Thunderbolt: a closer look at new MacBook + more

Engadget posted Intel Thunderbolt: a closer look, with video showing streaming of 4 1080p clips from a MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt running Final Cut off a Promise RAID.

See for yourself:

Update: there's always just one more thing, so check out Thunderbolt, Xsan built into Lion Server, hello cheap fast shared storage! at FCP.co and Swipe, Save And Serve: What’s New in Mac OS X Lion [VIDEO] at Mashable.

Mac crash saves with ToeJam + AE Suicide

Scott Garner posted AE Suicide, "a little script and app that can help force an autosave when After Effects CS4 or CS5 locks up" on the Mac. It's a shortcut of the technique outlined by Mark Christiansen for a Mac OS Terminal kill of the current After Effects process.

It seems to be the same as something by Erwin Santacruz, ToeJam v.5, the "tiny Cocoa app that forces After Effects to crash and save your current working file."

Update: AE Suicide has a new home at AE Scripts.

Magic Bullet Grinder: Mac app for Canon DSLR conversion

Magic Bullet Grinder (US$49) is a new standalone application for the Mac that batch processes footage from a Canon DSLR:

"It can convert to ProRes, add timecode, and even create low-res with window burn proxies for offline editing. You can also use it to conform (not convert, i.e. no frame blending or motion interpolation) a bunch of clips to one frame rate, so your 30p and 60p shots can become slow-mo clips at 23.976fps."

Update: Stu Maschwitz responds to comments on his blog,

"Why did we make something to compete with all the free options [Mpeg Streamclip, EOS 5d FCP log and transfer plug-in, etc.] out there?

Grinder's strength is its singularity of purpose and its simplicity. Yes, there are many free ways to convert media files. Some are easier to configure than others. Grinder is a zero-config, drag-and-drop app with a few carefully-chosen options custom-tailored for the needs of HDSLR shooters.

It doesn't do much that's unique, but one feature it has that I like a lot is the parallel proxy rendering. I like to work with low-res offline clips with TC window burn and then master back to my camera originals. Grinder makes that a breeze.

Frame-rate conform is another biggie. I love that I can go shoot 24, 30, 50 and 60p and conform it all back to 23.976 without any effort. Makes slow-mo a simple thing.

Grinder is not expensive. It's for people who want something that works right every time with no fuss."

Plus, there's already a review on PVC.

Update 2: of course if you're using CS5, AE CS5 and Premiere Pro CS5 both natively support DSLR footage. Video backgrounders can be found in AEP posts Native DSLR Editing in Premiere Pro CS5 and Keying, Time Remapping, & Stills in Premiere CS5.

Update 3: there's a public beta of 5DtoRGB, which converts Canon EOS series video files to high-quality DPX sequences or ProRes QuickTime files.

AE on Snow Leopard: new tech support doc

Todd Kopriva has a new post for Mac users, After Effects on Mac OS Snow Leopard: new technical support document.

Snow Leopard, AE, QT, and Quartz Composer 4 [updated]

Adobe guys Michael Coleman and Todd Kopriva are tracking After Effects and Snow Leopard, the 10.6 version of Mac OS X. Besides upgrading to AE 9.02 for multiprocessing, there's not much up. For Photoshop & other products, John Nack is a good source of information.

As a precaution, deactivating AE (or any CS4 app if you have a bundle) might be a good idea since you could avoid dealing with customer service if there's a problem with the OS install.

[update: it turns out that Snow Leopard requires 9.0.2, and you do lose an activation credit so deactivating is advised]

Only time will tell if the QuickTime gamma issue is really solved with current versions of the QT players and other software and old files, etc. While it doesn't get too specific, there's even a Compatibility Wiki by Wikidot for many Mac apps.

Update: CDM has an initial but in-depth review of something new in Snow Leopard -- Mac OS X 10.6: Quartz Composer 4.0 Hands-On Review, New Features.

Update: See the Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review by John Siracusa -- QuickTime is dealt with on page 6 and page 16 of like 23 (via johnmontfx).

Chris Meyer has more in Snow Leopard: Hopes, Misunderstandings, and Gotchas, as does Studio Daily in What exactly is this QuickTime X thing anyway?

