COVID-19

Work slowed to a halt because of the pandemic. Stay safe!

As a reminder:

1) Wash your hands regularly with water & soap.
2) Avoid touching your face.
3) Clean surfaces regularly, especially keyboards, mice, controllers, monitors, phones, cameras, microphones, door knobs, handles, desks, tables, etc.
4) Get outside at least once a day (unless it's not recommended depending on your conditions.)
5) Maintain 6ft distancing with others. (That's a three seater sofa length worth.)
6) Don a mask in public space, keep your distance.

LA County Ressources Page with lots of good infos here: https://covid19.lacounty.gov

Documentary Filmmakers, Do You Want Your Post-production To Go Smoothly?

Here are 10 organizational tips to make sure the post-production on your new project will go smoothly and not slow down to mollasses or cost a small fortune:

1) Shoot everything at 23.976fps. OK, except for high frame rates to be used as slow motion.

2) Stick to the same frame size, format, codec, picture profile, LUT as much as possible. Expose properly, strive for consistency.

3) Take the time to set your camera(s) properly so that the same clip name is not repeated at nauseam across days and cameras, no one wants to deal with a gazillions of "Clip0001".

4) Record Time Of Day time code, and jam-sync your cameras and main sound recorder several times a day. Imperative after powering-off, battery swaps, power outages. If that's not possible, use whatever clock your device has, and manually adjust the timing information on each piece equipment so that they are in close proximity. Watch for the pesky 12hrs. difference.

5) Always record proper temp audio (decent signal, not saturated, not garbled) on all cameras. That's another way to sync the footage in post if timecode is missing or wrong. Use a decent microphone on each camera, do listen.

6) Always record PCM uncompressed audio at 48k and at 32bit or 24bit if you your recorder allows it. Else 16bit.

7) There is no need to record 12 tracks of audio when 11 of them are empty. Learn how to use your sound recording equipment and turn off any empty/useless track.

8) Be generous with Preroll and Post roll. 

9) Offload your footage with a proper offloading software like Hedge, and keep camera cards structure intact.

10) Organize your footage in folders by day: 2020_01_30, 2020_01_31, and by device/card: A001 (camera A, card 001), A002, B001 (camera B card 001), S001 (sound card 001), etc.

Is Vimeo Not Reseting 5GB "Plus" Weekly Quota In Time?

It's Monday January 20, 2020 in Los Angeles, I uploaded my last video on January 17.

Vimeo alerts: "You've used 81% of your weekly storage limit, Upgrade". "Quota 4GB of 5GB, Upgrade". "Your weekly limit will reset on January 18 at 11:50 PST."

"WILL RESET ON JANUARY 18" ??? What? Hello?

Single External Rotating Drives Speed Wall

I often have to explain to friends and clients that no matter the connections on your SRHD (Single Rotating Hard Drive), USB 3, Thunderbolt, whatever, the read/write speed is limited by the drive itself.

See this BMD Disk Speed Test on a Thunderbolt connected 2TB LaCie Rugged portable drive. The port is capable of up to 10Gbps, 1250MB/s data transfer speed.

Lame speed due to the limitations of the hard drive itself. It has a USB-C connector as well, and the speed is exactly the same. As of today, single rotating drive won't give you anything above 130MB/s at best.

If you want more speed, you can only get it with a SSD or a Raid drive array.

As a reminder, the max speed of the various connecting protocols are tabulated below:
USB 2.0 480Mbps (60MB/s)
USB 3.0 / USB 3.1 gen1, 5Gbps (625MB/s)
eSATA 1.5Gbps (187.5MB/s), 3Gbps (375MB/s), up to 6Gbps (750MB/s)
USB 3.2 / 3.1 gen 2 / Thunderbolt v1 two channels 10Gbps (1250MB/s)
Thunderbolt v2 20Gbps (2500MB/s)
Thunderbolt v3 40Gbps (5000MB/s)

A single rotating modern drive is the limiting speed factor using all but USB 2.0 protocols. As a reminder USB 2.0 was implemented in 1996!! eSATA in 2004. Hard drives have some serious catch up to do.

Avid ProTools and Media Composer Pricing 2019

I'm seeing the new prices for ProTools and MC on Avid website. They are leveling the offer for ProTools and Media Composer "vanilla" at $34.99 per month on a month to month basis.

There is still a $10 pricing difference though between ProTools ultimate at $84.99 and MC Ultimate at $74.99 Avid figures it can still milk sound editors and mixers for more money.

I'm using the month to month as the only relevant $ figure. At the end of the day all the yearly, multi-year, advance payments schemes are just discounts. These guys (Avid, Adobe...) model of software as subscription is not to be fully trusted anyway.

Every Time I Quit Premiere

Every time I Quit Premiere... It does not quit and instead it hangs.

I have to Force Quit, and every single time...

Thanks for nothing Adobe.

Huge macOs 10.14 System Folder Size Difference Between Finder and About This Mac/Storage

I am puzzled by the discrepancy between the amount of space left on my system drive and the space taken by each folder as displayed by the Finder.

Let me explain: my system disk is a 480 GB SSD (479.89 GB to be exact.) Under Finder it shows 130.39 GB available. If I add all the content sizes (Users Folder size + Application Folder Size + Library, etc.) it all adds up to 242.61 GB.

242.61 GB minus 480 GB, I should have 237.39 GB of space left and available. But I only have 130.39 GB. That's 107 GB of space missing. What the heck?

Examining the About this Mac/ Storage shows an even more puzzling story:

Here the System takes a whooping 173.5 GB of space!! On the Finder screenshot above, the System folder is a meager 10.12 GB. That's a 163 GB difference!! What gives Apple???

I searched the internet for an answer, and stumbled upon this post: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8084507

In there a reader suggested to look for Time Machine local snapshots - invisible files that can take a lot of space on the system drive. Only.... I do not use Time Machine. Nethertheless I was curious, maybe I turned it on at some point and forgot about it, I wanted to be sure and entered the command "sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /" in Terminal. And I got this result:

Ah ah! I do have local snapshots, only they are not generated by Time Machine but by Carbon Copy Cloner, a (great) Bombich software.

Lo and behold, there is such a feature in the software since the introduction of macOs High Sierra and APFS- formatted volumes, and in my case... snapshots is turned on! Ah ah! We're getting somewhere.

Snapshots in CCC Preferences, is enabled.

And looking at my system drive in CCC I can indeed see the nine snapshots, with one that's 39 GB. All right, that's a start. But it's only a portion of the 107 GB not accounted for.

Hmmm. Since these snapshots are old from last year, at this point I will experiment and just delete them to see what happen. I should get back at least 39 GB, then we'll see where the rest is hiding.

So I selected the snapshots and deleted them all. CCC went on a re-reading of the volume and...

 Bingo! I now have 246 GB of free space! CCC snapshots were taking all these 107 GB of unavailable space, much more than the apparent 39 GB something.

Back to normal!

All right, so if you do have a discrepancy between the available space on your system drive and the space occupied by the system and your user files, chances are snapshots have been created by Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, or another backup app.

You might want to keep them, or you might want to delete them to free the space for other files. I wish Apple would list them properly in the About this Mac/ Storage as SNAPSHOTS! Is that too much to ask?