Steve Maller Photography

I am an Apple Aperture user, and have been ever since version 1.0 was released. Aperture is a terrific tool which is responsible in many ways for the great efficiencies I have achieved in my photo production. It allows me to work quickly and accurately, gives me a good number of editing tools, both for individual photos and en masse changes.

I currently have close to 100,000 photos in my main Aperture library on my studio computer, and I have anywhere from 10-20,000 photos on my Macbook Pro library, which includes my family pictures.

Every once in a while, though, Aperture has a hiccup that causes me trouble. Most notably, I’ve had cases where I’ve tried to move projects between computers, upgraded hard drive, or even upgraded the OS X on my computers. In these cases, I’ve had to perform surgery on my Aperture installation to avoid doing a complete rebuild of my library. Once I did try to do a complete rebuild, and my computer was tied up for almost 30 hours.

The symptoms most commonly associated with Aperture database problems are:

• Incorrect or corrupt thumbnail images
• Error messages about missing Master files
• Inability to export versions
• Inability to locate Master files
• Errors ordering prints and/or books

So, I have developed a set of tools that I regularly use to diagnose and repair my Aperture library and projects. I can help you to do this, too. If you have internet access and are running OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), I can use OS X “Screen Sharing” to access your computer and do this remotely. Most database and library repairs take less than an hour, and many can be completed in a matter of minutes.

If you’d like to hire me to do this for you, please contact me via email so that we can discuss your situation. The initial consultation is free. Up to 1 hour of repair work performed remotely over the Internet is $100. More complicated repairs will be estimated in advance.

Good luck, and happy shooting!

Steve

I use the excellent Firestore device sometimes when I’m shooting video with my Canon XL2. It provides up to 7 hours of runtime (along with the excellent PowerBagJunior battery) and allows me to quickly edit video without dealing with tape.

However, a few months ago I noticed that an update to Final Cut Pro (or maybe Quicktime) broke my workflow. The Firestore segments its recorded video into <2GB chunks (which is about 9 minutes of video). This isn’t much of a hassle because it’s easy to drop them all into a Final Cut Pro timeline and have them automatically line up. But at some point a few months ago, I noticed that there were very short (1-2 frame) gaps appearing in the audio at each join in the timeline. Needless to say, this was very disconcerting. Try as I might, I could not get anybody interested in this (not Focus, not Apple…nobody). I could not believe it was my problem.

So this week it bit me again, and this time I decided to revert to my old debugging chops from Back In The Day when I used to be a fearsome software coder with a reputation for leaving no bug unturned (or something like that).

Suffice it to say, this was difficult to figure out, but I’ve finally gotten to the bottom of the problem, found a solution (albeit a clunky one), and figured out how to get a few more years of use out of my Firestore.

In a nutshell, the Firestore is recording my Canon XL2’s “24P” video at the “drop frame” rate of 23.98 frames per second. Quicktime Pro’s player says “that’s fine” and plays it seamlessly, as do most other Quicktime applications. But Final Cut Pro sees the 1-2 frame gap in the audio. Why? Because the actual framerate of “24P” dropframe video is 23.976 frames per second, not 23.98. And for some reason, the Quicktime applications don’t seem to care. But Final Cut Pro is obviously far more fussy, and assumes the Quicktime file is 100% accurate, and in this case, it’s wrong. That’s because the audio is actually 23.976 frames per second (4/1000 of a second shorter) than the video, which is 23.98 frames per second. Over the space of the 9+ minutes of a segment of video on the Firestore, that means the audio actually ends a fraction of a second earlier than the video, causing the gap.

So, the right way to fix this problem would be for the Firestore’s manufacturer to fix this bug in their device. I’m not too sure they’d be interested in doing that because they’ve since moved on to newer Firestore devices. However, I wonder if this bug is also in their newer devices. Hmm…

Anyway, here’s the clunky fix I found. There’s a nice little Quicktime player application called QT Sync (get it here: http://www.qtsync.com/qtsync.php) that is capable of directly editing a Quicktime movie file and changing the frame rate. This is a non-destructive change, as this just changes a notation in the file itself. However, now the movie file has two extra blank frames at the end. So when you drag it into Final Cut Pro’s timeline, you have to carefully trim off the last two video and audio frames.

