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Just Say No RPM!

Sorry folks, No RPM Challenge this year. But honestly, saying “no” this year was more difficult than saying “yes” two years ago, and I didn’t actually officially say “no” until February 28th.

See, I was really looking forward to recording an album in February. I was looking forward to it months ago, and in December, and even in January, but once February hit, it wasn’t looking good.

2008 was easy, I’d just fire up GarageBand, find some drum loops, grab the guitar and bass, and a few hours later, I’d have a song done. I did 10 songs in 2008. 2009 was harder, and I wanted to set my standards a bit higher, but I did manage to do 5 songs, which came out to 35 minutes of music. I was happy with what I produced within the time limits. 2009 was a bit harder as far as getting the time to do it all as well. I think my final mixing session was like 5+ hours straight, and ended after 2am.

Still, I was looking forward to doing it again in 2010, especially since I wanted to dig into Logic 9 a bit more. (Amp Designer and Pedalboard!) But.. and everyone I know has a big but… it just couldn’t happen. Between work, work, work, and the Winter Olympics, and family time, and oh, more work, it just didn’t happen.

I did record a bit, but not enough. Last year I joked that for 2010 I’d just record 1 single 35 minute long song, along the lines of Sleep’s Dopesmoker, but even that couldn’t happen.

I also made the mistake of upgrading to Snow Leopard, which broke my FireWire audio input for two days. So I put in probably 3 or 4 hours fixing that so I could record, instead of actually recording, so by the time I got it working, I had no time to record. The whole month sort of went like that. Even though the Doctor (who doesn’t really appreciate the music I make, but supports me nonetheless) was very supportive. Still didn’t happen. I finally got down to the last weekend of the month, and thought “Hey, I’ve got 2 days, I can do it!” but I ended up spending Saturday driving all over Waukesha County, and the rest of Saturday meeting various deadlines. At that point, I knew all hope was lost. Just to top it off, I was at the office for about 5 hours on Sunday, because on Monday I was involved in probably the most important presentation of my life. That trumped it all, so I really don’t feel too bad about not finishing an album.

The sad thing is, now that I think maybe I’d have some time to record, I need to return the Fender to it’s rightful owner, so I’m out one good guitar. Damn…

Well, there’s always next year!

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FireWire Audio Headache

February is the month of the RPM Challenge. You know, record an album in a month… I’ve done it before, and was going to do it again, and to do it, I use a Behringer FCA202 FireWire audio interface.

Of course I also decided to upgrade to Snow Leopard this month, and for some odd reason, that rendered the FCA202 useless. It just wouldn’t show up anymore in the System Preferences as an audio input/output device. It did show up as a FireWire device though, so that was odd.

I ended up trying to replace the AppleFWAudio.kext kernel extension, zapped the PRAM, deleted cache files, removed audio units, different cables, using the power supply, tried logging in as another user, and on and on… I rebooted from my 10.5.8 backup and it showed up, so it must have been something specific to 10.6. I tried it on my MacBook Pro (10.6) and… it didn’t show up! Ugh, over to the Mac mini (10.6) and it showed up fine. I gave up for the night, convinced it was a 10.6 issue. The next day I tried it on a Mac Pro and MacBook Pro (both 10.6) and it worked, and then tried again on my MacBook Pro and it worked… so now it seemed that it was just the iMac I normally use to record to that wasn’t working. (I blame the “not working” on my MacBook Pro the night before to being tried/frustrated/bad cabling.)

I was pretty fed up by now, and sick of searching for possible solutions… I did find a post somewhere about the CoreAudio SDK and how it may install/updated the needed audio extensions to fix FireWire audio issues. One problem though, the CoreAudio SDK was last updated in 2005! But, the answer to that one was to install Xcode. I did that and like a little bit of magic, it worked.

System Preferences - Sound

So now I should be back in business, with the Behringer FCA202 showing up and selectable as an audio input/output device.

I wanted to blame Behringer for this weirdness, but honestly, it was something weird with my own Mac. I’m still not sure what it was, but I really should consider doing a clean install next time. My system has probably built up way too much cruft over the years.

