The nice people at fxguide were brave enough to record my incoherent ramblings and put them up as a podcast. Luckily Angus Wall and Jeff Heuser were in the same podcast. They added sense and reason and made it so worth listening to.
Category: confessions of a pixel pusher
Surprisingly little attention goes into the fact that most computer installation run 24/7 and use power that needs to be bought. Electricity bills are often perceived like taxes or any other act of god: An expense needed in order to do business. As long the competition get’s hit as well, what’s there to think about?
Well.
The ‘digital negative’ of the movie we just finished was 140 Terrabytes. That got me thinking: what if we would have tried to keep it all online. The installation of those disks would have used 8,750 Watts. Double that for cooling and you would have spent 16,863 US dollar to keep all those spindles spinning for a year. (at 11 cents a KW/h).
That does matter in my book. Since I can never remember anything I thought I would try to come up with a approximation of cost per 1000 Watts. It looks as if realities don’t get bent too much when assuming 80 US$ per 1KW per month, or 1000 US$ per year. Double that if you have to cool the room the machines live in. Which is always the case. The variables here are the efficiency on the cooling and the actual price not being 11cents. Actuall and nominal Wattage might also differ. But close numbers are better than no numbers, or numbers that are so complex to calculate that they never be taken into account.
Learning new stuff. Again. Will it ever end?
When trying to figure out why on earth there is no easy and obvious way to find out why a writeToFile has failed in Objective C the google gods had some mercy and sent me to this page that not furthers my question a single inch. Wil Shipley is the author of Delicious Library and what he had to write let me go further for 48 hours to look into this whole Cocoa thing. And that’s after spending three days to prepend 4 (!) 7 digit phone numbers with 310 since there are now overlay area codes. Cleaning up your address book with Objective C is a rather interesting excersive in patience.
Filesystems store what we use on our computers. They are not an act of god, they are man made. They seem to have an impressive resilience if it comes to innovation though. The folder / directory structure was more or less the last break through. Since the the storage capacity did grow: You mom might manage hundred times the storage now than a mid sized team of lab coat wearing engineers did when she was young.
This general rant got inspired by an rather unpleasant observation: Many filesystem become unstable or only slow in the better cases when they become full. Xsan and xfs
have technically not that much in common, but you better keep 10% space available.
Which is tragically exactly the opposite from any real life use I have seen. Now I am talking about professional storage for media. It always is full. Brimful.
Conceptually it was a well intended follow up: Sony’s Bravia commercial using exploding paint instead of many balls.
Execution wise there certainly are amazing explosions. There are few good camera angles. But most of them are, well, uninspired. The idea of using an abandoned housing project is interesting. Somewhat. I have just seen to many of them being blown up. Somehow you expect them to sink together once they become the object of the camera. But it was not this non delivering on the expectation that broke the spot. It was the unispired music choice together with that I call dismal editing. I can only write this, since I have not looked up yet who did it. It’s easier that way. And I am sure it was the usual clusterfuck of decission making or pure lack therof that pushed this brilliant idea of a follow up into the lower ends of mediocricy. The sport lives from the real Bravia. Not more, not less. A typical sequell that can’t deliver. Too bad they blew it.
does sound awefully slow: one point five frames per second. Actually it is a number that makes me happy: It is the performance of the first beta test transfer of the interdubs software that I write. It allows the direct exchange of material from discreet framestore to framestore. Runs in the background, once set up (2 command lines on each end, zero install) it needs not further interaction.
Uncompressed 720×486 at 1.5fps in the background surely beats fedexing a digibeta.
And the 1.5 fps limit is not on my end. I should be good for a bit more. Actually so much more that it’s not worth wondering about it: There are no connections out there that could reach it. I think.
Went and saw “flyboys”. Bad movie. Boring movie. Aces high I remember more vividly than the flick I endured yesterday. It has been more than twenty years ago since I Jack Gold’s ww1 movie.
The effects where mostly mixed. A couple of interesting yet subtle transitions. Comps were partially horrible. Smoke plumes comic like. The dog fight sequences, and there were lots, were executed alright from the fx side. Just that they did not work as a sequence, story or something that seemed worth following. No sense for dramatic guidance. They should have rented the original Star Wars movie. Or watched a couple of people play a video game for that matter.
Then I thought I transfer 2GB of memory from my glove box into one of my servers. I shut down the machine, put in the memory and turned it back on. Just that mysql decided that it’s tables were corrupted. Those had been growing over time. After 24 hours of constant fix attempts I gave up, and hit the reset button. Twenty million blogs down the drain. Again.
On top of that it turned out that it seems not to have been the disk that failed in the spanking new Nas server. In midst of a three Terrabyte transfer the unit became ‘DEGRADED’ again at the same position. A rebuild takes a couple of hours. Tomorrow morning I know better if it is the sled or the connection.
Summary: too much data, not enough content.
Aperture 1.5
Finally it can deal with images that it has NOT ingested into it’s own ‘vault’ system.
Took Discreet Autodesk Advanced Media Division years to figure that out for moving images.
Apple was faster, but started with the 1.0 Version in the wrong direction nevertheless. Apple is very very secretive with their product developement. Great if you want to fill the pockets of the world population with mp3 players. Not so great in the pro Application space: People making their living with and around a software will give you very very good quality feedback, information and direction. If you set up a couple of coders and mad scientists in a lab, and let them boil in their own juice for a while, you get something interesting. But also something that more often than not will not fit into the real world. Like Apertures file handling.
I have gone on the record with my skepticism regarding the ‘RED camera’ before. I actually was suprised that Jim Jannards company was able to show moving images a feeks ago at IBC in Amsterdam. This weekend was a busy one for the camera maker: They posted 2K jpegs on their site. And then reported that somebody had broken into their offices. Stealing development resources they said. “Red” has always been an interesting exercise in marketing. Or you could also say “hype generation”. Hence the title of this post. The internet plays an important role in this. It is mostly a couple of internet forums were people have ‘discussions’. Actually quiet heated ones by now. Not a pretty sight I must say.
Needed to build a new NAS server with safe raid storage. It’s more or less a near line storage solution, so I tried to go for best price per Terrabyte. Just before it dissapears into what will be hopefully years of uninterupted service I snatched it’s keys and took it for a spin on the weekend. So to say. I am still tweaking things, but right now I get just a hunch more than 600 MBytes a second sustained writes xfs.
Which is actually quiet awesome, considering that there is not a single SCSI disk to be found in the case. We paid a very reasonable price for the net 6Terrabytes we got. In theory this machine could record 3 streams of 1920x1080x23.98 10bit dpx frames. For 3 hours.