[Dave Haynie]

Do you think Apple’s really in the PC business anymore? I mean, sure, they sell more PCs than ever…. but they’re PCs. Apple’s ordering motherboards to their specifications from the Taiwanese, just like HP and Dell and all the others do, and putting into nice casework.

Even the iPad and the iPhone… they’re directing the design, but these designs are not complex, and most are large systems, outsourced. They’re using an SOC made by Samsung, some radio chips made elsewhere, etc. And even with all that, still making stupid decisions/mistakes on hardware, like the lack of diversity antennas (and making the antenna itself touchable) in the iPhone 4.

Again, they have a pretty strong physical design department, but if there’s any innovation in Apple’s hardware products other that, some other company did the heavy lifting. The ONLY reason these are popular is Apple’s UI, and the software integration with iTunes and the iTunes store; without that, the iPod would have been another also-ran MP3 player, and never evolved beyond that. They have NEVER matched the hardware features of comparable players… rather, they’ve counted on software lock-ins of various kinds to ensure that once an Apple user, always an Apple user. Smart, but unrelated to the hardware.

But their software… works. The only reason most people buy a Mac PC is to get the MacOS. I mean, sure, there are some people dual-booting MacOS and Windows, but I have NEVER heard of anyone buying an Apple PC and only running Windows. Anyone? And some people will buy Mac hardware just to get the apps… FCP, Logic, etc.

Sure, they bought NeXT to get the kernel used in the current MacOS, and they bought the foundation of FCP from Macromedia, and they bought eMagic outright. They bought both DVD Director (Astarte) and all of Spruce Technologies, to deliver DVD Studio. And also Color (orginally FinalTouch), when they bought Silicon Color. They built WebKit out of the KDE stuff, but it WAS such a day and night improvement that everyone started using it.

Native apps… hmmm. GarageBand, for one. Yeah, it was developed by the eMagic people, but some years after Apple bought the whole company — thus, it was made by Apple. And they had to see Acid first, to get the idea. Soundtrack/Soundtrack Pro… did that come out of eMagic too? I don’t think it was an indvidual purchase by Apple. I think Motion was an Apple original… even if it’s a

But these things happened ages ago. You can’t begin to argue that FCP, for example, has all that much to do today with the original from Macromedia. Apple’s successfully kept up against Adobe and Avid (are there any other major NLEs on the MacOS?), starting from nowhere. Ok, Premiere was pretty heinous before “Pro”, and Avid terribly overpriced — it’s not like they didn’t have an opening (in fact, much the same one Vegas used, also taking on the established players over the last 10 years or so).

They really do have the software chops. And while I’m not about to add all the details here, I’m probably the last person to defend Apple in any specific way… they hosed me royally back in the 90s.

But think about it .. as you’ve rightly pointed out, they have purchased a number of software companies. But that’s also salient — software companies, not just the apps, in most cases. They’ve also bought to small IC technology companies, though not much has come out of that (Samsung, who makes the A4, was already working with Intrinsity before Apple bought them) — and you have to buy a Mac to get to use that software. It’s a $3000 dongle.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Supposedly, this rumor began when Barron’s columnist Eric Savitz suggested that, flush with cash, Apple might think of buying Adobe, Sony, Disney, the continent of Australia, etc. But there was never even a hint of this from Apple or Sony.

Market-cap-wise, Apple is currently about 8x larger than Sony. But they’ve managed this based on essentially a handful of products: one or two current iPhone/iPod products (the “Touch” is always a proper subset of the iPhone… not much of a separate development), one iPad, one Apple TV, and a fairly small collection of Macs.

Oh, and software… Apple is essentially a software company selling expensive dongles that enable that software. They have complex software, including soup to nuts from OS to media content creation on the Mac platform. Macs, like every other PC, are nearly identical inside, and OEMed much the same way HP and Dell do it, only with nicer cases. iPods and iPads and iPhones are cute and fairly well made (albeit designed to slip from your fingers), but pretty austere… one port, and its proprietary.

