Firestreamer is software that allows you to use your Digital Video camcorder or VCR as a reliable computer data storage device. You can store up to 15 Gigabytes of files and folders to a Mini-DV cassette, or more with the built-in compression enabled. Firestreamer makes your DV recorder appear as a regular tape drive to other applications running on your computer, so that you can use Windows Backup Utility (NTBackup) to back up and restore your files and folders to and from videotape. The backup and restore are fully automated, as with a normal tape drive. You only need to change tape cassettes when prompted.
This is a great idea - you see videotape used as a backup medium in television systems - currently Avid's DS-Nitris machine can backup onto tape (but you can watch the tape back and recognise the images and keys etc.) but way back when (in the eighties!) Quantel had a backup system that used UMatic tape. If you had a DLS6001 or a pre-version 5 Paintbox you could use cheap low-band tape as a data tape. If you watched the recording back it looked like VITC all the way down the picture. Very clever (although I seem to remember taking nearly a day once at Lime Grove to get the alignment of the Schmitt trigger right so that it worked!).

I received and email from my old chum Tim Taylor;

Phil - your blog is the absolute business - always a great read - even if some of the tech details are way beyond me (or beyond my interests).

Today I was reminded of some pics you posted when they craned the Resolutions mobile in to the Fame Academy house on Highgate hill a few years ago. You can see the connection with my pics above - a crane would have been great today.

Tim is an OB engineer and sent me some pics of a company he works for sometimes and a bit of bother they got into moving a truck - the details shall remain secret!
Anyhow - here are some pics from an occasion I had to move a truck I'd built for Resolution - over the wall into the Fame Academy in Highgate, North London. £1 million in the air!

This week's reason for hating Decklink cards! - I have just got back from a client who was complaining about colour variation between component and SDi outputs of a Decklink Pro card. No trouble I thought - align the monitor so I'm happy that the reason is upstream and attack the ProcAmp settings. When you get there you can only tweak the U & V components together and they don't track!
So, I put up a PLUGE signal (so no colour, only luminance), cranked up the gain on the (digital) vectorscope and looked at the colour-in-the-noise (as if you were doing a quick colour balance on a studio camera looking at a chip chart). Tweak the chroma gain on the G5 and the colour caste shifts!. I hate those cards - they are so domestic! Now - the DeckLink defenders will say "but you can unlock the colour components and tweak them separately" - try it - one effects the other terribly - as with their analogue and digital stages they have used some half-arsed implementation that goes to prove that even in 2005 $895 doesn't buy you a broadcast-capable interface card.
So, you can really only use the analogue component output if you don't care about the colour balance (and presumably if you don't want to lay back to analogue tape) - and don't even think about using it at the same time as the SDi.

Catch up with previous reasons why I hate them here and here.

Hold your cell 'phone in the air like you just don't care!

I love bank holidays!

Linux on an iPod?! sounds like a pretty crazy idea, but these guys are on the way to doing it, even porting Doom to run on those stylish little boxes.

The Shield is my current favourite show - Channel Five are running series four on Saturday evenings at the moment. I missed the first couple and then being in Mexico didn't capture a couple of others and so went to TorrentSpy (a great Bittorrent tracker site) and found a few people posting the whole of series four in HiDef! One overnight download later and I'm catching up on Vic's antics in better resolution than I could ever get from C5 - Television is dead! Long live Bittorrent!

Isla Guagalupe, Mexico, part 2

After a couple of days in San Diego having meetings about parking links trucks etc. I finally got to go to Mexico - our fixer took us as far as the tiny military airfield in Encelada (an hour south of Tijuana - the border town near San Diego) where we got on a Cesna 104 that flew us the two-hundred miles to the island. We made a couple of passes of the airstrip and noticed the wrecked remains of other aircraft at either end! It is a very basic facility - just a dirt track big enough to land on. On landing we were met by some folks who work as conservationists (the Mexican government recently declared the island a nature reserve). We borrowed their truck and went about five miles inland (it took an hour! Very rough terain). Then we had to hike across very rough terrain (it is a volcanic island) for a couple of hours. Fortunately the Mexicans had come around the other way with a quad bike and so I was able to make it to within a few hundred metres of the beach.

Once on the beach (half an hour down a very steep ravine) I was able to take a couple of GPS readings (you gotta be able to see the bird if you're going to get pictures back to London!) and take a few photos.
If you want to see a few more pics from the day look at my photo blog (link in the right hand bar). What an adventure - I hope the show all comes together now - it'll be called Shark Watch on Channel Five in October.

I have to say I really enjoyed being with the various Americans and Mexicans - incredibly hospitable and friendly - they wanted to talk about Manchester United and Arsenal! I have been on other recces in the UK and found them to be lonely, uptight experiences but these guys made it a joy.

Isla Guagalupe, Mexico




So, I have to go away this weekend to recce this location for a show that will be on Channel Five in October - it looks really remote - 250 miles off the Mexican coast with only goats for company! I'll be going to San Diego on Thursday and then heading down Mexico way to get a light plane to the island. I'll post a load of photos on my picture blog (see the right hand links bar).

