tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-303270762008-08-26T16:24:33.642+02:00For television professionals. Technical tips, editing tips, random thoughts, inspirational advice, rants. Mostly editing-focussed, but also featuring broadcasting, camera issues, VJing, Apple Mac stuff... and more!Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comBlogger298125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-8436251826473268072008-08-26T09:12:00.008+02:002008-08-26T11:04:52.820+02:00

The ex-science fiction addict in me loved reading the news that Robots Will Overtake Human Intelligence By 2050, according to the Intel CTO. But the Humanist in me is appalled. No, I'm not appalled at the thought of computers being smarter than us. What I find really distressing is that we could believe such an absurd idea. The cult of techne has led us to believe that "progress" is some kind of

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-87242196513675965452008-08-25T10:16:00.014+02:002008-08-25T12:44:07.740+02:00

When you are an editor on your own, issues of workflow - organising media, file management, and the like - are mostly matters of personal preference. You might have a taste for naming all your final exports numerically, for example; another might prefer dates; yet another chooses to constantly replace the final movie file continuously, maintaining only one version (the latest). And so on.

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-78055092863889135022008-07-04T09:27:00.003+02:002008-07-04T09:34:39.274+02:00

So there is finally a place that actually hires out a real, working Red One camera: Red One Africa. The site is kind of dodgy-looking, but apparently they really do hire out these amazing cameras. For R7000 a day. It's interesting to see that you have a choice between 8GB Compact Flash cards (which record a paltry 4 minutes at a time!) or a "RAID pack", which is presumably some sort of external

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-1324691117999787612008-07-03T09:32:00.006+02:002008-07-03T10:48:43.446+02:00

One of my favourite rants is about how badly 16x9 footage is handled. I've had at least one experience of a salesmen trying to convince me, in quite serious tones, that on their R10,000+ flat-screen television, the reason picture is stretched "because that's what widescreen is". And this type of advice comes from a specialist audio-visual store. (I considered making mention of the likely

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-57873692068437304832008-06-24T16:40:00.003+02:002008-06-24T17:48:59.408+02:00

With some help from Apple Engineers, we managed to solve a weird issue with our new Xsan. We were getting dropped frames on very low-bandwidth footage, XDCAM HD (at about 4.5MB/s) and even HDV (3.7MB/s). Our Xsan, with its new 16 drive Promise RAID, should be capable of something ridiculous like 600MB/s or more. So throughput wasn't the problem. Somehow every 10 seconds or so, "something" was

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-44160751545109120312008-06-23T08:47:00.010+02:002008-07-04T09:51:22.142+02:00

I've been promising for a while on this blog to report on results of testing the potential for editing video over Gigabit Ethernet (see especially here and here). With our Xserves and Xsan finally up and running, I can now give some preliminary (though not completely exhaustive/conclusive) findings on some tests I've done. First, the bad news The bad news is that capturing video over Gigabit

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-84631909438194697232008-06-20T15:59:00.010+02:002008-06-23T08:43:15.920+02:00

Perhaps the most important part of setting up a SAN is figuring out the optimal workflow and the folder structure that will make it happen smoothly. Setting permissions for Users, User Groups and the various folders and files is an important part of this. Permissions are primarily about security: hiding certain things from certain people - that's perhaps the most obvious point. What is maybe

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-19941534961542798832008-06-18T09:43:00.004+02:002008-06-18T10:07:54.516+02:00

I was introduced to a clip on Vimeo, Diesel Liquid Space, which supposedly shows "hologram" technology used to combine live actors and "3D" graphics. I was intrigued, but immediately sceptical, since I have some idea of just how difficult it is in practice to actually achieve a "hologram". A visit to the site of the company, Vizoo, that makes the product, known as Cheoptics360, wasn't very

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-66406457137435462992008-06-17T09:09:00.003+02:002008-06-17T09:12:47.859+02:00

Just a picture of our old Xserve Raid and new Promise VTrak Raid hooked and ready to go. The lights are flashing like crazy because they're still busy "building" the raid, but the system already works. At the top you can see our Qlogic SANbox fibre channel switch. Should be spending a bit of time this week tweaking everything, and also testing performance over Ethernet (for the few edit suites

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-75045838321603196032008-06-12T15:44:00.003+02:002008-06-12T16:07:39.901+02:00

Quartz Composer multi-screen: more shots from Stephen Buchanan on Vimeo. This is a better quality video clip than in my previous post. Shot it on a PD150 this time, not on my cellphone like the last one! Once again, this is the system I've called "ygboX", developed by myself using Quartz Composer 3. It allows for very flexible multi-screen presentations, with theoretically an unlimited

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-72321273431197188292008-06-10T10:51:00.005+02:002008-06-10T14:13:08.697+02:00

Quartz Composer Multi-screen Presentation from Stephen Buchanan on Vimeo. In my previous post I explained how my multi-screen system worked. Here are some pictures of "ygboX" in action at the MarkEx exhibition in Sandton... Unfortunately, the AV "setup" part was not really our responsibility, so we were faced with a setup that made it a little tricky to get everything lined up perfectly -

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-51342746771698127372008-06-09T13:28:00.007+02:002008-06-10T10:47:38.461+02:00

The first commercial application of a Quartz Composer-based "multi screen signage" system I'm developing, called ygboX Marquee. This one is a three-screen looping presentation, and it's going up at the Sandton Convention Centre, for a stand at MarkEx. (Pics of the system in operation will follow!) The screens are pictured with a simple "test pattern" running, as well as a superimposed "status

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-82102011799102589032008-06-09T13:20:00.002+02:002008-06-09T13:24:32.420+02:00

