office and asked to speak to an engineer (not a sales guy). I explained my situation, told him the other vendors I was considering and asked him why I should choose their drives over the others. Their drives were more expensive then the other ones I was looking at.

He explained to me that they are constantly testing the different hard drives that they put into the units because not all drives are equal, and that from their testing the only drives that consistently lived up to their performance benchmarks were Hatachi drives (at that time there were not part of Hitachi so they could use any drives at all). He said that while they were more expensive drives, they wanted to be sure what they sent out reached the standards they had set, and that other vendors could just take whatever drives they could get the best deal on that month and toss them in.

He also mentioned how they were big on keeping the drives cool so that they would last. For me he pushed all of the right buttons, and I bought 2 drives right over the phone for testing, and later purchased several more.

One more note about Lacie. Not that long ago I ran into a past employee of Lacie. As soon as I realized he used to work there I asked him about the heat/drive failure issue. He admitted that they were aware of it, and that internally there were people who wanted to address the problem, but that it was ultimately ignored by the higher ups. He said that one of the reasons he ultimately left had to do with quality issues that he felt were not getting addressed.

To be fair, Lacie does make other drives and some are probably very good. I have one of their rugged mini drives and I do like it. It’s well made and is priced right. I don’t use the drive for mission critical tasks so I felt OK giving it a try. But in general, a company that does not respond to their customers complaints is not a company I want to do business with.

Offender #2 – Granite Digital
Products – Swappable Drive Bays

As I’ve mentioned in some previous posts about archiving, up until the last year or so we’ve used a system of hard drives as our long term archive. We used a removable drive system and trays that allowed us to buy off the shelf IDE (now SATA) drives and backup entire projects with ease. We would then keep a catalog of every drive (using a great program called CD Finder. Don’t let the name fool you it does a lot more then CD’s. We still use it to keep track of our LTO tapes.) so that pulling things up later would be quick and easy. It was cost effective, efficient, and at least for a time it worked out great. Until we started to pull things off the drives.

We had purchased 3 FireVue drives from a company called Granite Digital and the products were a bit disappointing right from the beginning. Again, I didn’t do the research that I should have.

To make a very long story short, what we realized as time went on was that the drives had some sort of error transferring data and would, on occasion, prevent files from properly backing up or in some cases they were backed up fine but would not restore. Files would be too corrupt to open at all, or in the case of QT files there would be both audio in video “digital hits” that made the movies useless. We started using ChrnoSync to try to retrieve files from the drives without any errors using the “verify” option, but what we ended up with was a list of errors, which confirmed the problem. If we repeatedly tried to get the files we could get some of them successfully, but there were some that just wouldn’t transfer and were lost.

Sample QT Movie

To their credit tech support was very helpful, at least to the point of telling us all of the things on our end it might be. From OS problems, cables, software and on and on. We have 3 different units on 3 different machines and they all had the same exact issue, but somehow they were able to say with absolute confidence, that the problem could not be their drives. This is a quote from one of my exchanges from tech support.

“I can appreciate your concerns but would have to totally disagree as to the reliability of our hardware. That’s not to say you don’t have a bad component that could create problems but rather to say our stuff works as good if not better than most.”

Well, I disagreed then and still do.

Companies that take a defensive attitude when confronted with potential problems are doomed to fail. Nobody is perfect and no company is perfect. Most people know and accept this, but then it all comes down to how the company responds to mistakes. In this case every solution offered had to do with my system being flawed, which in the end it was not.

Their tech support finally wore me down and I stopped asking for their help. I sometimes wonder if that’s part of the plan.

We are currently in the progress of migrating all of our drives to LTO tapes using the Series-A Backup Drive from Cache~A. The only way we can even get some of that data off the old hard drives is to remove the drives from the trays and create a direct connection with a IDE to USB adaptor. Then it all comes off smoothly.

On top of this issue, one of their rack mountable units was $600 and when I received it it was made of very cheap bendable metal (it felt like it was cut out of a single piece of tin and bent into a case using pliers), it didn’t fit right in the rack, no cables were included and on the back was a single FW port, meaning you couldn’t even loop anything else off of it. Except for the smallest portable devices where space is an issue this is unacceptable in my book.

I emailed the company and never received a reply, but instead received a package a few weeks later with a cable and a new back plate to replace the one built into the unit. OK, not bad – but why wasn’t it right in the first place?

The SuiteTake

I’ve singled out 2 companies that I’ve had bad experiences with. The good news is there are a lot more good then bad companies out there.

I would suggest you deal with companies that specialize in creating drives for media professionals, and have a good, accessible tech support staff. Don’t be afraid to call them on the phone and ask the hard questions before you buy. When you’re having trouble nothing beats being able to pick up the phone and get immediate help. This has been my experience with G-Technology and AJA specifically. Two companies with first rate tech support and really great people.

Remember, if you’re a media professional the hard drives you use are the fort knox of your data. Everything that you do comes down to those files be safe and accessible on your hard drive. This is no place to cheap out, and a little extra money spent here can go a long way towards avoiding much more costly disasters.

And now, introducing the SuiteTake App Store! Well, ok not really. It just seams as though everybody is getting rich selling apps these days so why not jump up on that band-wagon? The proliferation of the iPhone App Store, and the many others imitators from Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and on and on, it’s important to take a step back every now and then and remember that they still do make cool apps for regular computers too. And it may be hard to believe but some of them actually aren’t flashlights.

The following is a brief list of 5 cool apps that we just love to have on all our Macs. All 5 are what I would call utility and workflow type apps, they’re not things like After Effects or Firefox, apps that are essentially the core function of your Mac. These are little ditties that just make life, and work, that much easier.

