Aaron zander's Blog

Ok, to start, I've been reading about Shane's exploits for a long time on lafcpug here and now on his blog and he's had some interesting rigs involving rubberbands (i seem to remember that was you in a g5 with a rubberbanded set of drives) and now his latest macbeast.

Well i've had my mac pro since about a month or so before the octos came out. And Since then I've added a HDD a few times, which started first as a place to put media, than it was a third drive to put music and project files on. then it was another drive which i raided with the other 500 inside to create a 1tb raid 0 setup. I repartitioned 1 drive to install leopard on 1 part and keep music and projects on another.

So at this point I'm up to 4 drives, and 1 optical drive and the stock 2 gigs of ram (i know...i know)

So when the second gen leopard running octo macs came out new ram came out to work with them, and since that ram is backwards compatible (ie works on previous gen macs) the older ram got cheap, so 8 more gigs went in and I found out how cheap apple is now, I found 4 sticks of 556mg ram in there which ended up making me fill my risers with ram bringing me to 10 gigs (new macpros come with 2 1 gig sticks fyi)

Ok, so I'm all filled up right? hehe, wrong. I found out,as a few people know (shane included) about those 2 extra sata ports on the motherboard. So i decided thats 2 extra ports too many, and found this little install kit:

http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&product_id=158&CFID=268532&CFTOKEN=68543704

so It came on wed of this week my drives were do to arrive the next day but i had a 7 hour mournign shift and back to back classes after that so i started the hard part that day, which involves wiring the 2 sata cbales down to the motherboard and assembling this little aluminum rig to mount the drives. Really the only hard part is the wiring. So Shane talked about doing this, what he doesn't mention is he has a v2 macpro. If you have a v1, mac pro to take that fan assembly out involves loosening the ram chassis, taking off the cover for the processors' heat sink, taking the processor assembly up and then unscrewing the fan assembly. to say the least I didn't do this.

Here was my method.

Step 1: Remove optical cage and drive(s) and set them asside. Remvoe drives from Bay 1 and bay 2

Step 2: run cables down through the opening of the optical drive section. and down above the Fan section around where drive bay 1 is

step 3: using pliers of the needle nose variety, or tiny fingers, or both, or magic if you have it, plug in the cables to the 2 sata ports (bottom one first as it has the least accessibility)

Step 4: TAKE EXTREME CARE HERE! apply tension to the cables and bring the excess slack back into the optical bay section. and run the wires below the sata connection on the back of bay 1.

Step 5: Clean Up your ready for install of the max upgrade drive cage.

ok so now that that was done I closed up and started using my computer for the next 2 days until my next free day.

So here it is today. I installed the 2 drives and the burner, and closed up with 2 new drives installed, and i grabbed my windows 64 installers (btw if you look around you can find these drivers supplied with the new mac pros)

Ok windows time:

So I start to run through the bootcamp motions for the first time, and after about 90 minutes of banging my head against the wall (6 drives in a computer complicates thing, having 2 of those raided, and 1 of them split in 2 makes it worse) so i pulled out every drive but the 1 split in 2 with my leopard drive and the blank 1. still no go.

then I realized the windows reformat bios wasn't reading the extra drives off the mother board. So I pulled out the assembly, and switched the leopard drive with the blank 1 (now in bay 2) and for the last hour or more i've been waiting for this partition to work. So far...well we will see.

I'll finish posting when I have it going and running Eyeon's Fusion.

Side note, any one know if you can run parallels or fusion off an actual windows boot drive and/pr 64bit?

I'll try and grab pics if I can steal a camera from my friend (yea im about the only person I know who doesn't have any form of digital camera besides the 1 they stuck on my phone).

Enjoy

-Zander

this is in response to shane ross, who if you don't know, is a leader for FCP users here and several other major websites. he posted in my previous blog

I agree that FCP can work very very well but let me ask you the following questions:

Do your computer run on more than a gig of ram, a lot of the ones I work on at the computer labs I work at do not which is a problem.

Are your computers built and run to just do that kind of work, or do you have people doing flash, photo editing, scanning, script writing, fcp editing, dvd creation, etc on them?

I also wrote this a bit bitter about a lot of my day so it's pretty negative. And i'd be lieing if i said I didn't love it many times. but there are so many odd quirks and things that it's just hard to deal with some times.

ok, so as I stated previously, I am working with the RED a lot recently and though I'm exhausted after a 20 hour day I just had to talk about how pissed I am.

