CalDigit SAN announced at NAB

I just got this in my inbox courtesy of the LAFCPUG mailing list.

Right now at Digital Rebellion we're running Xserve RAIDs on Xsan 1.4. I love these things but they're loud, they kick out a lot of heat and they're no longer being made. They're still pretty good and they're not out of date yet but I have been looking at alternatives with the future in mind.

CalDigit, famous for their hardware RAID cards, demonstrated such an alternative at NAB. One major departure from the Xserve RAIDs and their replacement, the Promise VTrak E-Class, is the fact that it does not use 2 or 4 Gb Fibre Channel cables (which cost around $80 per cable) to transmit data. It uses ePCIe which allows it to transmit data at speeds of up to 20 Gbps and allows for very long cable lengths of up to 300m.

With the recent announcement of the entry-level Scarlet camera, the demand for real-time access to extremely high resolution streams looks set to increase dramatically and, luckily, the CalDigit SAN has the bandwidth to transfer multiple 2K streams in real-time.

Uniquely, there is also an ePCIe ExpressCard device to allow laptop users (MacBook Pro only) to access the SAN. This is not currently available for fibre-based networks.

There's nothing on their site as of yet but they have a press release out and it looks like more details will be announced nearer the shipping date, which is currently unknown. This is definitely something I'm keeping my eye on.

New tool: Lens Angle Calc

We've just released a new online tool: Lens Angle Calc. This allows you to calculate the horizontal or vertical lens angle from a given frame width / height and lens focal length.

This is very useful because it allows you to plan your shoot on paper and work out exactly where the camera should be placed before you even arrive on set - saving valuable time and avoiding awkward situations in small locations where you can't see the subject on your widest lens with your back against the wall. It is invaluable for effects work, where everything must be planned out in meticulous detail.

It can also work out the focal length of the lens from a given lens angle and frame width or height - very useful for working out which lens should be used in a certain situation.

Lens Angle Calc
Lens Angle Calc (iPhone version)

See our other web applications here.

NAB 2008 Summary

If, like me, you couldn't possibly keep up with all of the goings-on at NAB and decided to wait it out until the end, here is a short summary of the biggest announcements (or the ones most interesting to me anyway) in bitesize form.

RED
New low-end portable camera Scarlet

• 3K
• Around $3000
• Early 2009 release
• New Mysterium X Sensor
• 1-120 fps (180 fps burst)
• 100MB/sec Redcode RAW and RGB recording via dual Compact Flash
• 4.8 inch LCD
• Fixed 8x T2.8 lens
• Auto and manual shooting modes
• Wi-Fi control - this one opens up many possibilities

PVC Scarlet write-up

New high-end camera Epic

• 5K (up from 4K)
• I have heard both $30,000 and $40,000 quoted (up from $17,500)
• Early 2009 release
• New Full-Frame S35 Mysterium X Sensor
• 1-100 fps (up from 1-60 fps)
• 100MB/sec (up from 36 MB/sec) Redcode and HDMI recording
• 6 lb body (down from 10 lbs)
• RAW and RGB recording to Red Flash
• Wi-Fi control
• Fully upgradeable
• You can get a full $17,500 credit for your Red One if you upgrade

PVC Epic write-up

New playback device RED Ray

• Early 2009
• 4K in
• 4K, 2K, 1080p, 720p, SD playback
• Can play back content from a regular red laser disc
• Plays native R3D files from Compact Flash
• 4 HD SDI and 4
  HDMI connections for 4K
• 2 HD SDI and 2 HDMI connections for 2K
• 2 hrs of 4K with 5.1 audio on a regular DVD
• FireWire 800 for connecting external hard disks or cameras
• Under $1000

PVC RED Ray write-up
Scott Simmons at the Editblog has several photographs of the various RED products.

Sony
PMW-EX3

• Around $13,000
• Uses SxS cards (similar to P2)
• Removable lens
• 1080i / 720p switchable
• Genlock and timecode inputs
• Shoulder-mounted
• Available late 2008

F35

• S35-sized sensor
• Extensive depth of field controls
• Greater dynamic range than the F23 (800% more)
• PL lens mount allows regular 35mm film lenses to be used

Panasonic
P2 Varicams (AJ-HPX3700 and AJ-HPX2700)

• Now uses P2 cards exclusively. 5x P2 slots available on each camera
• 2/3" CCDs
• Full-res 10-bit 4:2:2 AVC Intra-100 recording
• Variable frame rates in 1-frame increments
• Available fall 2008

AG-HPX170 solid-state camcorder

• Improves on the successful HVX200
• 1/3" premium-quality CCDs offering increased sensitivity and lower noise
• 13x lens with 28mm wide-angle setting (widest in its class)
• 12-60 fps in 720p-mode
• P2-only; no tape deck
• Much smaller and lighter than the HVX200
• Available fall 2008

Here is a great summary from DVXUser.com.

