RAID Recovery

Tom's Hardware Guide: The Data Knight Kroll Ontrack To The Rescue! "RAID data configuration is almost always proprietary, since all RAID manufacturers set up the internals of their arrays in different ways. However, they do not disclose this information, so recovering from a RAID array failure requires years of experience. Where does one find parity bits of a RAID 5, before or after the payload? Will the arrangement of data and parity stay the same or will it cycle? This knowledge is what you are paying for." I didn't know that configuration was proprietary. A good guide to saving your precious data files on hard disks that always fail on you at the worst time. Backup! Backup! and Backup!

A Scanner Darkly

The director Richard Linklater already did a similar animation titled, Waking Life, which was a pretty decent, experimental, animation. But A Scanner Darkly is more serious, coherent narrative attempt at venerable Philip K. Dick's novel.

I wasn't sure why he revisited using rotoscope animation for this except the characters in this movie wear scramble suits that constantly shape-shifts, blurring visuals , doubting your sense of vision. I read from his Wired interview last year that he had such problems with this movie that he bowed he will never do an animation project again, and I can see why. However, his gamble and his team of animators' works paid off as the visuals are treats, the characters are great with solid acting all around, and the narrative pace is breath-taking under the veteran direction.

Watching this movie is a head-spinning trip that almost inducing hallucination, confounding your cognitive senses in all turns. "What does scanner see?"

Richard Linklater has another great film under his credit, no doubt, and the film world became a far richer from this work.

Renaissance

When I saw the trailer for this movie last year, I knew it was going to be another pretty French animation movie with no sense of pace and character developments. It was disappointing to witness my predictions come true.

No doubt, it's one of most gorgeous animations that came out in late. Stark contrast visuals accentuate the dystopia Paris with creative camera angles, movements and shot transitions. All eye candies without substance, unfortunately.

The overall feeling is heavily influenced by Blade Runner--who isn't?, and their invisible camo is a derivative of Ghost in the Shell. The car chase scene is too much like a video game, without feeling of weight on the vehicles and lacks realistic physics.

The most glaring problem is the generic hero, villains, and confusing narratives that driven purely by the lengthy dialogues. (Don't tell me, show me.) The French people love les mots, but the dialogues in this movie is pure babble, comic book babbles.

This is the director's debut feature movie, and I applaud his visual flairs, but can't do the same for everything else.

Ballad of Black Mesa

The most cinematic use of Machinima yet. This is the future, no doubt.

Do as the Hollywodians

Japanmanship: Japan is both ideally suited to change the game development rules to follow the Hollywood example, and the last place on Earth where it’ll ever happen; a tragedy of missed opportunity. Interesting contrast between Hollywood/Film industry model vs. Game industry model. It's all about business model!

I do see a possible model for my entertainment company, here.

How to Make it in Hollywood

TV Guide: by Jenna Fischer from the Office. "My first piece of advice to someone who is serious about being a professional television or film actor is this: Move to Los Angeles. Moving to Los Angeles can be difficult, but it is the only city that doesn't put a ceiling on where you can go with your career. New York is the place to go if you want to do theater, but if you want to be in film and television, move to L.A.

I had a college professor who said, "If you can think of anything else you are passionate about besides acting, do that. Your life will be better for it." I actually think that might be good advice.

It can take a very, very, very long time to succeed in this business, and my best piece of advice is to not give up. You have to motivate yourself and just keep going. Create projects for yourself. Don't whine. The first year is the hardest, followed by every anniversary up to about Year 5, when you're so beaten down you don't notice the years passing any more.

I think the first priority should be to build a body of work — become a pro so that you are valuable to an agent. No agent wants to sign a nonunion newbie. It's not their job to get you ready.

Yes, you will meet some scumbags if you move to L.A. — people who prey on newcomers. I can tell you with absolute certainty that those people have no power in the grand scheme of things.

I have a great acting coach who says that success in Hollywood is based on one thing: opportunity meets readiness. You cannot always control the opportunities, but you can control the readiness. So study your craft, take it seriously. Do every play, every showcase, every short film, every student film you can get. Swallow your pride. Be willing to work for nothing in things you think are stupid. Make work for yourself. Make your own luck. Don't complain. Hopefully, the work will find you if you are ready.

Life is too short, and it's not worth it in the end. I always took off and did that stuff, and it turned out fine. I was often anxious and worried in the process, but I did it. I believe that in order for my professional life to move forward, I have to keep my personal life moving forward as well.