And, the important point: Apple earns like a software company, too. They had an 27.6% operating margin in the year ending last June, and recently, $20 billion in sales for the last quarter.

Sony, on the other hand, had an operating margin of 2.7% over the last year, and they’re doing about $20-25 billion per quarter. And that’s over hundreds of products: cell phones, software, PCs, video cameras, still cameras, game consoles, TVs, DVD/Blu-Ray, etc. In short, Apple would double their sales, but barely affect their profits at all… and potentially drag them down for years to come, even if they did sell off many Sony business units.

Now Australia, on the other hand…

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I think the real issue would be authoring BDs, not just burning them. That’s technically possible in Toast, but not something that would produce professional quality wedding discs. Looks fairly similar to what you get with the Nero suite on the PC — a solid disc burning tool, and a bunch of throw-away extras (not useless, just worse than anything you’d actually buy for this specific purpose).

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

1. Well, letsee… I have two 1.5TB SATA main drives in the PC, and then the SATA “racks” They’re like this:
https://www.amazon.com/Connectland-CL-HD-MROF-5-25-Inch-Mobile-3-5-Inch/dp/B0028Y4DAO/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1287981777&sr=8-4
https://www.amazon.com/Connectland-CL-HD-MRDU25S-Removable-Enclosure-3-5-Inch/dp/B0028Y4DAE/ref=sr_1_18?ie=UTF8&qid=1287981872&sr=8-18

Windows doesn’t recognize regular SATA drives as removable, so it’s a good idea to power down then add/remove from these racks, but they’re pretty handy. Some people like the desktop “docks” instead, same idea.

2. I have a Philips BD-R drive. It’s a couple years old, but works fine at the moment. I have used various BD-R blanks, have not run into any problems with compatibility.

3. I usually buy hardware online, a place such as Newegg, or maybe Amazon.. they’ve been pretty competitive on price lately. Of course, it helps to know what you’re doing… I used to design personal computer systems, so I’m not worried about getting into trouble when integrating my own systems.

4. To make the files read-only, I usually do “chmod -R a-r orig” from a cygwin shell. The shell’s also handy for catenating AVCHD files that run over 4GB. But you can do the same from the Windows explorer… I think you just select your directory, right click, select “properties”, and then check the “read-only” box, and I think check another box that causes this to take effect on all subfiles and directories.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Well, yeah.. every Firewire device and every USB device contains a computer of some kind, even your keyboard or mouse. The big problem with a USB to Firewire bridge is that you’d need enough memory of some kind to buffer the video traffic. The Firewire side would be writing fairly continuously at 25Mb/s.. the USB side is going to be herky-jerky, as the PC gets around to requesting the next chunk of data from the USB device.

Also, you’d need a higher class of embedded CPU here, simply because Firewire chips typically come on PCI or ePCI buses (USB chips can, too, though there are also various embedded USB devices on simpler buses). It could probably be done in an FPGA… but that’s $25-$30 cost, just for that part (versus $1.00-2.00 or less for a typical CPU for most USB devices). By the time you’re done, it’s probably more than $100-$150 for a device that does this properly. And sure, if everyone needed one of these, they’d get fairly cheap in time. But in the quantities likely, typical users would better off with a cheap PC. Particularly because Firewire’s days seem to be numbered, ‘cept maybe in high-end audio work. No one’s going to worry about this in a fading market.

Same idea as a Flash or HDD storage unit… there are devices that’ll happily accept Firewire dumps and write them to Flash cards or HDD storage. But they’re in such low demand, and usually battery powered for field use (eg, so DV/HDV users can have their video immediately captured to disc, and use tape as a backup), that they’re far more expensive than a cheap PC and a $25 Firewire card. For example, you can find a bunch of Firewire to Compact Flash recorders at B&H, but they start at about $750.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I always use project directories. For any project of non-trivial size, I give it its own SATA drive… I have carriers that take both 3.5″ and 2.5″ SATA drives, kind of as if they were cartridges.