AJ-HVX200A camcorder

• Successor to the hugely popular HVX-200
• Incorporates the same lens and CCDs as the new HPX170 but with a tape deck for transitioning from a MiniDV workflow

Here is a great review from DVXUser.com.

64 GB P2 card

• More than 4 hours of DVCPRO footage
• More than 2 hours of DVCPRO50 or AVC-Intra 50
• More than 64 minutes of AVC-Intra 100 or DVCPRO HD
• Available fall 2008

AJ-PCD35 ExpressCard P2 drive

• Allows P2 cards to be used in machines with ExpressCard ports
• Can transfer from up to 5 cards at once
• Available late 2008

Imagineer Systems
High-end finishing system mogul

• Monthly subscription includes hardware, software and maintenance. Annual hardware upgrades
• Open platform allows content sharing and management between multiple applications
• Editing, compositing and grading integrated to allow you to switch from one to the other without rendering
• Software "plugs in" to the architecture to perform certain tasks such as mogul/roto and mogul/comp with similar interfaces
• mogul/serve shipping at NAB, other products to be determined

Studio Daily mogul interview

Matrox
MXO 2

• Inputs: Component HD/SD, SDI HD/SD, Embedded SDI audio, Y/C, Composite, XLR audio, RCA audio, AES/EBU, HDMI, Embedded HDMI audio
• Outputs: Component HD/SD, SDI HD/SD, Embedded SDI audio, Y/C, Composite, RCA audio, XLR audio, AES/EBU, HDMI, Embedded HDMI audio, Direct 5.1 surround monitoring
• This does not have a DVI output like the MXO so it cannot output to a Cinema Display
• Dynamic RT acceleration and hardware up/downscaling
• Designed for HDMI monitoring with calibration and 1:1 pixel mapping
• Black burst and tri-sync for HD
• $1600
• Released July 2008

Differences between the MXO and MXO 2 (PDF)
Shane Ross's write-up

FCS Remover 1.0.7 released

We've just released FCS Remover 1.0.7.

The biggest new feature is Final Cut Server support (thanks to Morten Schmidt for helping with this). Clicking "Remove Final Cut Server" will remove the Final Cut Server software but not Compressor or Qmaster. To remove these as well, you will have to click "Remove Final Cut Studio" as unfortunately these two applications overlap into both pieces of software.

It also removes some Final Cut Studio support files that were missed out in previous versions.

FCS Remover allows you to remove Final Cut Studio 1 and 2, Final Cut Express and Final Cut Server at the press of a button.

Bug report
Feature request

Apple releases 8800 GT for old Mac Pros

Early Mac Pro users can now use Apple's NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT Upgrade Kit to add the latest graphics card to their machine.

However, before you rush off to find your credit card, I would advise holding off for a while until Apple fixes the performance issues with an updated driver (these are normally included in operating system updates but sometimes are offered separately).

And if you're planning to use it with Color, you're better off with the original ATI Radeon X1900 XT as the NVIDIA card supports fewer working bit-depths.

But if you're a gamer, you're grand.

My Compressor issues solved

UPDATE 11/9/2008: We've now released a tool to automate this fix, called Compressor Repair.

I recently experienced the dreaded "Unable to submit to queue. Please restart your computer or verify your Compressor installation is correct" error message when submitting batches with Compressor. I noticed that it listed "No Value" under Cluster instead of "This Machine".



Going to Qmaster Preferences and clicking Start Sharing gave me a message saying that "qmasterd" was not running. This was the cause of the problem.

The first thing I did was look on Apple's support boards where I found many posts on the subject. Unfortunately most users found that they managed to solve their issues by removing and reinstalling Compressor or the entire Final Cut Studio. This is something I did not want to do.

I used the terminal command sudo qmasterprefs -reset (this seems to be equivalent to trashing prefs as far as I can gather) and then sudo qmasterprefs -restart to relaunch qmasterd. I then relaunched Compressor and everything worked as it should.

Except when I restarted my machine, at which point I was back to the same error messages again. I knew that a fix must be possible without a reinstall, and it was probably something simple. So I did some digging around and I discovered that the folder /Library/StartupItems/Qmaster had the wrong permissions. It was set to No Access for some bizarre reason, preventing OS X from seeing any files inside it. Note that this was not picked up by Disk Utility when doing a permission repair. So I set the owner back to system and clicked Apply to enclosed items to be 100% sure that the permissions would be correct for all files.



I restarted my machine and everything worked. Two restarts later and it still works.

I can't say it will work for everyone but try it if you are experiencing these symptoms.

