Mac OS X Snow Leopard announced

Apple just released a few preliminary details about Mac OS X Snow Leopard (I think they're running out of cat names...). The interesting thing to note is that NOWHERE does it say that this is OS X 10.6. It could be a major point update for 10.5. I think it probably is 10.6 but it's worth bearing that in mind though.

Apple has stated that the focus will not primarily be new features but improving the quality of the OS. I think a lot of people will be disappointed by the lack of features but this is great for people who demand high performance (a lot of people reading this blog I'd imagine).

Here are the improvements:
* Multi-core optimizations with a new technology called Grand Central. This makes it much easier for developers to create multi-core optimized applications (FCP dev team, I'm looking at you...)
* OpenCL support - Enables developers to use the processing power of the GPU to perform tasks. It will be interesting to see how developers take advantage of this but it could use your graphics card as an extra processing core when rendering and encoding for example.
* Theoretical support for 16 TB of RAM. But how much can each application address?
* QuickTime X - "optimizes support for modern audio and video formats resulting in extremely efficient media playback". That's a little vague so I'm wondering if there is some kind of GPU acceleration involved. And the "modern audio and video formats" bit makes me wonder if Windows formats such as WMV are supported out of the box, without requiring something like Flip4Mac.
* Support for Exchange 2007
* Safari speed improvements
* Takes up less space on disk
* Released in "about a year"

There have been rumors that 10.6 will be Intel-only but this report neither confirms nor denies this.

Also, there is no word on price. Consumers might be hard to win over if there are no new features so Apple may adopt lower pricing. I have heard some people say that performance and stability should be in Leopard anyway so the update should be free (which I disagree with). I personally would pay full price for an update that "unlocked" my graphics card for use as an extra core though. To me, that is worth paying for. And it'd probably result in a bigger performance boost than buying $130-worth of hardware.

WWDC 2008

It's Apple's WWDC (Worldwide Developer Conference) today and Steve's keynote just finished.

Here are the important announcements:

iPhone firmware update 2.0
* Released in "early July"
* Free for iPhone users, $9.95 for iPod Touch users (it's an accounting thing)
* Enables applications and the iTunes App Store as previously announced
* Enterprise features - Push email, push contacts, push calendar, autodiscovery, global address lookup, remote wipe.
* Positional audio (openAL) and fast graphics with OpenGLES.
* Word, Excel, PowerPoint and iWork document support
* Apps that are 10 MB or less can be downloaded over the cellular network - all others must be downloaded over WiFi or synced from iTunes.
* Enterprise users can set up private storefronts and distribute over their intranet.
* Push notification for applications - Instead of running in the background and wasting battery, the iPhone can receive messages and give you notification (alerts, sounds, badges) without needing to have the application running.

MobileMe
* The new .Mac
* Push email to all devices including iPhones, Macs and Windows PCs
* Online calendar and photo album - syncs with iCal and iPhoto. Drag and drop support.
* $99 per year, 60 day pre-trial available
* Available "early July"
* .Mac users get to keep their existing email addresses which will forward to a MobileMe address

3G iPhone
* Metal back replaced with glossy plastic
* Thinner at the edges
* Solid metal buttons
* 3.5" screen (same as original)
* Flush headphone jack
* "Dramatically improved" audio
* 10 hours of 2G talk time, 5 hours of 3G talk time, 300 hours standby, 5-6 hours web browsing, 7 hours video, 24 hours audio
* Built-in GPS - updates Google Maps live
* A LOT of extra countries - 70 new countries this year
* Price drop - Was: originally $599 for 8 GB. Now: $199 for 8 GB, $299 for 16 GB, $399 for 32 GB. These are the maximum prices for every country.
* Launches on July 11th (22 countries)
* Special edition white version

Steve went through the list of (almost) everything that was bad about the original iPhone and improved upon it dramatically. This is a great update.

As always, Engadget has the scoop + pictures.

P.S. I've disabled comments because whenever I post anything about the iPhone I get a TON of spam comments.

Using Frame Controls in Compressor

Compressor has some very sophisticated technologies in the Frame Controls tab of the Inspector to enable it to perform high-quality resizing, retiming and deinterlacing of footage.

These are incredibly useful but it is very tempting to set everything to "best" when it is not at all necessary and causes a significant impact upon the processing time. So what this post aims to do is outline what each function does and when it should be used.