I hope this proves helpful.

My lovely place on Marsten has become no longer the right place for me for a number of reasons. So I found a new place that’s about 150 yards south of this location. It’s a wonderful, funky old building that suits my needs wonderfully well. I’ll be packing up soon, so pardon my tardiness in returning phone calls and emails if that happens!

Wish me luck…there is a lot of stuff to move!

Was playing around with the 5D Mark II at a Mothers’ Day gathering at my sister’s house today and shot some nice video with it. I used the 35/1.4L and 85/1.2L, both wide open using exposure lock. I killed off the audio track in Quicktime Pro, conformed the video to 24fps (slowing it slightly) using Cinema Tools, then re-compressed it to 720P at about 2800bps using DV Kitchen.

Make sure your web browser window is stretched out as big as you can get it.

If you don’t know what any of that means, just watch and enjoy.

I was hired to do a marketing piece for a company that does high-end digital sales training, and when I told them I could do not only photographs (as I have done for them before) but video, too, they jumped at the opportunity. I decided that I would commit to the Canon EOS 5D Mark II to film this piece for a few reasons.

1. The gig was in New Jersey, and the complexity of flying out all my video gear (based around the Canon XL2) would be expensive, complicated, and probably require an assistant on-site.
2. The 5D Mark II would double as my backup stills body, further reducing the weight and quantity of gear
3. The phenomenal low-light capability of this camera also meant I could leave all my lights at home
4. The 5D Mark II will work on a small, lightweight fluid head I have
5. I just wanted to do it.

Overall, I was extremely pleased with the results. And my clients were flabbergasted when I was not only able to show them results in near real-time, but I was able to edit together a fun slideshow recap with about 10 different video clips embedded in the show.

• I found it very easy to “fool” the camera into using wide apertures when I felt like it would be an advantage (the snipped below was shot with the Canon 35/1.4 wide open using a technique I cobbled together on the forums).
• I decided to transcode all the H.264 video into Apple’s ProRes format because it was really hard to edit the raw camera files in Final Cut Pro on my Macbook Pro. And I’m really glad I brought out a pair of 500GB Firewire drives. I ended up with nearly 250GB of ProRes video files, which corresponds to only around 25-30 minutes of video!
• The quality of the video was exceptional. I found it easy to adjust the white balance before shooting, and I shot in a wide variety of situations, including hideously a dark and weirdly-lit bar and classrooms with combinations of window light and fluorescent light.
• The one huge downside (which cost me some time) was the complexity of using wireless mics. On two occasions I lost entire interview segments, once because I forgot to plug the XLR adapter into the camera, and a second time when I forgot to take the body pack off standby. Epic fail. I want a headphone jack on the camera to monitor the audio!

Anyway, here’s a photo of the rig perched on the camera. It’s an Azden dual-mic receiver with two XLR outputs. I ran its outputs into a BeachTek XLR-Pro adapter, which in turn has a stereo miniplug output, which works nicely with the 5D Mark II’s audio input.

Now here is a very short example of what the video looks and sounds like. It’s sampled way, way down so as not to swamp my poor server. See what you think…

I was leaving my studio mid-day today and noticed that the cherry blossoms (is that what they are?) have opened up, and they’re simply gorgeous. So I grabbed my Canon 5D Mark II and figured out how to get it to capture this scene. It was done hand-held, conformed to 24fps, then slowed down by 50% to 12fps, then compressed using DV Kitchen.

Beautiful stuff! You’ll need the latest version of Quicktime, a fast internet connection, and a reasonably fast computer, too. There’s no audio on this one.

Local Northern California disc drive manufacturer Seagate has discovered a flaw in the “firmware” which controls many of their recently-manufactured disc drives. I was alarmed when I discovered that as many as SIX of my disc drives might be affected, including two of my main production discs in my Mac Pro. These are very high-performance 1 terabyte discs, and despite all my precautions about backups, I was still concerned.