Why does QuickTime report a different resolution?

Ever wondered why QuickTime reports a completely different resolution to the one you exported at?



Welcome to the world of non-square pixels. NTSC and PAL use rectangular pixels to fill up space on the screen and save transmission bandwidth, which was more of an issue when the standards were invented. Computer monitors use square pixels and so QuickTime has to squeeze one side of the image in order to prevent it looking stretched. This is purely for display and the file is not modified.

The pixel aspect ratio of NTSC footage is 0.889 meaning 720 x 0.889 = 640 so it is displayed at 640x480. For PAL it is 1.067 so 720 x 1.067 = 768 and it is displayed at 768x576.

QuickTime also has some options for controlling how the movie is displayed. Open up your movie, go to Window > Show Movie Properties and click on the Presentation tab.

You will see an option marked "Conform aperture to:" with the following options:

Classic - Classic is identical to having the conform aperture setting switched off.




Clean - Scales the image to compensate for the pixel aspect ratio and crops it to mimic the overscan on a broadcast monitor.




Production - Scales the image to compensate for the pixel aspect ratio but does not crop the image.




Encoded Pixels - No modification is made to the footage. Note the stretching caused by non-square pixels.




This is one of the many reasons why a broadcast monitor is essential.

Preference Manager 1.0.4 released

We've just released Preference Manager 1.0.4. There's only one new feature but it's a big one.

We've completely overhauled the backup system so that backups are now stored in one compressed file instead of several folders. A lot of users want to synchronize settings between, say a work machine and a home machine. This new feature makes it much easier - just keep a copy of the file and Preference Manager on an external disk, install Preference Manager on the second machine and double-click the file. Easy.

However, these changes have caused old backups to be completely incompatible with the new version. They won't even appear in the Restore list. Don't worry though - I added a function to convert old backups to the new format. Just go to File > Convert Backups to New Format. Browse to your backup folder (default is ~/Library/Application Support/Digital Rebellion/Preference Manager/Backups), select all of your old backup folders and click the Open button to convert them to the new format. The old folders will remain on the disk in case you need them but if not, they can be safely deleted.

Preference Manager is a utility for trashing, backing up and restoring Final Cut Studio preference files, button bars, keyboard layouts, window layouts, user plugins, column layouts, track layouts and custom settings. This allows you to repair problems and copy useful settings to a second machine.

Thanks to everyone who put in feature requests and bug reports. Keep them coming.

To be notified of future updates, subscribe to our appcast or this blog.

Preference Manager 1.0.3 released

We just released Preference Manager 1.0.3. This is a quick bug fix version that repairs a rather annoying bug some of you were getting - the dreaded "The volume 'Digital Rebellion' does not exist" message.

I was aware of it and had fixed it a couple of days ago. I was planning to delay the release until early next week, as I had several features I wanted to implement over the weekend but unfortunately the number of reports I received about this bug prompted me to release this fix early.

Lots of people have been contacting me with suggestions for future versions, some of which excited me a lot because they were such great ideas. Keep it up, I appreciate it a lot.

Submit bug report
Submit feature request
Subscribe to our appcast

Final Cut Pro 6.0.3 released

Can you see an update in Software Update called "Pro Applications Update 2008-01"? Well, confusingly, that's actually Final Cut Pro 6.0.3 and Compressor 3.0.3. It also includes Apple HDV Codec 1.4 and Plugin Manager 1.7.3.

Release Notes

Final Cut Pro 6.0.3

This update contains the following:

• XDCAM HD422 support
• "Project is too new or unreadable" error fixed (yay)
• Still images are now exported using their native aspect ratios
• FCP now uses the aspect ratio of the clip when stacking multiple filters in a mixed-format timeline
• When using XML import, FCP can now reconnect files that contain slashes (/) in their filenames
• You can now place generator clips in FXScript filter clip wells, although read the release notes for the caveats

If this update is not appearing for you, you must have OS X 10.4.11 or OS X 10.5.2 installed.

Compressor 3.0.3

This update contains the following:

• You can now create Apple TV movies with non-square pixel aspect ratios and there is now a Dolby AC-3 output for it as well

I was very disappointed that it did not fix any of the bugs with Compressor on Leopard.

Apple HDV Codec 1.4

This update contains the following:

• 4:2:2 support

Plugin Manager 1.7.3

This update contains the following:

• This fixes FxPlug plugins on FCP 5.1.4 that were broken my previous Plugin Manager updates

As always, never update a system mid-project. Don't update if you are not affected by the changes listed above - if it ain't broke, definitely don't fix it in the world of FCP. If you do update, make sure to make a clone of your system first.

You can get the update here as well, but you will need to have your Final Cut Studio serial number handy.