See here is why I love film. when you shoot your mag, you tape it off in say red tape or ape that says exposed etc. and some loader sees that and says "hey this was shot" not to mention you pick up a 5lbs (is that the right weight?) mag and you know your holding a TON of money in your hands of painstakingly exposed film. You don't f@#$ up and tossed a used mag back on a camera and say WOOP i lost the shot.

So what happened tonight? Well we are in THE most crucial shots of the night, the nightclub our heroes have visited is falling apart, we shoot a slow mow 2k sequence, which requires a card swap. I grab that card, go DL it, Bring it back. it was very quick as it was 1 2k 60fps sequence, so it took all of 35 seconds to dl the card.

So i bring back the card and walk back off set to continue my rough edit. Come back when it's about time to get a new card, but what Do I get, another slo mow card, I dl this, come back, and they have already began shooting the next shot, but wait there's more, and here's the bad part. They are shooting over a card that was never downloaded, and wiped THE most critical inserts of the whole night.

This is something i wrote in another forum about "Phenomenon" apple's new compositor.

it's sad. i trouble shoot fcp daily...actually..a lot more than that. they do such a sh*t job of making apps. really they do. I have NO faith in any major app they release with the spotty work they have done since i got into their proapps

fcp 4.5 was THE most stable fcp ever, 5.0 went down the hole, 5.1 showed a resemblance of coming back to ok, and to say that i've been happy with fcs2 and all that has happened around that is an overstatement.

I run fcp in a few worlds. I have a boot drive for it running in tiger and it's pretty good in a hard core THis is an editing system environment.

Color is absolutely absurd, great app don't get me wrong, but to say it "just works" is a flat lie, and to say it works with ease (not even talking about learning the app, which wasn't too bad i mean it's actual from fcp and back issues) is a miracle relying on any workflow bumps to go smooth.

Compressor is really amazing now in it's ease of use. TO say i don't deal with a crash about once a week, is a joke.

How about fcp in a semi pro environment. Running in suites where only people a year and a half into learning how to edit/make film etc at school so these kids, for the most part aren't dumb. (i did have to turn a deck on for some one the other day to get video out...)

the primary ingest format is panasonic dvc codecs (dvcpro-hd) about 2 or 3 times a week i have to go over and change a setting or adjust things for the simplest of editing.

I made a unix script to send out when a problem comes up to trash prefs. Saves time walking. I'm not sure what it is, but i find my self deleting preferences more and more as each new version comes out.

Ok so how about a full student lab, one where everything is set up to basic ntsc-dv and then frozen in a state where nothing can be changed, surely everything should work as planned? the horror stories i could tell would make you laugh so hard, but thats for The LA meetup.

color can't be run do to monitor size and no output card (funny fire wire is an option....) Dvdstudio pro crashes pretty damned often, motion..no one uses it. Live type is actually stable... soundtrack, well why use it with a protools on our systems.

Final cut has one major hole as far as I'm concerned...it does not support any image sequences...seriously WTF? it's not like we use them at all, or the Digital intermediate acquisition format of choice is a single image per frame thing...

and what about that new app they are making. ok, so lets look at everything apple has developed from 0, there's the I apps and then there is aperture... they ended shake, which worked well and was popular. and they expect everything to just fall into place after 2 years and having a 500 dollar app out. there is no way that what ever it is will blow people away so much that it will move enough to justify a 5k pricetag and pay for the dev work.

I'm sorry there is no way that every one is going to see this app (assuming it's a shake/nuke/fusion/flame killer) it's taken 2 years for an industry to slowly move from shake...part of it was the price point part of it was familiarity. This isn't a 1 horse show any more, this is a f*cking rodeo, and i doubt 'phenomenon' is going to buck hard enough to get people to look.

-zander

So I have set my sites on jobs when I graduate. It's pretty clear I'm not going to be inducted to the orphanage as their newest lead compositor straight out of college, not that it hurts to dream mind you, but it certainly hurts to expect such things. So I've been focusing on a much more realistic vacancy: Roto Artist.

For those of you who don't know (and I'm assuming thats very very very few of you) roto, or rotoscoping is the art of separating elements from shot footage with the use of mattes drawn and animated by a roto artist. This isn't keying mind you, keying is using tools to pull a matte based off luminance and hue values. Roto is taking footage and essentially outlining parts of it over time to help compositors down the line add in more realistic effects like when the CG robot finally hugs the little boy in the end shot of the movie. In order for this to work the boy who was shot in a real location needs to be identified and matted. 