Everyone goes through a learning curve when it come to technology and computers. You begin as a novice and learn more and more over time until you become very streamlined and efficient with the tasks you do everyday, whether it’s crunching spreadsheets or compositing layers. Even though the latest and greatest versions of OSX and Windows have come a long way to improving upon the efficient user experience they still leave a lot of things up to third parties to fill in the gaps. For most of us there will come a time in our learning curve where we have become so advanced and efficient that our software actually gets in our way, we can think and process what we want to do much faster than we can type and click. These few apps go a long way in solving these types of problems.

iStat Menus

This nifty app lives at the top of your menu bar

This nifty little app is a great for those of us who need to see whats happening under the hood of our Macs. It’s a complete system monitoring app that displays information as tiny icons at the top of your menu bar. It monitors in real time your CPU and Memory, Date and time, drives, network, and temps fans and power. Everything is customizable and user configurable via a pane in your system preferences. You can select which items you want to see, change their appearance, and even their order from left to right.

I find iStat most useful in two ways. First, by monitoring the network and CPUs I can see at a glance the status of any processes that are going on and whether or not they have stalled. All of a sudden I may notice that an app has crashed and is pegging the CPUs, I can then just force quit the app and go on without any more trouble. And secondly, this one of those small things that I just love about apps like this, is that the OSX menu bar does not include the date as a number, it can only display the day of the week. iStat Menu displays a little iCal looking calendar page right next to OSX’s day and time. I use this feature every single day and love it.

iStat Menus is free (with a suggested donation) from the fine folks at iSlayer.com

Default Folder X

DFX adds a translucent border to your open and save dialogues

Default Folder X is an app that now that I have it I don’t know how I ever worked without it. Directly from their website: “Default Folder X makes Mac OS X’s Open and Save dialogs work as quickly as you do.” One of the biggest time wasters in any workflow when you have to deal with a lot of files and folders is opening and saving and just navigating through endless strings of folders upon folders. When I want to open or save something I just want to hit a key and bam, move on. Default Folder X adds a translucent overlay to your open and save dialogue boxes that offers several time-saving shortcuts. These shortcuts point straight to recent, open, and favorite folders that you can customize and even delegate among different applications. It beefs up spotlight’s power by allowing you to add your own search keywords on the fly. One feature of Default Folder X that I was amazed wasn’t part of OSX is the addition of hierarchical pop-up menus. You can easily mouse through the menus straight to the folder you need without click after click.

I have found that the recent destination button and being able to select already open Finder windows as the most useful. There are loads of other features that I simply haven’t gotten around to customizing yet, probably because I’m so happy with the few that I use daily.

Default Folder X is well worth it at $34.95 from the people at St. Clair Software

LaunchBar

Take this Dock!

LaunchBar is perfect for those of use who are keyboard shortcut obsessed, which, as editors, most of us are. If you are keyboard shortcut obsessed then you strive to do as much as possible without ever touching a mouse. You know all the commands in FCP, AE, PS, OSX, and even their Windows equivalents whenever the need arises. You even know the illusive CNTRL+EJECT command to activate the Shutdown/Sleep/Restart box. LaunchBar is for you. The best way to use LaunchBar is to set it up to automatically launch at login. It is activated by a configurable shortcut, we use CNTRL+Space. When you enter the shortcut a little menu drops down from underneath your menu bar, you then begin typing what you want to do. Most commonly this is the name of an application you want to launch. For instance, when I want to launch FInal Cut Pro I press CNTRL+Space then F-I-N. As soon as you begin typing a contextual menu drops down with suggestions that match what you are typing, when Final Cut Pro appears just hit enter and the app launches. LaunchBar remembers what keystrokes you use to launch what apps and makes life even easier. When I want to launch Mail all I need to do is type CNTRL+Space, M, and Enter. Now I’m not knocking the Dock, it’s fast and convenient, but for a keyboard shortcut junkie LaunchBar is the way to go.

There are dozens of additional features packed into LaunchBar from Spotlight searching, recent documents, web searching, iTunes browsing, Address Book entries, and so on. I love it for simply launching apps and constantly find myself hitting CNTRL+Space on Macs that don’t have it.

LaunchBar is approximately $34, actually €24.00, from the folks across the pond at Objective Development (They also make Little Snitch which is another gem)

1Password

Try and steal my HampsterDance.com login now!

It seems as though you can’t check the weather these days without logging in with some username and password. Username and password overload is a real problem these days with having literally dozens of logins all across the internet from Amazon, to eBay, to your bank, even SuiteTake! Very commonly people, myself included, resort to using the same username and password again and again across multiple sites just to allow yourself a fighting chance at actually remembering one. it doesn’t take an internet security genius to figure out that this can be a huge security risk to your business and personal life.

1Password is a utility that creates, stores, and recalls strong passwords for you right in your web browser. Any time you go a site where a password is required shortcuts that install in your browser allow you to create a password, that can be customized from simple to incredibly complicated, enter it in the proper fields then stores it for subsequent use. When you return to the site later you just hit the 1Password button and it autofills your password information. It works with almost any common web browser like Safari, Firefox, and Opera.

There’s not much more that needs to be said, if a thief managed to get one of your un-secure passwords they could run amok all over the internet with it. Using 1Password easily thwarts would-be criminals.

1Password also saves credit card information to speed up checkout processes and has portability features that allow you to access your saved password information when you’re at a computer other than yours. A handy iPhone app is also available. It is $39.95 from Agile Web Solutions.

MPEG Streamclip

De-mux anything that needs de-muxing.

Ok, this one falls out of the same categories as the apps above but I had to include it because this app has been a savior countless times across editing forums.

Have you ever needed to de-mux a DVD VOB file? If you’re an editor of any kind, yes, yes you have been given a DVD Video and been asked to incorporate it into a project. Hum, what the heck is a VOB file? Certainly not a edit friendly format.

MPEG Streamclip is a video converter app that, among many other things, can de-mux DVD VOB files to user-friendly Quicktime and Windows formats. Just pop in a DVD, select your settings and walk away as it converts everything for you.

Yes, there are many apps out there that do the same things that MPEG Streamclip does but the catch is that MPEG Streamclip is free! Yes, it’s a free app that is in version 1.9.2 and has been around for years. And yes, it does work and is reliable enough for a professional environment.

MPEG Streamclip Free at Squared 5

The SuiteTake

If you’re not there yet, one day you’ll get to a point where your efficiency with you computer outpaces your ability to click and type fast enough. There are hundreds of useful apps like these out there that go a long way in helping improve upon that efficiency and overall user experience. these are just 5 of them, the list could go on and on and on. The best part is that the most expensive app listed here is less than 40 bucks. Drop a little cash and save yourself hours of frustration.