Firstly, if you are not resizing, retiming or deinterlacing footage, do not switch Frame Controls on at all.

Resizing controls
When an image is resized, new pixels need to be calculated. If you downsize an image, an area that was once 10 pixels could now be 2 pixels and vice versa if you are upsizing. Compressor goes through the resulting image and calculates what each pixel value should be based on the value at that point in the original image. These are not always integers. For example, a pixel at point (3,3) in the resulting image might correspond to point (2.8, 2.8) on the original. As there is no pixel at (2.8, 2.8), Compressor has to calculate a suitable value. The following options are different ways of calculating these pixel colors.

Fast (nearest pixel) - Compressor takes the value from the closest whole pixel in the original image. This is very fast but can result in significant visual artifacts and inaccuracies, particularly when resizing by a significant amount.

Suitable for: Minor size changes, situations where a fast encode is more important than a high quality one.

Better (linear filter) - This improves on the nearest pixel method by taking the values of four surrounding pixels and weighting them, increasing accuracy.

Suitable for: Most downconversions (e.g. 720p to NTSC).

Best (statistical prediction) - This uses more complex algorithms to maintain edge sharpness, at the expense of processing time.

Suitable for: Upconversions (e.g. NTSC to 1080p HD)

Anti-aliasing slider - This smooths rough edges but don't set it too high or you will visibly soften the image.

Suitable for: Smoothing jagged edges when upconverting footage (e.g. PAL to 720p HD)

Detail Level slider - This sharpens edges, increasing our perception of detail in the image. Use sparingly to avoid adding noticeable noise or jagged edges to the image.

Suitable for: Sharpening soft edges when upconverting footage.

Deinterlacing controls
To deinterlace, first select Progressive from the Output Fields drop-down menu. Use this instead of the Deinterlace filter in the Filters tab as it will provide greater output quality. Choose one of the following from the Deinterlace menu:

Fast (line averaging) - The two fields are blended into one frame. This, however, can result in strange motion artifacts because you are playing two fields at the same time that were originally offset in time.

Suitable for: Situations with very little motion.

Better (motion adaptive) - This method analyzes the fields and uses simple linear blends (equivalent to the Fast setting) on areas with no motion. For areas with motion it discards one of the fields and uses interpolation to build up a whole frame from the other field's data.

Suitable for: Most situations except those with extremes of motion. In most cases you will not get any benefits from choosing higher settings than this if you are working in Standard Definition (e.g. NTSC, PAL). The downside to this method is that you lose vertical resolution if there is a lot of motion in the image.

Best (motion-compensated) - This uses optical flow technologies to track the motion of objects and analyzes multiple frames at once. This data is then used to split the image into blocks (typical sizes are 4x4, 8x8 or 16x16) and then shift these blocks so as to align motion between the two fields. This is incredibly processor intensive and will take some time.

Suitable for: Situations with extremes of motion (e.g. sports).

Retiming controls

Fast (nearest frame) - If you slow down footage, Compressor will need to add extra frames. This option just duplicates the nearest existing frame. It is very speedy but it can result in very choppy / juddery motion. If you are speeding up footage however, the choppiness will probably not be noticeable.

Suitable for: Minor speed adjustments, fast motion

Good (frame blending) - This blends frames together to create "in-between" frames and is a lot smoother than the nearest frame method, at the cost of processing time. This is suitable for most applications unless you are performing extreme slow motion.

Suitable for: Most speed changes with the exception of extreme slow motion

Better (motion-compensated) - This uses complex algorithms to analyze a range of frames and interpolate (predict) what the in-between frames should look like based on their surrounding frames. It then creates these new frames from scratch. Obviously this is very processor-intensive.

Suitable for: Extreme speed changes or footage with large amounts of motion (sports for example)

Best (high quality motion-compensated) - Apple's documentation is a little unclear on what makes this particular option higher quality than the one below it. It could be that it analyzes more frames to produce the final result, it blends using a higher bit depth for greater accuracy, or it recreates every single frame instead of just the in-between ones for greater smoothness. Or maybe all of them.

Either way, this is incredibly processor intensive and should only be used if you cannot get good results with lower settings.

Suitable for: Extreme speed changes or significant frame rate increases (e.g. 23.98 to 59.94 fps)

Conclusion

So what does this tell us? It tells us that "Good" or "Better" should be adequate for most situations and it is not worth choosing "Best" unless your footage actually needs it. The best way of finding a happy medium is to start with everything on "Fast" and perform small test renders (10 seconds or so) for multiple areas of your movie. If you are not happy with the quality, go up to the next level and keep going until you reach a level of quality you are happy with.

