The Vanity of an Ancient King

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Yeah, so that was a thing that happened. I’m sure everyone who cares has seen the liveblogs, or read the news, or similar, so I’m not going to bore you with the details of what’s available. I will however, give you the full tedium of my take on all this:

T-Mobile is now the only national carrier that doesn’t have the iPhone.

According to Apple’s listed specs, the iPhone 4S doesn’t do the 1700MHz band that TMo needs to do 3G, but it does mention that it can send and receive on the 2100MHz band, which TMo does use. Technically the chip they’re using can do the 1700MHz band, but I am not sure if the 4S antenna can work with that frequency, even if some form of software workaround can be had. This makes me upset, and after all these years with Tmo, I may have to jump ship. My 1st gen iPhone is on its last legs, and it’s time for me to seriously consider options. I’ve speculated before as to why Tmo didn’t get the iPhone, and I’ve narrowed it down to two possibilities: either all parties involved thought that Tmo would be swallowed by AT&T, rendering the idea of Tmo as an iPhone partner moot, or Tmo and Apple were in talks, but they somehow broke down. We may never know.

The new camera is slick!

A 5-element, ƒ2.4 wide angle lens, 8 megapixels, and a backside-illuminated sensor won’t give my 5DmkII a run for its money, but it’ll be a hell of an improvement over any other phone, possibly including Nokia’s. Not only will it take a good pic, but it will also record 1080p video at 30fps (can I have a 24fps option please?), with built-in image stabilisation. I’ll reserve judgement on the quality of the camera’s IS until I get to play with it, but it’s undoubtedly going to be a huge improvement over the iPhone 4. Oh, and one more thing… it’s got built-in noise reduction. Tiny sensors suck — it’s just a fact of life. A good built-in noise reduction algorithm will go far in enhancing the quality of the photos and video taken, more than the increase in megapixels. The built-in software has also improved, allowing a much faster time-to-picture, and picture-to-picture performance. They also added the ability to crop and rotate within the camera app. I’ve been waiting ages for this. Finally, they added a hardware shutter (the volume button). I’d prefer a dedicated button, but I’ll probably get over that pretty quickly.

Personal Digital Assistant

Siri, if it works with my funny accent, and the processing time isn’t too long, will be amazingly useful to me. The artificial intelligence used reminds me of the Newton “Assist” feature, which simply knew what you wanted to do, and did it. This time, it’s voice activated. “Lunch with Bob tomorrow” will set up a calendar event for lunch, tomorrow with Bob. Do you have several Bobs in your address book? Siri is smart enough to ask which Bob you are talking about. If it needs clarification, it will simply ask. It’s also proactive. If “I want tacos nearby”, it’ll find all the mexican places near my location, then ask if I want to make a reservation. I hope it works as good as it demos.

Messaging

The new messaging features are nice, but really, they’re merely fixing what was horribly broken since the original iPhone. In this modern age, a modal dialog box that vanishes when you unlock the screen, with no way to retrieve the information is dumb. In IOS 5, we get something closer to what Android has had shortly after they decided to become an iPhone ripoff rather than a Blackberry ripoff. There’s still a lot I prefer in the Android, WebOS, or even the Windows Phone 7 notifications system, but at least the iPhone is no longer a total joke in that regard. iMessage is good, but I’d like to see more integration with the desktop, and I’d like more control over the destination. A ‘merged message inbox’ is a lovely thing, but sometimes you want your outgoing message to a person to go on a different system than the original.

iCloud

I’m not going to touch upon too much, as that’s a totally separate article. Suffice to say, if they can pull it off, I’ll be ecstatic. My experience with prior efforts though, is that Apple’s cloud services become unavailable for long periods of time. iCloud promises seamless integration between devices. If it doesn’t work 100% of the time, I can’t rely on it, and it won’t change my current behaviour.

So what excited you? Anything disappointing? Let me know in the comments.

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A couple of friends are building a tiny, cool PC to act as a streaming media client for their TV, using the PLEX client/server applications. I’ve been watching PLEX for awhile, and while their earlier incarnations seemed quite flawed in their usability, the modern ones seem to do well, coupled with the speed of modern hardware to decode complex media and output 1080p signals to a TV via HDMI. Now, they also have IOS/Android apps to both act as clients, or as remote controls for other clients. Suddenly we have convergence.

I’m taking a slightly different route: I’m not going to build a micro PC, I’m going to buy one of the new Mac minis which use very little power, and almost no power when sleeping. The form factor is perfect, and it has HDMI-out. In the past, people have hacked earlier minis to be media servers, but with varied success (they were underpowered, and they didn’t have HDMI, so getting it to the TV was a pain, and they often couldn’t decode a proper 1080p/24 file without stuttering).