And please, offer your favorite gems bellow as comments. I’m sure there are loads of apps out there yet to be discovered, we’d love to hear about them.

So while it’s true that I am in fact a Mac Addict, I also consider myself a well rounded computer nerd. So it shouldn’t be too surprising that I’ve been using the beta version of Windows 7 almost since it came out. While most of what I do is on the Mac, there’s no avoiding using the accounting computer when I do invoicing and receivables (yes I know there is QB for the Mac but there are many issues with it and that’s a whole different conversation). And I can tell you from personal experience that Visa has been pretty slow and buggy for me.

Another way we use Windows is to check WMV files. While you can check them using Flip4Mac, VLC Player and the really outdated Windows Media Player for Mac, there are technical issues with all of all of these when it comes to doing a 100% QC check. In recent weeks we’ve had to watch over 100 VMV files, start to finish, to check them before sending them out for a huge Wachout presentation. The only true method we found of checking them, with confidence, was installing Boot Camp onto one of our machines and booting into Windows natively. It’s amazing how much better the files looked, and how much more smoothly they would play in that environment.

So when the free beta version of Windows came out a few months ago and I started hearing good things about it, I decided to give it a try. I installed it as both a virtual machine on my MBP, as well as a Boot Camp volume natively. What really struck me was that running Windows 7 under virtualation inside the Mac OS was actually faster than running Vista natively on our accounting PC (a 2 year old laptop).

When running in under Boot Camp, it screams and feels very fast and fluid.

I wasn’t planning on sharing this on the blog but recently Microsoft did something they’ve never done before. They lowered the price for all pre-orders to $50 for a upgrade version of Windows Home Premium. That means if you have a copy of XP or Vista, you can upgrade for $50 for a limited time. Once the software is released on October, the price goes up to $119. Full versions are $199 and up.

So if you have a PC in your life, this is worth buying. If you’re not sure, download the Public Beta of it now and run it using Boot Camp or Sun VirtualBox. Both are free! If you like it, get on board and buy it before the price more then doubles. It’s what Vista always wanted to be. I purchased 2 copies, one to run on my laptop in virtual mode, and one for our QC Boot Camp machine.

And don’t hate me because I use a PC. I’m still a Mac at heart.

Click here to buy it on Amazon.com

For several years now I’ve made it a habit to read business periodicals as well as business books. As a business owner I feel it’s imperative to learn from those with more experience than myself, and I have to say I enjoy it more then I would have ever imagined. I keep up to date with Inc. Magazine and read between 4 and 10 business books a year. Some are good, some not so good, but I always seem to walk away with something of value.

It’s been quite some time since I was really excited about a business book, but I just finished reading one that I thought I would share. The book is called “The Knack:How Street-Smart Entrepreneurs Learn to Handle Whatever Comes Up“, and is written by Norm Brodsky, Bo Burlingham, both writers at Inc. Magazine.

The book is written in an interesting way. Throughout the book, between different topics/chapters, questions from business owners are read and answered by Norm. By writing the book in this way a diverse number of topics and questions are covered that are not necessarily covered in the book otherwise.

Topics covered include how to decide if a new business is worth pursuing, how to raise capital to start a business, non-traditional ways to compensate your sales people, ways to detect unhappy customers and make sure you don’t lose them, the decision to grow or not to grow your business and when to ask for help from other business professionals.

One of my favorite parts of the book is when Norm discusses business plans, and says that before you put any effort into a business plan you need to first come up with a life plan. Ask yourself what you want out of your life in the next 5 or 10 years, and be very detailed. Maybe it’s more money, more time for vacation, the ability to travel with your family, or maybe it’s to reach a certain milestone in your company. The point is, you can’t decide what you want out of your business until you know what you want out of life. By planning one without looking at the other you run the risk of moving further and further away from the things that actually make you happy in life. I found this especially powerful and I reflected on it for several days.

While nothing in this book is specific to the media industry, like many business books the lessons learned can easily be applied to any business. And even if you’re not a typical “business owner”, you are still in business for yourself in one way or another. Even if you have a staff position, you are still the President of your own personal company. You still need to market yourself, continue to grow and improve yourself, and at some point move onto another staff position and sell yourself again.

If you are a freelance editor, this is even more true. You don’t need to have your own facility and staff to learn and apply valuable lessons from a book like this. As a freelancer you really are out there selling yourself and your skill set everyday. Books like this one can give you an edge over your competitors.

If you’re like me and have a hard time keeping up with reading, this book is also available as an audio download from Audible.com. If it wasn’t for my iPod and Audible, I would not be able to consume as many books as I do now.

I hope you enjoy this book as much as I did, and look forward to your comments and emails.

To those that know me it will come as no surprise that I’m a backup nerd. Since owning my first DAT drive in the mid 90’s that held a grand total of 2 gigs per tape (compressed) I’ve been interested in backup technology, redundancy and “playing it safe” when it comes to my data. That trend has been extended to my business for the benefit of my company as well as my clients.

This post will discuss a new backup appliance being introduced at NAB this year, and cover in general terms how we currently use its predecessor in our workflow. Even if you have your own method of archiving and don’t need anything at this time, you might want to read about our process toward the end of the post to see if you can benefit from it at all.

A Brief History – The Wrong Way
From 2002-2007 we used a hard drive backup system at our office that was working OK, but was starting to show signs of fatigue. With about 45 drives on the shelf (300-400 gigs each), some of the drives were 5 years old now and on occasion we would have problems retrieving files on some of the older drives.

There has been plenty written about the expected life of hard drives, the need to exercise them and the amount of time they will last on a shelf without regular use. No matter which side you’re on or what your personal belief is, I can tell you from first hand experience that we were losing data and I was getting very concerned. What use is a backup system that slowly loses its files over such a short period of time.