At last! Our 16x bay Promise VTRAK Fibre-Channel RAID has arrived. 16x 750GB drives sitting in a very heavy box... and below that is a monster of RAID hardware. Definitely not as pretty as the box our two Apple Xserves arrived in, but I'm sure it'll have plenty of blinking lights to keep me happy. I'll keep you posted on our progress in setting it all up, especially getting some of the

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-31277064239480235472008-05-22T11:18:00.006+02:002008-05-22T11:31:47.010+02:00

Found a fascinating C++ framework called openFrameworks, whose primary purpose is to allow artists/programmers to create interactive installations. Click on the video labelled "made with openFrameworks" - the video is done quite badly, unfortunately, but the stuff that it showcases is amazing. Drawing "graffiti" on a building using a laser pointer, "bugs" that crawl off an LCD screen and onto

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-7509868566929962922008-05-12T15:13:00.006+02:002008-05-13T09:12:28.587+02:00

If you read articles such as PCWorld's Powerset Unveils Test Version of Google-killer, you might be tempted to think that the so-called "semantic web" is here. (In fact, that's exactly what some articles attempted to suggest: Powerset brings the Semantic Web to Wikipedia. To save you some reading: Powerset is basically a "plain language" search tool, i.e. instead of being "keyword"-based, the

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-39780028239846607162008-05-09T12:43:00.003+02:002008-05-09T12:53:26.630+02:00

Fascinating interview with James Cameron, discussing his latest movie, Avatar, shot in stereoscopic 3D: "James Cameron supercharges 3-D". Cameron goes into some detail about the technical aspects of 3D film production (more succinct and correct than many supposedly "technical" articles, actually); but he spends more time talking about the creative aspects and the directorial issues that 3D

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-54345384997192365902008-05-06T12:14:00.003+02:002008-05-06T12:19:40.775+02:00

Finally, it looks as if we might be getting iPhones - and not the "hacked" variety - in South Africa. Articles such as PC World's "Vodafone Will Sell IPhone in Ten Countries" confirm that Vodafone, which owns local networks such as Vodacom, will be selling the iPhone in various countries. Here's the relevant bit: Customers in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal,

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-91562034600835386942008-04-25T15:09:00.002+02:002008-04-25T15:20:24.687+02:00

Just to make it even more clear than in my previous post, here's another photo of synchronised playback using two very simple Quartz Compositions. You can see three different clips are playing: they all happen to be exactly the same length (they were from the same series), but only the one playing on the MacBook Pro is using its "own" timebase to play back the clip. The other two displays are

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-964738009827994642008-04-25T08:28:00.005+02:002008-04-25T09:01:44.234+02:00

I've been playing with Quartz Composer 3's new "Network" patches. It's a very "QC" type of thing - almost absurdly simple, which makes it very easy to make it "just work", but as a direct consequence of its simplicity it is quite tricky to get it to do something specific. In the photo above I've got a Mac Pro desktop and my own MacBook Pro - both running OS X 10.5.2 and Quartz Composer 3 -

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-28155284847524234722008-04-20T18:19:00.001+02:002008-05-09T12:47:50.567+02:00

Went to see U23D at a digital 3D theatre in Rosebank here in Johannesburg. The only other 3D movie I've seen was Beowulf which was a pretty awful movie but as my first glimpse of digital 3D it was still an interesting experience. But U23D is just incredible. I was a little under-awed by some of the opening sequences, where the cross-dissolves seemed a little heavy-handed (by nature I'm just

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-23881052683044317912008-04-17T12:27:00.003+02:002008-05-09T12:48:16.131+02:00

I've been battling with some very finnicky interlacing issues with Final Cut Pro 6 lately. The situation I have to deal with quite often is using a mixture of interlaced and progressive footage on a progressive-scan timeline. In other words, I often want to work with a timeline where "Field Order" is set to "None". The reasons are usually that the output medium (projector, playback on computer,

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-30583207027273360782008-04-11T18:35:00.002+02:002008-04-11T18:40:42.295+02:00

My friend Tyron Janse van Vuuren has uploaded the second episode of his "Zero Dollar Film School". This one is entitled "How to kill your favourite children" - don't worry, the only kids harmed in the process are precious scenes from his script! Tyron Janse van Vuuren talks about developing the story structure of his film script, in preparation for writing the second draft. Here's the clip:

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-1041063201021755612008-04-11T16:14:00.001+02:002008-04-11T16:16:25.342+02:00

Pro Applications Update 2008-1 has now been released. One of the issues it addresses in Final Cut Pro is something I've struggled with already: When opening some projects, Final Cut Pro 6.0.2 would sometimes erroneously display a message warning that the project was unreadable or too new for that version of Final Cut Pro. This issue has been resolved in Final Cut Pro 6.0.3.

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-16833892309171993162008-04-11T10:45:00.003+02:002008-04-11T10:59:49.681+02:00

Read an interesting article from the New York Times (MySpace Signs Deal to Aim Its Content for Overseas TV). Seems like MySpace plans to become a platform where original, user-uploaded content may be used to distribute content to broadcasters. I'm not sure how well the idea will work in practice, but it does at least suggest the possibility of a fundamental shift in the way content gets created,

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30327076.post-27790439104961355922008-04-11T08:53:00.002+02:002008-04-11T08:56:28.103+02:00

I'm keeping track of Jim Dalrymple's Recording my first music album series on Macworld.com, where he's going to document the process of producing an album using the Mac. He's going to start with some pretty basic tools - Garage Band and his own guitar. Should be fun to watch and learn.

Stephen Buchananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17059891232922196507noreply@blogger.com