Why not an Apple TV? They’re great toys, but they’re closed devices. They don’t do 1080p, and they only do a limited subset of H264 decoding (luckily it’s done in hardware). With the mini, I can read any file any mac can read, which includes the ubiquitous .MKV files the kids get off the interwebs, and with the new multi-core i5/i7 processors, and dedicated GPU, I’ll always be able to send 1080p content to my TV.

So over the week-end, I started ripping my DVD collection. It’s small by some standards, but it’s not inconsequential. I have a mix of old, unrestored films, B&W films, foreign films, some modern digital transfers, and both old and new animation. Logically, this means I had to do some homework to figure out what settings were best for the source material. Finding proper encode settings however, was like pulling teeth — painful, messy, and occasionally, inaccurate ;-). I rip all my DVDs to the hard drive prior to transcoding to H264, then batch transcode overnight. Here are some insights:

• Ripping (transferring but not transcoding data from the DVD to the hard drive) is far slower than merely copying bit-for-bit. This is due to the bullshit copy protection where they purposely corrupt sectors in the DVD, making the read-head dance from track to track trying to follow the programme material. Nothing can speed this up, as the DVD drive is the bottleneck, and you can’t have a read-head move much faster.
• Transcoding is resource intensive. You’re CPU bound, and potentially memory/disk IO bound, but there are workarounds…
• Rip to one disk, transcode to another. All disks should be fast. Don’t use anything USB, unless it’s USB3 (even then, just don’t). Use Firewire 800 (minimum), or SATA/eSATA, or in my case, Fibre Channel (FC, fuck yeah!). This will have a massive impact on how many frames per second you can transcode. Nothing sucks more than having to read from one area of the drive, and write to another area of the same drive.
• Use fast, 64bit apps. Transcoding is a lot of very scary maths. In 64bit mode, not only can you twiddle giant numbers without rounding/truncating (or being forced to use double cycles to perform the operation), you also get access to way more registers, which means more efficient use of the CPU (32bit mode uses the legacy register system from the old 8088 days which is crippling in a modern compute environment). If your transcoding apps aren’t multicore aware, get new ones.
• If your primary target device is IOS-based, amp up the bits-per-second, as each IOS device seems to be able to understand different bits of the various H264 profiles, and they’re not merely additive (ie, AppleTV2 isn’t ‘everything the iPhone4 can do, plus some’). Throwing more bits-per-frame will always give you a better picture. All those fancy features are ways to achieve higher quality at a lower bitrate. Give yourself a big bitrate, and you don’t need to rely on the fancy bits that will make your file unreadable on your target device.
• Check your audio tracks! Sometimes the 0 track is not the main audio track. If you’re not encoding all the audio tracks, double check that you’re bringing in the correct one. Personally, I encode a number of audio tracks, including an AC3 passthrough of the original audio. For commentary tracks, and down-mixed main audio, I use AAC at 256kbit/sec.
• Check your subtitles! For the love of Pete, don’t burn them into your video. Keep the subtitles as a proper separate track. They’ll look really bad, and it’ll screw up the encoding quality. Do however, ‘force’ them if needed. From what I understand, ‘force’ will bring up the subtitles on the main audio track when there is a foreign language being spoken. Helpful in those films that are primarily English, but suddenly there is dialogue in French or German, and you want to know what they’re saying. This trick obviously only works if the original source was tagged to do so.

For transcoding, I prefer using the latest Handbrake, as it uses the very fast x264 engine for encoding to either .m4v or .mkv H264 containers. I looked around to find a good optimal encoder setting as a jumping-off point, but most sites had old information which wasn’t directly applicable to the latest version of the app. I did however, learn about some of the advanced options which did have a relevance.

I settled on starting with the “AppleTV 2″ preset for my non-animated DVD content, but that yielded an image that I found unacceptable in most of my test material. In most scenes, the entire screen seemed like it was underwater. The macroblocks would shimmer and shake, making it difficult to concentrate on the material. From this, I made some minor adjustments, and I am pretty happy with the results.