Back in April 2007 I went to NAB in part to find a new backup strategy (and in part to just relax in the hotel spa). After looking at plenty of solutions and talking to plenty of vendors, I came across the LTO A-Series drives from Quantum. It had some really great features that nobody else offered at the time, and was targeted to post production professionals. Some of the features include…

• Built on the LTO-3 standard, you could fit 400 gigs of storage per tape (tapes were about $50 each at the time, and even cheaper now).
• It was network accessible over Gigabit Ethernet. If you have multiple edit systems like we do, this is pretty big. You can park the machine anywhere on the network and access it from any local machine. With other solutions you have to move the drive from machine to machine as needed.
• No special software needed – using a standard FTP client or their built in web browser client you could backup and retrieve files with ease. It’s truly platform independent.
• The drive was based on the LTO open standard (there was also a SDLT version if you prefer). The two main benefits of this are that it’s an open standard that was created by Seagate, HP and IBM and the tapes have a 30 year shelf life.
• Each tape has it’s own built-in file system on the tape, so loading the tape directory and locating a file is fast and very responsive. No need to have a separate catalog file that you have to keep track of.

Implementing the A-Series Solution
The drive was not shipping at the time, but would be later that year. I patiently waited and in the fall of 2007 purchased the desktop version of the A-Series and a case of tapes.

This is where I’m supposed to tell you that everything went smoothly and rainbows were flowing out of the tape drive. Well, that was not the case. I’ll spare you the particulars and just say it took us almost 6 months, countless emails to tech support and a major software/firmware update to finally trust the drive with the long term safety of our projects. To their credit, the Quantum support staff and engineers were first rate in the way they responded to each and every problem we had. As annoying as I’m sure we were, they never made us feel we were any trouble even when we sometimes lost our patience.

In early 2008 they released a major software/firmware update that addressed 99.9% of our issues, and since then it has been smooth sailing. We have not had a single issue with archiving or retrieving elements and have found ways to turn the drive into a new revenue stream as well.

The Future is NOW (or at least very soon)
So here we are approaching another NAB, 2 years after my first introduction to the Quantum A-Series drive, and it just got better. I’m so excited and impressed with what’s coming out that I’m considering selling my current A-Series drive and buying the newer model. But, the new drives are not from Quantum. They’re from Cache-A.

Cache-A is a new startup company that has licensed the A-Series technology from Quantum so that they could build on the platform that Quantum created. They have some of the key players that helped create the original drive, and some seriously good people that have really thought through how to improve the new drive. Much of their feature list no doubt comes from feedback from the current customer base.

Here are the highlights of the new drives from Cache-A.

• The new drives are all based on the LTO-4 standard. This is huge, because now each tape can hold 800 gigs, double of the LTO-3 model from Quantum. That brings the price down to about 6¢ per gig. Wow!
• The drive is backwards compatible, and can read any LTO-3 tapes created with the Quantum A-Series drives. This is very smart, because it means upgrading from the previous model is very easy.
• The file system on each tape is now an open standard, which was not true before. This means that you can exchange a tape with anybody who has a standard LTO-4 drive. In the past, you both needed to have a A-Series drive to read the content. This was one of my biggest concerns with this solution originally, and it’s nice to see it has been fixed. No need to be that proprietary.
• The file system supports original metadata from source files, and they’ve made it clear they are adding to this support in the future.

I have requested an evaluation unit once they’re shipping, and if I get my hands on one I’ll do a follow up hands on review of the drive. For the previous review that Scott Roberts did on the Quantum A-Series drive we currently own, check out his post.

Looking a little further down the road, there are plans for the LTO format to progress with LTO-5 and LTO-6. LTO-5 will have a capacity of 1.6 TB per tape, and LTO-6 will hold 3.2 TB per tape. Time will tell if the technology continues down this path, but so far history has proven this format to be very robust and successful.

The Workflow
So how do we use the drive in our post production work flow? Here are the broad strokes.

Deciding What/When To Archive
All editing projects are archived to tape once the project has been complete and unchanged for 3 months or longer. It’s usually flagged for backup right around the 3 month mark by the primary editor on the project after conferring with the client. The backup will include all elements in the job (with the exception of digitized or imported original camera media) as well as a final master QT export of the project in it’s original format. If the client would like to include original camera media, we will do so for an extra charge based on the amount of space they need. This process is quick and easy since all projects use the project folder system I outlined in a previous post.

Once a project is marked for backup (by using colored labels in the Finder) it is moved into a folder called “Archive-Projects”. On the first of every month our assistant editor Scott goes to each edit system, verifies that each project has a master export, and creates backup folders that each contain roughly 400 gigs of files. We’ve found from experience that pre-organizing the folders/files in the finder prior to backup works much better then trying to do it all during the transfer process.

Performing The Backup
At this point it’s a matter of putting a blank tape in the drive and logging into the drive using your standard web browser. Using the client side software through the web browser you start the transfer by a simple drag and drop.

It takes roughly 3 to 3.5 hours to fill a 400 gig tape, but since this can run in the background it’s no problem to continue working on the computer. Once the transfer is complete, you get a confirmation message telling you that everything was successful, or a list of any problems that occurred during the backup process.

Once the projects are all successfully archived (as verified by Scott), he then turns the folders another color, indicating to me that the projects are safely archived and ready to be removed. Where removing projects is concerned, I’m a bit of a control freak and prefer that I’m the only one that deletes project folders and media. If a mistake is ever made and something is deleted by accident, I would rather be mad at myself.

Removing All Project Assets With A Simple Search
For the last part of this process I sit at the edit computer and load all of the media drives in the office (we have 2 raid systems totaling 20 TB of space, but a few years ago we had several G-Raid drives on each system). Using the job number from each job that has been archived, I do a file search for any and all files related to that job number across all drives. By doing this, I am able to not only delete the project folder, but all render files, capture scratch, project archives and so on. Once I have them all in the same window I give them a quick review – and then select them all and delete them. I then move onto the next project and repeat the step.

Keeping It Accessible
You may be wondering how we find files once they’re on the tapes. After all, we have over 25 tapes now and finding a single QT movie would be a nightmare without some sort of system in place. Well that’s the final step.