I first move all my video, audio, and photo assets to a subdir called “orig”. Once in there, I make that read-only, so as not to accidently overwrite anything. At this time, I copy the project over to my RAID, and to a few blank BD-Rs as an inital backup.

If it’s a medium sized project, I probably keep .veg files at the top level; if a very large project, I’ll have separate subdirectories for each chapter/act, with Vegas projects for those. Sometimes I also have individual projects for individual scenes… depends on the kind of video.

I don’t explicitly go through and catalog every scene… that’s more of a thing for films… I shoot primarily events (maybe a second camera, but not a choice of a dozen takes of the same scene). The individual Vegas projects would include the media for those specific parts of the video.

I usually create an “artwork” subdirectory, for DVD/BD menu and case artwork, that kind of thing. When I’m done, the case artwork and DVD/BD files go onto the RAID, so I always have the completed project at my fingertips. The SATA drive then goes on a shelf — in case I need to re-edit at some point, it’s all but instantly available.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Create a new Vegas project. Add all the files you want, in the order you like, and save as a .veg file. Then load that .veg file into your main project. It will behave as a single media file.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Sure there is… Hollywood is using this stuff on a regular basis. Check out the “3D” version of the “Clash of the Titans” remake. Here’s the technology they used:
https://www.primefocusworld.com/news/2009/09/prime-focus-launches-view-d

The proper statement is “there is no software that can make GOOD 3D out of 2D”. James Cameron has been very vocal about this issue… or was, before he announced that a “Titanic” re-release is being done for 3D. That other lesson.. money talks. There will undoubtedly be increasing support for consumer 3D, and 2D-to-3D, if demand actually materializes.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Actually, Firewire and USB both use DMA in all modern implementation.

The problem and difference is simple. Firewire is a multi-mastered bus. When you have a video camera on Firewire, the camera itself initiates the transfer… it dumps video, and your PC responds. This allows the camera to be “camera-like”, and pretty much just treat the Firewire port as a digital version of a video port. It doesn’t have to get “computer-like” at all.

In the USB case, there’s a fixed master/slave (or the more politically correct host/client) architecture. The PC has to connect with the USB device, it has to initiate any transfers from the USB device (once initiated, the device can shoot the data to the PC, and the PC dumps that in memory via bus mastering, just as with USB). But the effect is that this is very computer-like… it just doesn’t work with continuous data supplied by an external device.

A USB to Firewire device is conceptually possible… I could build you one that works like a champ. But no one has, because it gets kind of expensive. You really need a full fledged Firewire device, a good deal of buffer memory, and a high speed USB device (USB at 480Mb/s will be fine against Firewire at 400Mb/s, as long as there’s enough buffering… camcorders generally run at 100Mb/s anyway). No one’s done a serious version of this, because it’s just way cheaper to add a real Firewire port. The few that have existed are kludges, and while I’ve seen and read about numerous units that don’t work, I have yet to hear about one done correctly.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Your footage on disc has absolutely nothing to do with the editing format, only that last render. Use a bitrate calculator… you can precisely figure out the average bit rate needed to deliver X minutes on a DVD5 or DVD9, for any senario.

As for editing.. I would always edit in HD if I shot in HD, even if I’m only delivering in SD. For one, you can zoom without effective quality loss. But also, if you’re shooting NTSC, there’s a very specific mismatch between DV and DVD.

As with most consumer formats, DV and DVD both do color subsampling. You have 720×480 pixels in each case, but only 360×240 color samples. This makes sense… as humans, we have about 120 million luma sensors per eye (eg, we see resolution very well), but only 6 million color sensors per eye (eg, we’re only so-so on color). The problem is that NTSC DV does 4:1:1 color subsampling, DVD (and PAL DV, and HDV, and AVCHD) so 4:2:0 color subsampling.

So just based on that, your DVD will look better from HDV than from HDV converted on-camera to DV. But there’s also the recompression and everything. Always edit in your best quality format if possible, and you’ll get the best result. Editing in the same resolution as the deliver format, you’ll get more recompression effects, etc.

-Dave