Guadalupe Island on Wikipedia
An Oceanic Wonder

This is a nice pic that Sarah found online - I'm quite looking forward to it!

Impressed but annoyed!

These are the pics that Transport for London took of Sarah not getting out of a box junction quick enough on Archway Road! However, paying the fine was about as painless an e-commerce transaction as could be! Their website is superb with you being able to confirm the fine with both reference numbers and the image shot at the time.
Now I think that £100 (with a £50 cash-back if paid promptly - these guys are across modern retailing!) is steep for lingering in a box juntion for too long but I do like the idea of automated penalties for speeding etc - several times more people are killed by sober people speeding that by drunks - and maybe it'll mark the start of better behaviour on the roads.

Why do people have to have their say?

Last weekend was Sarah's fund-raiser for our medic friends who work for Hand in Hand for Asia and it was a great night - brilliant music and comedy and we raised a good sum. I was doing the PA - and if I say so myself it sounded very good! Outboard compressors and feedback killers as well as me riding the parametrics to find the sweet spot on every instrument! It's that old BBC training! Anyhow - one of the bands manager's kept sidling up to me to say things like "his guitar could be a bit brighter" and the like. On each occasion I'd just touch the knob and say something like "is that what you're after" and he'd say "yes, much better" even though no adjustment had been made.

It reminded me of when I used to spend a lot of time racking studio cameras. I'd make a point of making sure they were all colour-matched consistently and it used to annoy me when the director or the lighting guy would say something like "camera two looks a bit blue in the blacks" - I'd stare at the monitor, flick between the cameras - touch the OCP (making NO adjustment) and they'd say "ah, much better"! Talk to any racks engineer and they'll report the same.

All this put me in mind of an occasion when I worked at a facility where they had a studio and an audio department. I used to work a split shift across maintenance and studio operations and I got on quite well with the studio sound guy. One day during a coffee break I was in the studio's sound control room chewing the fat and one of us knocked a cup of coffee into the mixer - panic! It was one of those Soundcraft Venue models with the removable channel modules and so we quickly removed the three or four modules that the coffee had spilt into. While we were mopping out I noticed that the half-dozen op-amps on the channels were TL071s - I mentioned to the sound supervisor that there was a low-noise Mil-spec version of the chip, a TL061 which might buy us eight or ten dBs of better noise performance (which in the days of analogue recording was worth having). "Tell you what" he said, "buy a bag of them and whenever I'm quiet I replace a channel's worth and when I'm done you can put the Lindos on the mixer and see how better it sounds".

After a couple of months he'd finished and when I did squeak the signal path I reckoned we did have an extra eight dBs in hand - very nice. Later that week the dubbing mixer (who worked in the audio department) came to me and said "I heard what you did with the studio mixer - I've booked you in for maintenance this weekend and you're going to do the same with mine" - he had a similar model of desk. I was less than keen to sacrifice another weekend and so on the Friday evening when he'd left I went up to his suite and burred up a few screws on the removable modules and left a couple of the old TL071s out of the studio mixing desk littered about.

On the Monday morning he came to me and said that the mixer sounded so much better - in fact "night and day" was the expression he used! By the end of the week several of his client had come to congratulate me on how much better the suite sounded.

So, I concluded that some of the most senior people really have a limited grasp of technical quality and Lord Kelvin's quote (see the right-hand column) is as ever, very relevant.

Data sheets for the A450 audio switch and the Crystal Vision Demon pinouts - I use these all the time and never have the details to hand when I need them.

Pimp My Ride is hilarious - it's MTV's "make-over" show. They take your tatty old car and make it look like a drug-dealer's vehicle. Unfortunately you're little Fiat Panda's 750cc engine now has to drag around another 100kg of body-kit and amplifiers for the outrageous sound system. Tim Westwood is the clown prince of UK hip-hop and the presenter.

I wondered about how we sometimes upgrade old edit suites and if Mr Westwood might have a take on that? (bold is for hip-hop emphasis);

Westwood: Yes, yes - my man is getting no respect with his old-skool version seven ABVB machine. Back in the day his AVR2 laybacks looked good but now no comissioning editor would be blessed by his offlines.

cut to fast montage of Root6 engineers pulling out the 9600 Mac and installing a new Adrenaline

Westwood: Holler! With this DNX-L board he'll be enjoying maximum resolution. Eight channel audio ensures massive sonic response!

Decklink video cards and the online community they run at Creative Cow. I have been caught out several times by their so called "Pro" products - see a previous post here. Anyhow, I posted the following;

Does anyone have any advice on phasing the active picture to sync timing on the output of a Pro card under V4.7 of the driver on a G5?
I've recently put in a couple of suites running FCP 4.5 and the output of both cards shows a consistent error in their picture sync timing. It's so bad that some outboard devices (typ. those that don't have a separate genlock - a legaliser in this case) aren't happy with the SDi out.