AE Mac/Windows benchmark smackdown

Kevin Schmitt is back on Creative Mac having re-run benchmarks to see which OS runs AE better with The Great After Effects Mac/Windows Smackdown: CS4 Edition. There's a some twists to running benchmarks and multi-processing in AE that may pop up in coverage of this, but really the problem is that Apple makes insanely great changes to its OS and hardware a bit often. Here's Kevin's conclusions:

"Cripes, the Mac OS X version of After Effects is absolutely smoked again, and the results are slightly worse than last time in places. Either Adobe isn't tuning After Effects on the Mac at all, or tuning the buhjeezus out of the Windows versions. Hell, even single process rendering on Vista generally spanks multiple processes on Leopard, for the love of Pete.

Vista pwnage aside, it's interesting to see how enabling multiprocessing on either platform doesn't necessarily translate to better performance. The time savings bear themselves out on longer renders, but it isn't always a slam dunk to soak up all your system resources by enabling multiprocessing. If your system is beefy enough, it may be a better bet to give AE a single process and then work on something else while the render happens.

In any event, it's clear from these tests that Vista x64 offers significant "pound-for-pound" time savings for your After Effects renders. We're still in disappointing territory for Mac users, to be sure, but I'm actually surprised this time. I figured the situation would be much improved this time around, and, well, not so much. We'll just have to see how the CS5/Snow Leopard/Windows 7 comparison goes."

Free Mac utilities for denoise, deinterlace, standards conversion

I didn't know that when you export NTSC Quicktime file to PAL in Final Cut Pro it adds one black frame every 10 or so seconds on your file (not so with Compressor I suppose). That spurred Flippant News to note some possibly handy applications from Jan E. Schotsman, including:

1) Deinterlancer, which deinterlances movies, changes field dominance/order, converts PAL to NTSC or Custom, and more; and 2) Video Cleaner, which removes noise, logos, and cross-luma.

Encore CS3 and Blu-ray on the MacPro

Dave's Tech Table has some updated info on Working with Adobe Encore CS3 and Blu-ray, especially concerning using the 2 ODD onboard SATA ports on a MacPro.

Hackintosh in the air

Update: Lifehacker posted this a few weeks later: OS X on Your Hackintosh PC, No Hacking Required, and No Film School is still interested in November 2010 in How to Build a Hackintosh.

Reposting something from November in honor of the new Apple laptop -- and the $400 ASUS subnotebook. But the hack is hardly headache-free. If you "don’t have SSE3 and/or recent Intel chipset, my understanding is the EFI hacks at the moment do not allow you to run an unpatched kernel, hence no updates." There can also be sundry system errors from driver malfunction, so no fancy Final Cut setups are safe, according to sources sighted at Macworld...

Actually seeing the new Apple Air does make you soften somewhat because it is nice, but Tech Thoughts hasn't touched it yet and has some good comments. Henry Norr, the former editor at MacWeek who took a brave stand at the SF Chronicle, has more thoughts. \\\


Hobbyists might enjoy building a Hackintosh -- in the sense discussed here, a PC running Mac OS assisted by "OSx86" technologies that evolved from developer kits for transitioning from the G5 to MacIntel. It seems akin to cloning the BIOS of the original IBM, and not quite the same as running a virtual machine like VMware.

Lifehacker has a walkthrough on how to Build a Hackintosh Mac for Under $800, and UNEASYsilence does the same for the $300 ASUS subnotebook in Load OSX 10.5 Leopard on the eeePC.

I'm not sure why someone doing video would spend too much time on this, but I keep hearing about it because of the low cost of building a PC Frankenstein. You might remember that Victor Frankenstein shirked responsibility for his actions and rejected the creature out of fear; only after this neglect did the creature became a monster.

Free Mac plug-ins: Vee You

Of course we've been able to do this in AE for years, but free is free...The Edit Blog notes Mac Freebie plug-ins: Vee You, explaining "Only Motion 3.0 has audio behaviors which enable you to drive the eq and vu levels automatically but you can also use these plugins in Motion 2.0 or Final Cut Pro 5/6 if you want to manually animate the parameters of the plugins."