But after following this story closely for a few days and with the friendly assistance of “Brian B.” on Seagate’s tech support live chat system, I finally got what I needed to update my drives. Five of my drives were actually in need of updates…

After about a half hour of nervous hacking, Mission: Accomplished!

I successfully updated five Seagate ST31000340AS (7200.11 1TB drives) which were at SD15 firmware to ‘SD1A’ firmware. This was a little complicated because after I did the two that were internal to my Mac Pro, I had to remove three of my internal drives and replace them with the three from my eSATA drive. It turns out the sixth 1TB drive was actually a Maxtor-labeled drive, and the firmware hasn’t been posted for that drive yet.

But here you go…FreeDOS booted on my Mac Pro running Seagate’s flasher program. Worked like a champ. Whew!

Feb 2 2009 Interesting update found on Macintouch.com written by Randall Voth:
It is my understanding that a log file is written to by the firmware when certain things happen, such as swapping bad sectors. If you startup the drive when it has written exactly 320 items to this log, then the drive will not be recognized at boot. The data is still intact. The physical drive still functions. The log needs to be cleared and you should update the firmware.

I had the privilege and the joy of attending Leah’s bat mitzvah yesterday. Here is a short video snippet shot with my new Canon EOS 5D Mark II.

Update (Jan 14): I have edited the video to use the sound from the temple’s sound system, so here you have it in all its glory!

Update (Jan 16): I have added a second video. This is too much fun!

I am amazed at Moore’s Law. For those who may not be familiar with this great piece of computer history, it goes something like this…

Way back in 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore wrote in a research paper that he believed that the number of transistors able to be placed on a circuit board would roughly double every two years. He could not envision this continuing beyond even ten years, when that would place over 65,000 transistors on a single board. Imagine his delight all these years later when he sees things like this.

Digital cameras record their images on “compact flash” or “SD” memory cards. The SD cards are considerably smaller, and are becoming more favorable because of their size advantage. Their capacity has now caught up with their larger siblings, as evidenced by Kingston’s announcement of a 16 GB SD card.

I won’t bore you with yet another accounting of how much of the Library of Congress would fit on that one card. But consider this:

Currently the largest available conventional hard drives are one terabyte (that’s roughly one thousand gigabytes, or 1 million megabytes) in size. They’re available from all the major hard drive manufacturers. So I did some math and imagined if you were to build a storage device made up of not a high-speed magnetic platter, but a whole bunch of these little SD cards.

The SD card spec says that the cards must be 24mm X 32mm X 2.1mm in size.

A standard 3.5” one terabyte hard drive is roughly 26mm X 101.4mm X 147mm in size.

So, based on my redimentary calculations, that means if you were to attach a whole lot of SD cards together (I figure 200 would work) so that they could fit in the same space, you’d end up with a solid state storage device which requires very little power, weighs 40% less than a hard drive, and stores over three terabytes. And it would work a lot faster than a hard drive, too.

Unfortunately, at a retail price of around $230 each, this whiffy storage device would cost you $46,000. But remember Moore’s Law, and just wait a few years!

[Update as of Feb 1, 2008]: As if to prove how quickly things change, today I saw that Sandisk has announced a 32GB SD card. So take the calculations above and double them. Except for the price, which is $350, so the cost of your 6.5 terabyte solid state disk would be a nice round $70,000.

Update (August 19, 2008): Intel have announced that they’re jumping into the Solid State Disk business: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10018837-64.html

[Update as of Jan 15, 2009] : Well, the 32GB SDHC cards are still very expensive, but the latest sale I saw just now on 16GB SDHC cards has them at $29.99 (including free shipping!), meaning that the price of our mythical 3TB all-flash hard drive has gone from $46,000 to about $6,000.

(Images courtesy of Kingston, Inc. and Sandisk, Inc.)

Great piece on NBC’s Today Show about how fast Facebook is growing among the 30+ demographic…