Internal bars on a DVW A500P and the o/p of the Decklink Pro card
click the image for full size screen-grab from a WVR610.

You'll see the difference between the output of a DigiBeta (I'm assuming that is correct!) and the Decklink. What the Tek610 waveform monitor is showing is the difference between start of the data interval in the back porch and the start of active video. Although this isn't well specified in REC601 it is related to the 10.4uS interval that engineers measure to get the start of active picture placed correctly (dropping edge of sync to start of active line). In each of these screen-shots the Tek is free-running (so as to remove the effect of a card whose output isn't genlocked to station black). To make it a fair comparison I also pulled the reference from the VTR's input. There is about a micro-second of discrepancy.
It's wrong - measurably so - and is problematic if you want to integrate your FCP into a broadcast setup.

Now the moderator didn't put the post up but I was tickled by the following thread:

Subject: 4:3 to 16:9 (Letterboxing) Without Image Degradation

This may not be the right forum for this question, but thought I'd pose the question just the same: Does anyone out there know of an app that transforms non-anamorphic DV material shot at 4:3 to 16:9 WITHOUT just cutting off the top and bottom of the frame and losing all those valuable, indispensable little pixels in the process? Since I believe the Pana DVX100a does this digitally, perhaps there's some software that does it after the fact.

Thanks,

What you describe is impossible. To get from 4:3 to 16:9 you must lose part of the picture. The Panasonic camera just crops the picture, unlike other anamorphic systems.

In any event After Effects will do a better job than FCP, picture-quality-wise

I was afraid it was, but thought I'd ask anyway, since what might be impossible today, might not tomorrow. Thanks for the response.

Not a matter of possible/impossible, just a matter of simple geometry. Think about it: How can you change the aspect ratio to a wider ratio without cropping or stretching the picture?

Maybe they're not ready for measurements that mention microseconds!

New version of fccHandler's compile of VirtualDub - is always an event for me! VirtualDub by Avery Lee is the best swiss-army knife video utility I have and being open source gets re-built by others. This version supports MPEG2 files and is just the thing for taking the high-bitrate output of my capture cards (4Meg long-GOP) and transcoding it into DivX whilst fixing some VHS artefacts on the way (including droping the audio into CoolEdit to fix the hiss). Also see flaXen's VHS filter as this is excellent.

Extensions to Skype - I am a big fan of Skype and I've found a couple of cute extensions;

• Skype for Outlook toolbar - this provides integration with Outlook and works really well.
  
• Jyve webtools allows you to have a clickable link so folks can Skype you directly - see my right hand links

Bomb attacks in London - things are a bit crazy here in London at the moment - there have been multiple bombs across tube trains and buses and nothing is moving. The cell 'phone networks are also down due to the load.
I had to cycle from MTV in Camden to our office in Soho and for the fifteen minutes I was in the saddle I didn't move out of earshot of sirens - there are buses parked by the side of the road with their "out of service" signs up and as I swung by University College Hospital's new A&E department I noticed several armed policemen on guard. There are more helicopters in the sky than I've ever seen.

BBC News have the details

Everyone in the office stopped to watch the reports.

Tektronics WVR7100 & 6100 remote cables - we put in a load of these waveform monitors and I'm a big fan - you fundamentally can't get a more accurate video signal analyser. Anyhow - they come with dire warnings about how you can extend the optional control panel - essentially the manual suggests you should ONLY use the provided 8m cable - kinda daft when most edit suites are more than 30m away from the machine room!
So, here is the pinout for doing it over cat5 - pin 9 is the ground and pins 2 & 8 are +Vcc

9 - brown
8 & 2 - brown/white
1 - orange
3 - orange/white
4 - blue
5 - blue / white
6 - green
7 - green / white

I've tested it to 50m and it seems fine. In my case it is going via a patch in the machine room, a wallbox and a patch in the suite.

Hip Hop acts named after technology - for the most part I find hip-hop lyrics to be almost childish in their boombastic'ness (is that a real word?!) - anyhow, in the same way that most of them are materialistic/misogynistic idiots I've spotted a tendency to name themselves after IT and A/V things;

• NAS - Network Attached Storage,
  
• DMX - the audio compression system,
  
• Cisco - (or however he spells it!)
  
• Run DMC - look on the keyboard of any Sony edit controller
  

More as I think of them.

The Art of Demotivation - Rupert pointed me at this truly hilarious site that lampoons modern management and consultancy styles. A job I was on recently has a total bully as an MD and yet he surrounds his staff with the kind of crapola that reads A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step on a poster of the Grand Canyon.
Anyhow - here is best quote from this site:



True wisdom for our age!

My friend Kevin Cade has entered the world of PodCasting - I'm looking forward to listening to his first two shows - see the link in the right hand bar. As an aside you can see some pics of Kevin & Lucy's tribe when we all went to the London Eye - Kevin, I and my boy Joe were all taking pics so there are a fews to look at - still, between us we have six very handsome boys! See 'em here.