As each tape is filled, we mount it on the desktop of the computer and use a program called CD Finder to create a catalog file of all contents of the tape. This usually only takes a few minutes per tape. Once complete, the tape is in the CD Finder database and can be searched from any computer in the office without the tape being loaded. Once we find what we’re looking for, we load the appropriate tape and retrieve the files. It has turned out to be a great system.

The Payoff
So in the end, we have all of our important files backed up and safe for the next 30 years, they’re cataloged in a way that allows us to find a file in minutes, sometimes seconds, and we’ve made a small profit along the way by charging for the backup process and tape stock used. What started out as just pure overhead has turned into a income stream.

The SuiteTake
The amount of digital media attached to any single post production project is growing leaps and bounds at an alarming rate. Only a few years back having 1TB of storage per edit system seemed like a bottomless pit, and now we have 10TB per machine and at times are running low on space. The list of files to archive keeps growing, and if your workflow has includes tapeless media you have probably already been pushed to the limit.

One way to stay on top of managing your space is to do regular archives to a safe format that not only frees up drive space for new projects, but gives you peace of mind that all past projects are there when you need them.

As much as everybody wants to move away from tape, I still believe when it comes to reliability, cost per gig and shelf life, there’s still nothing better out there to archive your data. And I have literally put my money and company behind that belief. If you’ve been looking for a long term backup solution, I highly suggest you check out the new line of drives from Cache-A. If you can’t see them at NAB, be sure to check out their website or call them directly for more information. You won’t meet a nicer bunch of guys interested in helping you out.

See For Yourself
As of this writing, prices have not been set yet but I’m hoping they’re in the same area (or cheaper) then what the Quantum drives were selling for, which was about $7K for a single drive unit. If you’re going to NAB, be sure to stop by and visit them at booth SL-9605.

Back in 2003 when I converted my basement to full blown edit suite (a year long process), it was both a blessing and curse all at once. Gone was the commute and fighting with Chicagoland traffic. I could sleep in later and “get home” from work earlier. Sounds great! But the flip side of that, if you don’t have a serious commitment to putting up work/personal life barriers, you are always at your office and always working. And clients know that too. So what’s to stop you from working late into the evening or over the weekend? As I found out, not much.

First home edit suite, 2003

Basement edit suite, 2004

Luckily, the home edit suite was short lived. In less then a year my wife and I had outgrown it and had to get office space or we would lose some of the larger jobs. The separation of work from home life was back in balance. However, there have been times that I wished the suite was back at home. It’s one thing to stick around the office to edit, but it’s another to stick around watching a render bar or compression bar just so you can finish and upload a file. What if you could do this from home? And what if it was free to you assuming that you already have a high speed internet connection at your home and office? Well, I’m hear to tell you that the solution is not only out there, but it’s a lot easier to get setup then you might think.

I’m sure by now everybody knows about MobileMe and Back To My Mac on the Macintosh (just try to get Back To My Mac working reliably though) and services like GoToMyPC.com (now supporting the Mac platform). There is also a client/server based service called HamachiX for Mac, but I could never get that to work reliably and it would often get very frustrating. About a year ago I found a free service called LogMeIn.com, which supports both Mac and PC. They’re goal is to get you hooked on their free service, and then have you upgrade to one of their paid accounts. But for what i use it for the free version is perfect. I now have several computers registered with them and use it at least weekly, sometimes every day. It has become an important tool in my toolbox.

How It Works
The concept is very simple. You create an account at LogMeIn.com. Make sure you sign up for the free service to start, it’s not always obvious that it’s available. I actually had trouble finding it when I started writing this article. Once you have an account, you download the client software that you install on every computer that you want to control. The installation is very fast, and during the setup you enter some account information that they provide you when you setup your account.

Once you install the software, it takes you to the LogMeIn.com website and registers that computer as one of your computers. You’re able to keep everything in one master list of computers, or create groups of different computers as I’ve done here.

One of the great and flawless things that the LogMeIn.com service does is get around all of the routers hubs and firewalls of your network. Our network is by no means complicated, but it’s not just an open network either. We have a cable modem, Apple Airport Extreme router, and about 5 switches in multiple locations on the network. And not once have I had a problem navigating through all of that to the machine I wanted. Hell, I can’t even get iChat to work at the office half the time.

At home it’s a similar setup. Cable modem, Time Machine wireless router and a few switches. There have even been a few times that I was at Panera Bread and wanted to start downloading something on the server at the office, and did so with great success. That says a lot because if you’ve spent any time on the free wifi from Panera, you know how painfully slow and frustrating it can be.

If you want to get really crazy, there is an iPhone application from LogMeIn.com as well, allowing you to perform all of the same functions but using your iPhone. I have not tried this, but if you have please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Putting It To Use
Once you’ve setup one or more computers, it’s just a matter of logging into the LogMeIn.com home page and you’re taken to your list of registered computers. From the list you can tell which ones are on-line and available, and which ones are not. Just click on the computer, enter a name and password and you’re in. Your browser window transforms into the desktop of the connected computer, or you can make it full screen and get the full experience being in front of the remote computer. Nearly all keyboard shortcuts that you would use locally work as expected (I’ve found a few that do not and randomly quit the browser).

This is one of those situations where seeing it in action goes a lot further then me telling you. See my real-time demonstration of it at work by watching the video at the end of this post.

How This Can Help You In Your Business
I have found many uses for LogMeIn. The initial problem was getting used to the idea that I didn’t have to hang out at the office for everything that needed to get done. Here are a few examples.

Post Edit Output
By far the biggest use we’ve had for it is web approvals. For example, it’s the end of the day and you’re finally ready to show the client your masterpiece. The typical process for us is the export a self-contained QuickTime Movie to the project folder, take that into compressor and create a H.264 QT movie file optimized for the web, take the output from compressor and into our Dreamweaver Template, create a web approval page with all of the necessary details, sync that to the server and send the client the approval link. With the exception of the compressor step, it all goes very quick. But unfortunately, if we have a long video to post the compressor step can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2-3 hours (we’ve tested the Elgato Turbo.264 USB key, but the output is not as good and the files tend to be larger. It is fast though).