So if you can't tell this is painstaking work that takes hours and hours per shot, even days depending. In my quest for bettering my self I have started using Nuke from The Foundry and Shake as well as my old friends Mocha After Effects and Combustion. I've been messing with some pretty complex (for me) composites for this Project I've been working on for Nissan Design USA. And in the course have really gotten my head around node based compositing. When i opened shake for the first time yesterday I was able to quickly adapt to it once I got the hang of the interface. 

I have also been working on a short film entitled Reprise in which the main actress is a dead, well, actress haunting a local theater. The problem is she is a Black and White dead actress shot in color and not on green screen. With close to fifty shots there is a lot of roto needing to be done. So I have started do get that done. I started with my mouse and keyboard etc in mocha, but friday I made a big leap forward. I grabbed a spare wacom tablet from work (an old 5x8 graphire2) and started using that. I've been told for months I need one as i have horrid wrists and joint issues from sports and general geek stuff (yea a year of WoW will do that to you) and they are supposed to speed up your work especially with roto and detail work. I've also been told I'd hate the thing for about a week or 2 until I really got used to it. This was not the case, I took to it like a duck on water and immediately started working with it not only at work but took it home and messed with it there. I did approximately 8 hours of roto accomplishing one 150 shot. the shot was a wide of the actress between two curtains. 

The next day i did another 150 frames of roto in shake, as many facilities still use shake especially for roto I felt it would be good to get adapted to that interface and style of masking. There are a few differences between the two programs, each has their own advantages and flaws. but over all, roto is roto. A line is a line and if you can deal with that you can roto.

I prefer the feel and look of nuke to shake (i think I'm one of a rare few that do) it's more baron in the UI, and less polished which lends to it's ease of use to me. It does what it does and there is no fancy lace around that. Shake is much more on the level of what we expect from software. A nice looking UI that seems simple and easy to navigate with pretty pictures and glowing buttons. But to be honest it's single window design is getting very restrictive to me after dealing with nuke.

Also limitations like only being able to see one splines controls at a time is bugging me, though I suspect I can see 2 i have not yet figured out how. Sitll In nuke you can see as many splines as you want/have. which is nice if you are say working on the matte for the lower arm and are also tweaking the upper arm when you find errors. The node viewer in shake is based around noodles. These noodles are little strands that say "I go out to here and in to here" every node based software has it, AE has it too it's just not as functional or quite the same. But it's the basis of all node based workflows. Nuke has it too, The thing about nuke is it's nodes represent what they are a lot better. All full 3d nodes are rounded, 2d nodes are square and the in between nodes are well...in between. The Noodles in shake are an S curve which looks nice, but when your node tree becomes large It creates a bit of an odd ordering to things so that your noodles don't touch. Nuke on the other hand uses straight lines with optional breaking points that you can add a "dot" node too the dot does nothing other than allow you to organize a bit better. I think i enjoy the straight lines a bit more.

they can both do, on the smaller scale that I am in, pretty much the same things in the same way. It's just a matter of learning the languages of each program File In, in shake=Read in nuke. Bezier shape in nuke=rotoshape in shake. But pretty much it's the same thing in a different package. 

so my goal with this project is to do all my roto in one or two programs, but I am going to do atleast 1 shot in everything I have, from Mocha, to Nuke, Shake and combustion. hell I might even give AE a wirl with it. 

If you have a chance, check out Nuke @ Thefoundry.co.uk Fxphd has amazing classes to get you going, as does The gnomon school. 

I really feel as if I am learning and growing to meet my eventual tasks of slave labor roto for a few years where ever I choose to work. It's been a crazy few weeks and I've been neglecting to write here for a bit. I'll try and keep it more regular.

Hope you enjoyed. As always any questions feel free to post/ask

-Zander

Ok, so I supose I should start one of these with an introduction to my self, and though I will be talking about me whenever i'm talking here and my experiences, we all had to start some where, and the start is where we are at. So lets begin shall we?

First off, if you have issues with bad grammar and possibly bad spelling, than I recommend you leave asap, as I am good at neither.

Secondly, I want to thank you for reading the following, and any subsequent entries. If it wasn't for the COW, and the readers at the COW, I wouldn't be the person I am now. So thanks! Ok lets begin shall we?

I am currently enrolled at Brooks Institute a film school (as well as several other visual mediums) in Ventura California. I have 6 months till I graduate, and am anything but the typical student there. Before I went to college I was an AP photography student with work published in a few coffee table books as well as several magazines, so when I talk about cameras it's not completely out of my ass.

Brooks is an amazing though there are many opinions about the school, and all are valid, to me it's been some of the best experiences in my short 21 years. The school really is what you make of it. and that goes for most schools yes, but here in particular. The way the school teaches you is to task you with projects, and if you are a DP you try your hand at being a DP. Though every one learns the same fundamentals, it is really up to the individual students to learn all they need to do to become what they dream of.