Oh, and just a note… I’m not convinced this is the end of the issue. I left the Mac up and running last night, and this morning the Behringer disappeared again. But I’ve read that is can happen, and a quick unplug/replug of the unit fixes it. So… as long as that doesn’t happen while I’m recording, I may be ok. (This problem I’m more tempted to blame on Behringer…)

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Panorama-riffic!

What have I been up to?

Well, I built a panoramic head for my camera…

Panoramic Head

…then I took some pictures with it, stitched them together, and made this panorama…

Lake Street

…then I put it into a Flash player so you could spin around in it!

I’ve also been using a Nodal Ninja (a really nice panoramic head which I highly recommend if you’ve got the cash) and digging into panoramas and panoramic photography, and stitching and viewing software…

I used to do a lot of QuickTime experiments (3D objects, etc.) about 14 years ago, so I have a certain fondness for this sort of thing…

If PhotoCampMilwaukee2 happens, I’d love to share what I know about this stuff.

Update: See the project page for more photos and info.

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The Saddest Photo

Paddy

This is one of the saddest photos ever. This is Paddy, our friend’s cat. Paddy went blind in one eye, and then had it removed. Paddy then went blind in the other eye, and had that one removed.

While this photo makes me sad, it’s also a great photo, which makes me happy. I alternate between happy and sad. It’s such an awesome photo, but such a terrible thing…

I’ve shared this sentiment with Paddy’s owner, and it’s all good. So find sadness, but also find happiness.

Good Luck Paddy… Hang in There!

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The (Low Cost) Red DIT Station

If you’re on location with the RED, it’s a good idea to have a Digital Imaging Technician Station (or DIT Station) which will allow you to backup up all the footage you are shooting while you are in the field, and will also allow you to view the footage and make sure it’s all good before you leave the field.

If you’ve got an unlimited budget, I’d recommend the top of the line MacBook Pro (which can easily run $3,000-$4,000+ depending on how you deck it out) as well as a few external drives. Look at the G-Technology offerings, as they have various solutions depending on your budget and needs. The G-Raid mini is a nice, small, bus-powered drive with a quad interface (FW400, FW800, USB2, eSata.) Get a few of these. You could go with the 1TB, but the 500GB might be fine. You want your data in two places, and not “RAID two places” but “two different physical drives” places. The RED Drive holds 320GB, so if you are dumping a full RED Drive, you could just dump it to a 500GB drive (well, two drives) and mark it as “DONE” and move on. Oh, and since we have gobs of money, pick up an ExpressCard with eSata on it to put in your new MacBook Pro.

RED DIT Station
For the “dumping” of data, you can either use something like R3D Data Manager which does all sorts of checksums for the data, can backup to multiple locations at once, and has other nice features, or you can do a standard Finder copy. R3D Data Manager is $79, which is not too bad… again, what is your footage worth? If you want to fly in the Finder, and can review everything you dump, that can work too.

Speaking of software, RED has provided a number of excellent tools for free. Grab REDCINE-X, RED ALERT! and whatever else you may need at RED’s support site. REDCINE-X is a nice little app for checking the footage you just shot.

So where’s the “Low Cost” part come in? Well, let’s say you don’t have the budget for the top of the line MacBook Pro… that’s fine, get the bottom of the line MacBook Pro (at least get a Pro, you want Firewire 800!) and with that get some drives. I still really like the G-Raid minis, but you could probably find USB bus-powered drives that are cheaper (and slower!) if needed, but again, we do want as much speed as we can afford. (Bus-powered drives are nice because you never know where power will be when on location… if there is power at all.)

If you are shooting to CF Cards, do yourself a favor and get a Sandisk Extreme FireWire Reader (about $65) which will dramatically speed up transferring of footage compared to a cheap USB Card Reader. (The low end MacBook Pro has just one Firewire port, but you can plug the Firewire CF Card Reader into the the back of the G-Raid mini, which has two ports.

RED DIT

So we’ve go the MacBook Pro, which is $1,300 before adding AppleCare (but here’s a tip, you can get a refurb, plus AppleCare for it, for about $1,295) add in two G-Raid minis (the 500GB) at about $450, and a CF Card Reader for $65. We come in under $2,000 for this set up, which is not the ULTIMATE portable RED DIT Station, but it’s a Low Cost one, that is effective enough to get the job done.