Using LogMeIn.com, this has changed. When the edit is over and the master is exported, we take into compressor and start the conversion. We prep the web page with everything except for the final video file, and leave. Then the editor, from home that evening checks in when the file is done being compressed (we’re sent email notifications from compressor as each file finishes – or fails), finishes the web page and sends the link via email on the edit computer. Total time spent about 5 minutes. The big differences is that all of the time you would have waited around, is now spent at home.

Check The Status
From checking the progress of an AE render, FCP export or making sure a large copy in the finder completed, getting peace of mind is fast and easy. How many times have you left something going in compressor just to find out that it crashed 5 minutes after you left and you had no idea. Now, even if you can’t fix it remotely, you know what you’re in for before you get there.

We’ve also used it to check on large DVD runs. Our duplicator usually runs flawlessly, but on runs of 500 or more it occasionally gets hung up and has to be reset. Again, in this case there’s not much we can do to fix the problem remotely, but just knowing that somebody has to go in early to fix so that we make the deadline it is a huge help.

Creating DVD’s
While this is not an ideal way to create a DVD by any means, in a pinch it can be very helpful. There have been a handful of occasions that I received a last minute panicked call that a client now wanted a DVD instead of a web approval. At the very least I could login and start the compression so that the DVD was a quick output in the morning. In most cases though I can get the entire process done right up to saving a disk image that the assistant can burn as soon as he gets in and then messenger it out.

Grab Files Remotely
While the edit computers themselves can not share files outside of the office, it’s no big deal to login to grab some files and upload them to a FTP server so that they can be downloaded elsewhere. When I was out of town on a remote job there was a situation where I needed a graphic element from a current job that I had forgot to bring with me. It was an animated background in QT format. No problem. I logged into the edit system, dragged the QT movie to a program called FileChute, and emailed myself the link from the edit system. Ten minutes later I had the file downloaded on my remote edit system and the client was blown away (these sorts of things can really make you look like a hero).

These are just some of the ways we’ve found it can help. I’m sure based on your own projects and work flow you’ll come up with new ones of your own. If you do, feel free to leave a comment on the blog and share it with others.

See For Yourself
Click on the link below to see a real-time demonstration of just how easy it is. To sign up for your own free account, just go to LogMeIn.com and you’ll be up and running in just minutes.

I’m not sure exactly when it all started, but over the last several months I’ve been having permission issues while using OSX. Every so often I’ll go to save a file in a folder I should have access to – and I’m told that I don’t have permission to do so. Normally it’s a local drive, but it happens with network drives as well. I thought maybe it was something specific to Tiger, but recently we updated to OSX Leopard and the problem actually got worse. And when I say “upgrade”, what I mean to say is we rebuilt each system from scratch, formatting a drive and reinstalling all apps from scratch. Our last few upgrades have been OS upgrades using the “Archive and Install” option, but we wanted to really start clean this time.

To make matters worse, I got tot he point last week where I had locked myself out of making any further changes somehow. We have a common folder on a local network server that we use for web approvals. It’s been there for years without having any problems at all. Then all the sudden, I couldn’t copy over my QT movie so that it could be processed with the rest of the files. I did the usual “get info” command, unlocked the pane with an administrator account, but when I tried to change the permissions it would not allow me to. I could click on any of the users or groups and set “Read & Write”, but as soon as I clicked off it it went back to either “Read Only”, or even worse “No Access”.

You might be thinking that I should just run Apple’s “Disk Utility” and choose to “Repair Permissions”. That would be great except that it’s not a boot drive. Disk Utility needs to have an installed version of OSX on whatever drive it’s to repair permissions on. Without a OS it has nothing to use to determine what the correct permissions are.

So an hour has passed now and I’m getting very frustrated, because nothing about this should be hard. So I did what every good editor does when backed into a corner. I did a google search on the problem.

What I turned up was a nifty little free utility (Donations requested via PayPal) called BatChmod. It allows you to change the file permissions any any file, any folder, or an entire drive with the click of a button. Sounds great, but you have to be careful too. Changing permissions on an entire drive, if done wrong, can cause serious access issues. Especially if it’s a boot drive.

It’s very simple to use. Open the program and follow these 3 simple steps.

Select the file, folder, or drive that you want to change permissions on.

Choose the user and groups that you want to apply to the selection, as well as what permissions “Everyone” will have.

Click Apply.

Your done! I did this with a pretty large folder and it happened so fast I thought that nothing happened. But in an instant, all of my permission problems were solved and I was able to (finally) finish my web approval.

Check it out for yourself and take control over your permission issues. You have my permission (sorry, couldn’t help myself).

This is the second of a two part series on the Quantum A-Series LTO drive. You can find part 1 here.

Once Quantum released the unbelievably fantastic Version 3 upgrade three months ago, any minor inconvenience we were having with the tape drive seemed to disappear. They really did a great job listening to client comments and fixed virtually every problem that needed to be addressed. The interface is more fluid (you used to not be able to adjust the size of the windows), and there is no longer a self-destruct button next to the eject button. There is now an automatic preventative measure in place to no longer lose the table of contents (a problem we had early in its use, it appeared worse than it actually was). We can fill the tapes up as full as we want (we used to need to add a cushion of space to prevent filling the tapes “too full”). I can now let my pals < and ? into the drive without concern. Oh, they can invite the rest of their friends as well, the blacklist is lifted! There is still only a 97 character limit for filenames, but only once in a blue moon do I export FCP movies titled…

“Saturday_Conference_With_Rebecca_and_Steve_Morricone_ Featuring_the_Brilliant_Antics _of_Reggie Montgomery_Which_Occurred_at_9AM_Eastern_Time _or_8AM_Central_Time_Which_Would _Make_More_ Sense Because_We_Live_in_Illinois.mov”

The actual process of putting (small named) files on the tape is an easy, 5 step process. It’s so simple that I was able to teach it to my cousin Eric in just a couple of minutes (FYI he sniffs a lot of glue, it’s hard to teach him things).

1. Organize everything you want to put on the tape into a folder, name it appropriately. We use a date coded folder based on the day of the backup.

