I used to use a program called Drop Extract Images to take apart Aperture’s PDF book export file into its JPEG contents for uploading to WHCC for their books. But that program is now extinct under Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. But it turns out that the underlying Unix program works fine if you know how to use Terminal.
Here’s my post from a few years ago describing the situation.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1431048?threadID=1431048
And the Terminal fix is to call pdfimages -j, then drag the PDF file into terminal, then make a folder and drag the folder into terminal, and add a trailing “/”.
I recently purchased a new Canon XF100 video camera to replace my Canon XL2. I primarily film events, presentations, interviews, bar mitzvah and wedding ceremonies, and the like. I was attracted to the XF100 for several reasons:
direct-to-compact flash recording with media rollover for continuous recording
50mbps 4:2:2 editable codec (no rendering in Final Cut Pro timelines)
XLR inputs with phantom power
So the other night I took it on its maiden voyage. I filmed a local theater group’s play for my very first “real” assignment with the XF100. It took a few minutes to figure out the audio inputs, as I was shooting with a line input from the sound board in input A and my Sennheiser shotgun in input B. One thing to report is that my Sennheiser does not fit in the mic mount (it’s too thin). I guess it’s easy to wrap it in gaffers tape or something, but I think I’m just going to use my shock mount in the cold shoe.
I shot at 35mbps so that I could get 57 minutes out of my two 16GB cards, knowing that I was transcoding down to DVD for delivery. I was very happy with the overall performance during the filming. I used my $30 OEM battery and it still showed over 50% capacity after 2 hours of runtime. I used autofocus and it worked well. I shot wide open at 1/48 and 0db gain, and that was perfect, along with tungsten white balance.
I used rsync (a built-in Unix utility in OS X) to copy each of the CF card images to my hard drive. Then I used Log and Transfer in FCP to wrap the video in native form to Quicktime (not ProRes). Everything went swimmingly.
But I ran into an interesting problem in DVD Studio Pro. I used the Compressor preset “DVD Best Quality 120 Minutes” setting to transcode to DVD format. Then I created a DVD Studio Pro project to burn the DVD itself. But the DVDSP muxing process error’d out, with very little information other than “Bad Video File Error”. Nothing I tried would work. So, on a hunch, I re-encoded (2 hours!!!) the video using a 1-pass encode (to save time), but dropped the VBR data rate a bit (4.6-6.0). And that worked. So I re-encoded overnight with the 2-pass encode using the lower data rates and it worked properly.
I’ve done hundreds of DVDs and I’ve never had a problem of this nature. Is there too much data in the files? I’m perplexed. Doesn’t seem rational.
I had the pleasure of photographing Miss Savannah’s bat mitzvah a few months ago, and I got this lovely note from her mom. I am embarrassed sometimes at this kind of compliment, but nevertheless I’d like to share it with you.
One of the best decisions we made was hiring Steve Maller to photograph our daughter’s bat mitzvah. His unique photojournalism style captured the many powerful emotions and special moments of our day.
During our evening celebration, Steve created a slideshow in which he kept adding new photographs throughout the night. Many guests commented how special it was to see real time the journey we all traveled together on that day from the first prayer to the last dance. He brought us all together through the moments we shared.
I jumped onto the Aperture 3 upgrade bandwagon as soon as it was announced because I was anxious to take advantage of some of the long-awaited new features. But one that I didn’t expect was the ability to do “local adjustments” using brushes in Aperture’s characteristic non-destructive way.
It didn’t take long for me to grok the brushes thing. It’s incredibly cool, although there are some performance issues with them right now. But that could also be the result of me skipping a few hardware upgrade cycles. I’m still laboring away on the first Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro.
Here is a photograph that I took of Walter (my dog) on the beach a few weeks ago. I love this photo, but it has a huge range of contrast, and I thought I would play with using the Shadows and Highlights tools and their new Brushes augmentation. When you click on the photo, the Quicktime animation will first show you the original, then a version with Highlights and Shadows both set to about 40%. Finally, a version with the same amount of adjustment, but applied locally to the water and sky (Highlights) and parts of Walter (Shadows). What do you think?
I’m really excited to take my workflow to the next level with my favorite photography software!
My dear friends Gary and Liz got engaged last night in the old fashioned way, with a modern, rock ‘n roll twist. See below for the technical nitty gritty!
Here are some technical details on what I had to do. I originally planned to film this with two cameras from the sound booth. I was going to use a Canon HG10 HD camcorder for a wide shot, and use my 5D Mark II with my 70-200/2.8 for a closeup (it’s a small club). But when I got there, I faced a couple of complications. First of all, the club was so dark that my HG10 (which is pretty decent WRT sensitivity) could barely register a picture. Focus was hunting badly, too. Secondly (and more seriously), I quickly realized that once the crowd filled in the floor in front of the stage, my cameras in the back of the hall would be useless, especially when Gary got down on one knee, as we planned for him to do.
So I had to think fast, and here’s what I did.
My Beacktek XLR adapter which was originally on the 5D Mark II with my Sennheiser shotgun and a feed from the mixing board was switched over to the HG10 where it would simply record the audio, knowing that the video was going to be all but useless.
And as for the 5D Mark II, I decided I was going to have to charge the stage with a wide-angle lens and take my chances at super high ISO on built-in mic, and sync the audio later. I wish I had a second Beachtek box, but this is the first time I saw the value in that. Anyway, I used the 16-35/2.8 even though I would have preferred my 35/1.4 because I was worried the 35mm end wouldn’t be wide enough if I was right at the front of the stage. I pre-set the camera on Manual with 1/30, f2.8 and ISO 6400. Like I said, it was super dark. Fortunately, as you can see from the resulting video, it basically worked. The first 30 seconds or so of video are super jumpy because I was literally knocking people out of my way to get to the stage. I was originally told the proposal would be before their encore, but as the show started I was told it would be in the middle of the set, and by then people were already smashed up against the stage 20 or so deep. Sigh.
My last challenge was syncing the audio from the two sources, but g-d bless PluralEyes. That was simple (after I retimed the 29.97 audio from the HG10 to match the 30fps from the 5D Mark II).
I’m quite pleased with how this came out, despite all the shortcomings and challenges. It was a magic moment, and I’d say I managed to bring it home in one piece. Actually in several pieces, but I put Humpty Dumpty together again in Final Cut Pro.