Rough cuts

Shane Ross has a great post about "rough" rough cuts and how frustrating it is when producers cannot see past a lack of audio or sound effects, or a dodgy transition. What is worse is when the producer gets it into his or her head that you are trying to pass that off as the end product, despite your protestations to the contrary. That has happened to me and is a nasty situation for all involved.

I think the key is to make the producer comfortable with you. Normally these kind of problems go away on the second or third project as the producer realizes that you can do the job and are not a cowboy, and they get familiar with the way that you work. I also find that a comfortable producer will give you a lot more creative freedom (I prefer to see scripts as a guide rather than a rulebook for example) and in return you will take advantage of that freedom to return a better product, so it is mutually beneficial.

How to change default preferences for our online tools

I recently had a question about this. We have several useful online tools in the resources section of the site, many of which are used by people on a regular basis.

However, if you consistently work with a particular format (e.g. HDV) or work in meters instead of feet, it can be annoying to have to change the settings each time you want to use it. Here's how to get around that.

1. Delete your old bookmark for the page.
2. Go to the page and select the settings you would like to be the new defaults.
3. Click "Link to this calculation".
4. Bookmark the page.

For bonus points, you could create separate bookmarks for different settings - e.g. one for HD projects and one for SD for example.

8800GT performance improvements with 10.5.3

With the recent OS X Leopard 10.5.3 upgrade, several users are reporting performance improvements with the Nvidia 8800GT, which has received bad publicity over its poor ProApp performance.

As always, Barefeats have benchmarks comparing the card with and without 10.5.3 and against the stock Radeon graphics card. At Apple Discussions, users have also posted their comparisons.

Performance improved significantly with the update but unfortunately not by enough to warrant purchasing it over the stock card. In some cases it was still slightly behind the stock Radeon. But progress is a good thing I suppose.

One poster says:


It looks like that could be the case. I hope that if it comes to that, Apple will do the decent thing and offer an exchange program.

Update: Some users are reporting graphical anomalies and Adobe CS3 suite problems with this patch

Mac OS X 10.5.3 released

Apple just released Leopard 10.5.3 via Software Update.

Apple's change list page is quite sparse while other sites have posted a much larger list of fixes based on beta versions of the patch. What is unclear is whether or not these changes made it to the final patch release or not (although the answer is probably yes as the final patch is 536 MB).

As always, NEVER upgrade in the middle of the project and if your system ain't broke, don't fix it. However, if you are suffering from a major issue fixed by this patch, wait several days to see if there are any major problems with it (I have heard of Airport issues already) and then only install it after performing a full system clone.

If you are considering upgrading, you are advised to download the full combo updater rather than relying on Software Update:
Mac OS X 10.5.3 Combo Updater

"Codec overrun" error when installing our applications

A couple of people have emailed me to say that they are getting "codec overrun" errors when trying to mount disk images of our applications.

This error means that the file got corrupted during the download process. The most probable reason for this is that they are using download manager software such as Speed Download that breaks up the file into chunks and downloads each one separately before piecing them back together.

Some people have reported that they receive this error when sharing their internet connection via Airport (for some bizarre reason).

The solution to this problem is to either disable such software or download the zipped alternatives that I have now made available on every product page.

FCS Remover
Preference Manager

New tool: Power Load Calculator

We've just released a new online tool to the resources section of our site - Power Load Calculator.

Power Load Calculator allows you to calculate the load on a particular circuit when certain devices are plugged in. For example, you can calculate whether or not the circuit breakers in a location can handle the lights you want to use and if not, the size of the generator that needs to be hired. This sort of thing is better discovered during pre-production and not on the day of shooting, so this calculator is very useful in that regard.

You can also calculate the minimum circuit breaker size for a given power load which is very useful if you are upgrading a building's power supply in order to accommodate your needs.

As usual, there is also an iPhone edition available.

Check out our resources section for more tools.

"The filter failed to render" error fix

Just saw an interesting fix for the big red "The filter ____________ failed to render" message some people have been getting in Final Cut Pro.



I seem to get it randomly every now and again but this is a useful fix for those who were experiencing it on a permanent basis. Pity you need to lose a monitor though.