2. Insert a tape with enough free space to hold your folder.

3. Open the drive’s server interface, and connect to the tape on the right side.

4. Locate your folder on the left hand side (which is the local side).

5. Drag it to the right side.

That’s it. It really is that easy. And that’s one of the best parts about this drive, it’s so incredibly easy. You can then watch the progress in the bottom part of the interface.

And it will let you know when it is done.

Taking things off of a tape is just as easy. Just drag the files from the right side to the left side!

Now I know what you’re thinking. “Hey Scott, I just backed up multiple terabytes on these LTOs, now I need to pull stuff off of them, but how do I know where anything is on these tapes???” Well, my amigo, that answer comes in the form of a sort of mashed together single word, CDFinder. This is a spectacular cataloguing tool that we used back for the IDE drives that still carries over to our tape use. We now have (at the time of this article posting) 46 archive tapes/drives. CDFinder helps us sift through all 46 places that a file could potentially be. The way to put a new tape into the catalog is unbelievably easy.

Just load the tape onto the desktop by going to Go > Connect to Server.

Then open CDFinder, and drag the tape to the left part of the CDFinder interface.

Hit “Create New”. And it will start to catalogue your tape.

This is sort of a buggy process, as the tape drive will claim to disconnect every few minutes or so, but it’s just an illusion, as it will eventually catalogue if you just let it do it’s thing. Then just rename the catalogued tape whatever it is you’d like to call it, as I’m sure you won’t want the sever number as the name of your tape (though, I do plan on naming my child “10.1.10.70 Roberts”. It works for a boy OR a girl!).

Then the process of finding things just requires that you hit “Find”.

Type in what you want to find.

And it will search ALL of your tapes, and find what you seek. This whole process it relatively intuitive, and as stated many times, abnormally simple.

I think I saw this once on a math test in 7th grade...

Now I know no one likes to hear it, but the A-Series isn’t exactly cheap at $8000. But hear us out here! Before we had the tape drive, back in the IDE external drive days, we archived everyone’s projects as a common courtesy. Just for our own well being knowing that projects come back from the dead after a while, that’s just how it goes. But with the longevity of the LTO tapes, backing up our clients projects has now become (in addition to a way to easily access old projects for use in current projects) a way for our clients to have long term storage of their valuable work. So we now charge our clients for each project that they have archived. Pulling things off of the tapes is free to them, but the initial archiving now costs them a small fee. This is a win-win for us and the clients, as they will have their projects safe for several decades, and we will pay off the expense of the drive in the near future, and even start making money on it! It’s an investment!

Sadly, the cashier at Target wouldn't let me buy an Xbox using LTO tapes instead of money.

I guess the underlying point of this was to let you know, if you happened to have doubts about LTO tape based archiving, you were right to perhaps have doubts in the past, but it all seems to be good now. The Quantum A-Series is a fantastic machine for archiving large amounts of media. I recommend the Quantum A-Series tape drive NOW, because it works good NOW. It is definitely faster to actually pull things off of it or put things on it compared to the IDE drives. It also importantly comes with the assurance that bad data blocks won’t get copied over, giving us very comfortable levels of security. I think what we expected it to do when we first got it, is finally happening ten fold in recent times. Bail on the hard drives, this is a good time to be tape based archiving. And you should make it an A-Series.

Our ever growing collection of filled LTO tapes.

In a future article we will look at how we use the LTO drives in combination with tapeless production cameras. Having a good workflow is the key to everything.

For more detailed specs on LTO technology in general, check out Wikipedia.

Archival of editing projects and tapeless camera originals is a hot topic these days, with opinions flying everywhere. Today’s post covers our experiences with both hard drives and the new A-Series LTO drive from Quantum.

In early 2008, we decided to switch to LTO tapes for all of our long term archiving.  We previously used external IDE drives (well, internal drives put in cases to make them external) for our backups.  They work decently for at least a while.  The problem was, it got to the point that we had to use Chronosync, a file synchronizing software, to bring back any element from a project because digital hits would appear in the video files due to bad data blocks copying over from the drives back onto our system.

Chronosync Error. The bane of my existence.

There is a “Verify Copied Data” function in Chronosync that detects any of these digital hits, and causes it to restart the copying until it got it right.  Sometimes it would take fifteen tries just to get it so that it wouldn’t have a hit in it.  It is easily one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever seen.  And you know it never happened 10% into the copy, it always cruelly waited 15 minutes for your 30 GB video to get to 92% before it decided it was going to restart.  And while the Chronosync’s verification worked in ensuring a good file, doing the verify literally slowed the copy speed down a drastic amount.

IDE Hard Drive, in a special case to make it external and loadable in a hard drive reader.

Another eventual downfall of  hard drive based archiving is the longevity of hardware itself.  Hard drives tend to only last a couple years or so.   So if you were hoping 20 years from now that the Johnson project is still on that cob web covered hard drive, you probably won’t be happy to see that your hard drive most likely won’t even turn on.   It takes a little TLC to make sure that hard drives last as long as they possibly can last.   Every month or so, you should connect each hard drive you use and “spin them” in order to keep them fresh.   If you let a hard drive sit dormant for too long, it will just give up on itself.   This can be annoying and time consuming when you have 30 hard drives.  Hard drives crave a lot of attention, just like that one hyper kid in my 8th grade math class who would run up and down the aisles waiving his arms.  But tape based archiving is great because you can just put the tapes on a shelf and ignore them for long periods of time, only using them when you want to.  They are said to last approximately 30 years.  And if you are wondering what you are going to do with the files on your tapes 30 years from now, man, you are thinking way too hard about the distant future.   We will probably have thought-controlled nano-archives implanted in our brains by then.

So, the LTO drive was a perfect upgrade.  It had the power of John Rambo, the speed of Barry Sanders, and the elegance of Jackie Onassis.

Before we go any further, perhaps we should take a moment to go over a brief history of the LTO tape, and discover its mysterious origins.  Unlike most of us humans, the LTO tape was born in a laboratory, in the late 1990s.  It was given the name Linear Tape Open, named after its grandfather Linear Tape Ostrofsky, who fought bravely in The War.  It is a magnetic tape, which was first publicly released in 2000, and was only big enough to hold a measly 100 GB, but it was adorable nonetheless.  LTO grew up fast though, and in 2007, it became capable of holding up to 800 GBs!  And the roadmap for he future looks bright as well. On average, the capacity of the LTO tapes has doubled every 2-3 years.

