the chaos spiral

It took longer than expected, but my first feature...

2007-03-25T00:13:00.000-07:00

It took longer than expected, but my first feature script is done.

Now, to find some people and shoot the thing.

Cleaned up my css, squashing an IE parsing bug tha...

2007-03-19T09:54:00.000-07:00

Cleaned up my css, squashing an IE parsing bug that's been driving me nuts for years. Good times.

Computers are cool.

2007-02-06T15:17:00.000-08:00

Computers are cool.

Another year. A bunch of cool stuff on the techno...

2007-01-18T10:09:00.000-08:00

Another year. A bunch of cool stuff on the technology front:

1TB hard drives. Format a little shy, but whatever.
ZFS is coming in leopard, which has inspired me to abandon all my current storage plans and wait.
My brother got an intel machine w/ parallels, and I must say that coherence is damn sexy.
Maybe we'll finally see Final Touch as part of Final Cut and the long rumored Phenomena at NAB.

Dang. Zapped Fedora and went to Feisty Fawn.

2006-12-11T20:53:00.000-08:00

Dang.

Zapped Fedora and went to Feisty Fawn.

Installed Fedora Core 6, played around with a pair...

2006-11-06T22:13:00.000-08:00

Installed Fedora Core 6, played around with a pair of promising new technologies, Xgl (eye candy) and Xen (virtualization).

I'm still partial to apt, but it's a pretty slick package.

Got a 160GB drive for my laptop. Get perpendicula...

2006-10-05T23:41:00.000-07:00

Got a 160GB drive for my laptop. Get perpendicular!

I ask, they deliver.

2006-09-14T15:33:00.000-07:00

I ask, they deliver.

Cutting the price to $499 == good. But end of lif...

2006-06-20T09:14:00.000-07:00

Cutting the price to $499 == good. But end of lifeing shake == bad. They better get their in-house replacement out soon, or else a bunch of people are gonna go to Nuke or Fusion.

Here's a sample of some of the footage I've shot w...

2006-08-18T16:54:00.000-07:00

Here's a sample of some of the footage I've shot with my HVX. Enjoy.

I still haven't found a good system of dealing with the data in the field, though.

Ganked a machine, finally did one of those project...

2006-07-27T22:39:00.000-07:00

Ganked a machine, finally did one of those projects I've been putting off, building a raid-5 setup on Linux. Performance locally capped out via bonnie around 49MB/sec. Iozone over the network via afp managed to hit 46MB/sec. In other words, sweet. There's rumors of ZFS in Leopard, but if that doesn't happen I've got another way to solve my storage needs.

Made my first HD-DVD, even though the only thing t...

2006-06-16T16:19:00.000-07:00

Made my first HD-DVD, even though the only thing that can (sorta) play it is VLC.

More beginning to end proof of concept than anything else, although it's nice to see that I haven't forgotten everything.

160GB was only six months ago, and now 200GB is on...

2006-06-05T14:36:00.000-07:00

160GB was only six months ago, and now 200GB is on the way.

The HVX arrived...and I'm in love. The noise issu...

2006-05-17T22:05:00.000-07:00

The HVX arrived...and I'm in love.

The noise issue is overblown. Same for the naysayers who said that 1080p mode was the same. It's not, both my dad and brother could tell the difference side-by-side. FCP makes the whole import process easy. Slide in the P2 card, hit import, and viola. Color correction is a breeze and the whole thing runs smoothly on my three year old laptop.

The future is now.

And to think that some people say there's no such ...

2006-03-30T16:17:00.000-08:00

And to think that some people say there's no such thing as progress.

Ordered a HVX200.

2006-05-10T22:32:00.000-07:00

Ordered a HVX200.

Super-sweet.

2006-04-24T20:53:00.000-07:00

Super-sweet.

Sweet.

2006-04-20T16:55:00.000-07:00

Sweet.

If only this was an order of magnitude cheaper.

2006-02-16T20:32:00.000-08:00

If only this was an order of magnitude cheaper.

Well, I actually converted them back in November, ...

2006-02-12T21:33:00.000-08:00

Well, I actually converted them back in November, but I only got a chance to test out ipod versions of my shorts last week. I threw a few of them online, and jazzed up the filmography page.

Opened the old mac, installed ~450GB of my brother...

2006-01-10T22:22:00.000-08:00

Opened the old mac, installed ~450GB of my brother's drives, moved another 200GB to the bottom of my dual enclosure. Throw in the existing 320GB drive there and my laptop's 80GB, and...finally over 1TB of space!

Yes, I know you're quite impressed.

Scratch that previous bit about qmaster being easy...

2005-11-30T22:58:00.000-08:00

Scratch that previous bit about qmaster being easy to set up. Woke up to find all the renders had stalled, wasted a bunch of time getting the whole thing working again. Some notes:

Traffic appears to be routed through the box that submits the jobs, so the submission machine needs to be left on the network.
If you delete a controller, you have to reassign its slave nodes to the pool before creating a new one, else they will quietly (and invisibly) wait for the original to return.
Compressor stores locations as relative to its current location, i.e. if you submit your batch from the box that shares the network drive none of the other nodes will be able to find the files.
Each node needs a different serial, else you will get Quicktime Error: -50.
The simplest setup seems to be a controller that runs Compressor (submitting the jobs), linked to another box that maintains the network volume/is a slave node. From there you can add additional slave nodes that see the network volume.

Shipping December 29th. Importantly, the P2 price...

2005-12-07T09:06:00.000-08:00

Shipping December 29th. Importantly, the P2 prices dropped over half in price. I was all ready to make do with a 2GB card, and now 8GB costs the same amount. Woot. And the trend should only continue in the future. In a year or two, they'll be giving away 128GB cards with cereal boxes.

My brother promised me another 450GB of space once he clears it off. Staples had 50 packs of DVD-R disks for $8. Bought a couple and decided to finally make proper backups of all my data. Then all I gotta do is make sure I'm keeping up to date going forward. The piece of tech that would be super-cool is a DVD autoloader combined with a jukebox.

Well, the date has come and gone. About ten peopl...

2006-01-05T07:54:00.000-08:00

Well, the date has come and gone. About ten people have managed to get HVX200's, and have been quietly posting footage and comparisons. The ones on the various wait lists are wailing and gnashing their teeth.

What I've seen has been pretty impressive so far. DVCPRO-HD is essentially 4 DV data streams together. The image quality is roughly the same, but they improved the color sampling so the end result looks much cleaner. The HDV GOP and blocking issues seem to be solved, my main reason for leaning against the FX1.

My little laptop handles 720@24p fine. 1080@24p seems to kill it, but it seems to be less a CPU issue and rather the max transfer rate of my 5400 rpm internal laptop drive. I've been holding out for Seagate's 160GB drive, but maybe a 120GB 7200 rpm one would be a better choice. My brother gave me his old hard drives out of his machine, so I picked up another 600GB of disk space. I need to figure out how to consolidate everything, but it should put me over the terabyte mark.

Is this the year? We'll see.

Footage.

2005-12-07T16:05:00.000-08:00

Footage.