• First thing I did was raise the ‘constant quality’ slider from the default position of 20, to 18. This is actually a logarithmic slider where the smaller number indicates higher quality.
• I also ticked the “No DTC Decimation” box which helped in areas where there is large areas of a single colour (or subtle fade)
• Set the “Adaptive B-frames” to “Optimal” which gives a boost in efficiency to the Pyramidal B-Frames.
• For cel animation, I increased the number of B-frames to 6, and amped the ‘constant quality’ slider to 16
• For B&W source material, I used a variant of my cel animation settings, but brought the B-frames back down to 3, and used the Greyscale filter in the Picture Settings sub-menu. This greatly reduced macroblock collapse which often happens in B&W transcoding (large splotches of the same colour).

These settings may not be what you’re looking for in your application, but they work well for my purposes (finding a balance between file size and quality level). Perhaps you can use this information as your own jumping-off point. Experiment. Queue up several copies of the same source with different settings, and see what works best for you.

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Running up to the Final Cut Pro Supermeet at NAB, there were a lot of rumours about what Apple would show. One camp was convinced that Final Cut Pro would be transformed into an iMovie-like consumer application, and Apple would cede the professional markets to Adobe and Avid. The other camp hoped to see an ultra-modern version of FCP with the ability to ingest any video file, at any resolution, and cater more to the needs of feature film production.

So what happened? Apple unveiled a totally new application with the title “Final Cut Pro X”. Aside from the fact that the old FCP and the new FCPX are both video editors and share a name, very little is similar.

The new FCPX is rebuilt from the ground up as a 64-bit aware cocoa application with hooks into all the cutting-edge technology of MacOS X 10.6. Incorporating OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch allow the new application to not only scale down to lower-end laptops, but also harness all the logical cores on the CPUs and GPUs of the new Mac Pros. The upside? No more render bars, and much faster performance!

They took a few cues from the latest incarnations of iMovie. The interface is decidely iMovie-like in the placement of UI elements, and there is no longer a clip and separate canvas view. Even though I learnt the traditional clip/comp/timeline way of working an editor, I always thought it sucked. This seems to be an improvement, but I withhold my judgement until I can use the application.

Organising your clips was always a pain in the arse. Automatic shot detection (ex: closeup, medium, and wide), and automatic video scrubbing of clips on mouseover both came from iMovie, and are welcome additions to the new app. The new keyword and search features also look quite promising, although I am curious how they handle missing and relinking media. In the past, Avid has been the gold standard in that area, and the sneak peek at the Supermeet was inconclusive as to Apple’s approach. Not everything is iMovie-derived however, as FCP retains its frame-accuracy, and introduces sample-accuracy on audio tracks. Many folk were worried that because the demo was so reliant on the mouse, that the keyboard jockies would be left out in the cold. During the demo, it was mentioned that everything is operable via the keyboard. That little, yet very important detail seems to have been overlooked by other blogs.

Some features we got to see will change the way we look at editing video. I actually clapped when I saw them demonstrate the elastic timeline. Instead of the old track-based timeline, new tracks are now created automatically any time there is a track collision. If you start dragging a clip near an existing clip in the timeline, the old clip will simply jump to a new track, so you can manage the conflict on your own, rather than corrupting the timeline. J and L cuts are also easily created according to what they mentioned, although we did not see this in the demo.

Another big change includes the ability to audition clips without affecting the timeline. Imagine you are editing a scene, you have a variety of clips you could insert at a particular point, and you want to see which clip feels best. It used to be that you performed some pretty scary timeline acrobatics (or even created a new project), and inserted clips one at a time. Double clicking now brings up a meta-timeline which allows you to rapidly try a variety of clips before settling on the one you want. You can always change your mind, and none of your choices will harm the real timeline. Final Cut Pro X also now offers a much better way to do precomps, aka. nested timelines. Normally these appear as a single track, but if you need to edit them, double clicking will cause the precomp to expand. There are other features that were shown, but it’s easier to show you the video.

So who was right? It’s too early to tell. The dog and pony show was quite impressive, but like any other professional app, you really need to use it for awhile before you can pass final judgement. I think the app shows great promise, but what little we saw at the Supermeet raises more questions than it answers. What of the other apps in the Final Cute Suite? What about migrating old projects? How extensive are the keyboard controls, really?

The new Final Cut Pro X will be available in June through the Mac App Store, for $299. The price has sparked controversy in the editing community. Many folks believe this price point will mean less work for editors, as clients will just attempt to do it themselves, (with the implication that they will fail horribly). Some people may indeed do that, but I say those people were never really your clients. The application is just a tool, and editing is an art, as well as a skill involving a lot of experience and talent. Those that have a budget understand that, and will still ring you up. The same thing happened in every other industry I can think of. Wrenches are cheap, as are shop manuals, but I still hire a mechanic to take care of my car.