And there are electives that teach about specifics, such as cinematography or Directing the actor, it's every ones own cross to bear. There are many people who get out of Brooks and fail, for various reasons, but the #1 thing I see is people who don't try as hard as they possibly can do to do all they can in the time they have at the school. Then they get out in the world, and they are screwed because they have done so little in comparison to other out there.

My friend and I gave a free workshop about workflow, from start to finish, the stuff you need to think about before you begin doing anything. and 1 person showed up. She said she learned more about the film making process in those 3 hours than she had in the 10 months prior.

Like every enterprise the school is growing and changing, and understanding workflow as well as more post production fundamentals are coming in the near future. I am very proud of this as I was asked for input on the future curriculum. To me the school is not just a place for me to learn, but if no one else is learning with me than how am I to gauge my learning experience. So i try my best to help those around me. That being said, I am the lead student Technical Assistant in our digital labs. We have

about 140 running machines right now, including 30 mac Pro's 30 g5's and some old g4's, a lab of Intel Imacs (actually 2) and several post production suites including a dvcpro hd capture based suite, and a protools HD surround mixing suite. I don't need the work from the school they pay me very little, for the job I do, and sometimes I feel like I'm talking to a brick wall, but when you know you really helped some one achieve a goal, and they feel grateful, you get this amazing rush, a feeling of pure pride in knowing you could pass on your knowledge.

This is one of the reasons I love places like the cow, the knowledge sharing goes back and forth so fast and so freely, it's stunning. There's a lot more about me to be said but that will be for another entry I suppose.

I want to talk now about something that has been on my mind a lot the past year. We were one of the first school to get the HVX, we have 20+ now and they are very popular to say the least. And this is great in many ways, and yet disheartening in even more ways. We all know the pluses and the benefits of the camera, and how amazing it is, but one of the things many of us also see is the footage in context. We can see the downsides, and we know they are there.

The problem is, so many new people into this field, including most of the students at Brooks, don't know the difference between a 1/3 ccd and the Red Mysterium chip. Many of them couldn't tell the difference between 4k and hdv either but that's not the point. All they see are the pluses and none of the downsides.

Many of them try and shoot with a ground glass, which leads them to shoot with a cheap ground glass, and from there they end up shooting WFO and getting dark muddy and grainy images. They see this and they think "Oh all HD is like this" they assume the dvcpro Hd 720p is the same as 4:4:4 uncompressed 720. HD is HD is HD right?

every student that passes though the brooks shoots on film twice, at least. Once on a 16mm hand crank bolex, which is an amazing little camera, and a few months later we shoot on an Arri S. Both these cameras are old and out dated, but they are really there to show you what film is, to learn the material and learn the process behind it. It really was an amazing experience, I operated a bit with both cameras, and did some loading. But being student projects done around a year into the 3 year program, they are full of mistakes and done rather sloppy. so they turn out rather bad, and to me this really gets people thinking All film will turn out this way if they don't have millions of dollars worth of budget.

So they go to HD. Since we got the HVX's not a single portfolio has been shot on film (portfolio projects are the final course in on of the three tracks at the school, a total of 8 months goes into the production of the short if not more) and to me it's kind of the trade make of student filmmakers today. They all have the opportunity to run out and shoot on tape or p2 cards, or basically free media. So mistakes are made, but with little consequence, and risks are taken and corners are cut.

To me it seems like the following analogy: It's like two young drivers, one has a nice new scion, with those dent proof plastic bumpers, the other has a 1997 honda accord that dents like I bruise, for no reason at all. They both back out of the same parking spots ever day, and behind them are metal guard rails. One day they both back into the guard rail, The scion owner gets out looks at his car, not a dent, looks as good as new. the Honda owner gets out, and what do you know, he's got a dent the size of Al Gore's head.

So 800 dollars in repairs, and 2 days later the two drivers are backing out again, This time the Honda owner takes it slow and steady always keeping a vigilant eye, and makes it away smooth. The scion owner, having payed no penalty for their mistake bumps into the poll again.

With out cost and sacrifice we cannot learn the lessons we need to to be successful in the future. Many young filmmakers today will never have to deal with a hair in the gate, or having a perfect take flashed by a bad zipper on a changing tent. They won't learn well from their mistakes, and they won't take all they can get from them either.

That's enough for today. I'll be coming back to this topic in the future as well as any other ones. If you have any questions or comments, let me know. I'm happy to answer them or give my perspective. -Zander