The tape capacity, coupled with its relatively cheap price tag ($30-$40 for the tapes), makes it a valuable asset to backing up large files, for instance, video files.  It is now one of the best selling tapes on the market.  Its most prominent use?  You guessed it, backup.

The Quantum A-Series tape drive.

But the tapes won’t do any good without a drive to put them in.  Believe me, I’ve tried everything; yelling at the tapes, bribing the tapes, waterboarding the tapes, nothing works!  Then I heard a rumor that they will do whatever you say if you put them in a tape drive.  Seems logical to me.  Now, there are several LTO drives on the market, and they do alright for their purpose I suppose.   But Quantum has created a special LTO drive, the A-Series drive.  This drive was created with the post production market in mind, particularly regarding large media backup.  One great selling point of the drive is that it has a built in server. With the build in server software there is no need for any additional software to do backups, and nothing to install.

In addition to that, the A-Series is network based, so it is highly convenient that the drive can be accessed by multiple computers, as opposed to the standard method of having to nomadically hook the drive up to each separate computer that you’d like to use it on, moving it around constantly.   This is one of (if not the only) LTO drive on the market that has this networking ability.

The Series-A server interface.

The actual process of putting files on, and taking files off of the tapes is done through the drive’s web interface.  It is highly convenient that you can archive a project and order new underwear on Amazon with the same program.  There are some problems with the interface, some of which got fixed in recent updates, others that still remain to this day.  For example, one thing that has gotten fixed since was in the right click drop down menu, the “Eject Tape” and “Erase Tape” commands were literally next to each other.  This is almost cartoon-like in its insanity, much like building a robot and putting the “Self Destruct” button half an inch away from its “Off” button.  But things like that got fixed upon request, hey, pobody’s nerfect.

A-Series Drive with tape loaded in. It's good to go!

One of the earliest problems with the drive was a simple confusion with the reality of deleting folders on a tape.  That reality is that you can’t. It’s all or nothing when it comes to tape based archiving.  It is a linear device and can’t be defragmented, much like video tape.  Though, it is possible to delete the contents of an entire tape.  So what that means is if you have a tape with 200 GB on it, and you add a 100GB video to the tape (see: WatchOut), and then you realize, “Oh wait, I already added that 100 GB video to a different tape last week!”  Unless you want to erase the previous 200 GB that were already on the tape, there is no way to delete the 100 GB of previously archived video that you just put on the new tape.  So that is lost space, and granted it is “cheap” tape (costing between $30-$40), but it still feels wasteful to lose ¼ of your tape due to this.  That has nothing to do with the hardware or the software, that simply has to do with tape in general.

Now, when you deal with the Series-A drive, you have to deal with a ton of characters.  A lot of them you will want nothing to do with.  Take Quotation Mark for example, never invite that guy to your house, he won’t shut up the whole time he’s there.  And don’t even get me started on Asterisk, you don’t want to know what he did at my cousin Tony’s wine mixer.  There is actually a blacklist of jerks that weren’t allowed into the LTO drive:

The Usual Suspects: I bet one of them is Keyser Soze.

If you attempted to sneak in any of these characters into your archive party, any file associated would get bounced out of the club with them (something I sadly know too well in real life…).  They just wouldn’t be included into the archive. This has to do with the fact that the software that was built into the drive is set to be very strict, and follow Windows format.   So all Mac people must conform to the tyranny of Bill Gates for at least one element of this process.

In previous versions of the software, there was little to no indication that anything was skipped at all, because the transfer summary that shows in the interface used to not exactly work (which was related to a Java problem I believe).  In addition to that, when you would put files on a tape (if I filled a tape with 345 of 400 GB), it was hard to certify that the files actually made it on to the tape, because if you mounted the tape in the Finder and did “Get Info”, the Finder would say that there was actually 100 GB less on the tape than what was in the original archived project!  That of course makes you incredibly nervous that your files aren’t going to be backed up properly.  There is apparently a discrepancy between the Finder and reality itself.   The only real way to see how much space is left on a tape is to put in in the drive, and see for yourself how much is left when it shows it in the interface.  (I keep track of all of these “space remaining” numbers in an Excel document. It’s old school, but it works for an easy reference to how much space is left on each tape)

The interface let's you know plain and simply how much space is really on your tape.

Another small element worth noting in the battle between tapes and hard drives is the speed it takes to access your files.  While the actual process of transferring files on and off your archive is faster on tape, the time it takes to locate the files are significantly different.  Think about it this way, if you’ve taken your date from the saturday night sock-hop to the top of Make-Out Canyon in your DeLorean, and you pop in your Run-DMC mix tape cassette, and you want to listen to track 9 (because sometimes words can’t express love the way that the song “My Adidas” can), then you have to sit there and wait for your cassette to fast forward throughout the entire tape until it gets to track 9.   Where in contrast, if you were to pop in your Run-DMC mix CD, you could instantly go to track 9 without having to fast forward over the other tracks.   The wait isn’t too bad (maybe 2 minutes on a bad day) for tape fast forwarding, so it’s only a problem if you’re horribly impatient.  So, while a drive is instant access (like any folder in the Finder), the other benefits of the tapes should outweigh its inability to instantly access files.

Run-DMC helped popularize tape based archiving in the early '90s with their chart topping smash hit, "I'm Gonna Back Up Dat Booty (Right Onto My Tape Drive)".

Next week I’ll post Part 2. It’s an in depth look at how the Quantum A-Series drive actually works, and how to make money with it!  

We will also explore how to cook LTO tapes into a delicious winter stew, how to turn your A-Series drive into a muffler for a Dodge Ram, and we will discuss my brief stint as a vocalist for Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young & Roberts.

**DISCLAIMER**  THE STATEMENTS MADE IN THE PREVIOUS SENTENCE MAY OR MAY NOT BE FALSE.