The success is not always in getting the part but in the seed that is planted... Slow and steady wins the race." Yeah, I'm still here and grateful.

Poor Film Student Story (What's New?)

LA Times: Homeless by Choice. "After a long day of film classes, working at the Apple Store, rock climbing at the gym and finishing homework in the student union, Cal State Fullerton senior Andy Bussell heads home — to a white Toyota Tacoma with a twin-size mattress in the truck bed, a camper shell for protection and black curtains for privacy." I should do that, except my trade being an editor with big G5 and two monitors and a host of hard disks, I cannot. However, I agree that you should live your life to the fullest before settling down, before it's too late.

the Simpsons Movie Trailer #2

All ye who doubt shall cast no fear. Yes, I repent. It's gonna be a great animation movie.

What's that 40-gig hard drive doing inside my Apple TV?

I, Cringely: Appeerances Can Be Deceiving. "I want to know the identity of the Apple TV's H.264 decoder chip. There's a lot to be learned from the identity of THAT chip. Remember you heard it here first.

If you are wondering what Apple might accomplish with such a peer-to-peer distribution system, it would be nothing less than the undermining of TV. First Apple would eliminate its current dependence on Akamai, reducing its network costs for iTunes by about 100X, making the network costs effectively free. Hello HDTV!

Second, Apple would have one or many content channels roughly equivalent to an HBO, Showtime, or perhaps Discovery. Yes, I think Apple will do direct content deals, buying programming that it will then either distribute to subscribers or support with Google ads, thanks to Google CEO Eric Schmidt's position on the Apple board. Apple's network will give you the same content with or without ads, delivered from the same servers, one of which may be underneath your TV.

The business case for Apple is downright amazing. Lowering network costs by 99 percent will enable the company to add to its portfolio the equivalent of half a Time Warner. Apple becomes a cable company without trucks or network costs. It becomes a whole bunch of cable networks with an instant audience the exact size of the iTunes registered user base, which is frigging enormous. Add $40 billion to market cap, no waiting." There's no doubt that Apple has more innovative business models than its equally innovative products since Jobs came back.

Considering how much content investment iPod users have made with Apple, the case here is very compelling. If I was an individual producer with short clips to sell, I would contact iTunes division first of all.

Compressor Quick-Reference Guide

I got Apple Pro Training Series: Compressor Quick-Reference Guide since there has been an explosion of works converting from one digital format to another, especially DV to DVD and DV to QuickTime for online previews.

This book is basically an updated manual for Compressor, with color pages in compact form. I can't really say that I learned something from this short book that's less than 150 pages long, since I've been using this program extensively by poking around, playing with settings. Like the book said, compression is almost an art form, that merits another book for the discussion and exploration. If you were expecting more technical aspects of compressions that Compressor offers, you won't find it here.

However, if you were looking for Compressor manual that Apple neglected to update since they moved up to 5.1, and new to Compressor and compression techniques, it's a great book to get started.

Metal Gear Solid! the Movie!

Hollywood Reporter: 'Metal Gear Solid' "Sony's Doug Belgrad and Sam Dickerman will shepherd the live-action project for the studio, working in consultation with Kojima as well as Michael De Luca Prods.' Josh Bratman, who brought the project into the company. Rick Privman of JEA will executive produce." Don't. You. Dare. Fuck. Up.

Hugh Jackman better be Solid Snake.

500 Mac Book Pros

Arriving at Full Sail. FYI, the school gives out a laptop for each student enrolled in Game Development, Computer Animation, and Digital Arts. They used to give out Toshiba notebooks, but now that Mac's come in Intel chip, running Windows XP no less, it makes more sense of them to switch.

the Best Mpeg2/DVD encoder

An editor/avid technician friend of mine, and the word on the Internet is that Cinema Craft Encoder Basic is the best of the best when it comes to encoding for DVD. Steal at $58, the bare bone program only runs on the Windows platform. Bummer!

However, my friend swears by it, and advise me to ditch Compressor. I'm going to get a copy and make my reel DVD with this program and let you know. (I might do a screenshot comparison between CCE and Compressor.)

Shooting with HVX-200

Ken Stone: How To Shoot a Network TV Pilot With the Panasonic HVX-200. I wish I read this article before I went on to shoot "Circle of Karma." His article encapsulates almost everything I've learned during the "CoK" production.

I would have to concur with him that P2 workflow is a step up from numerous tapes, but be prepare to buy BIG hard disks. Preferably configure to Raid-5 redundancy and backup hard disk to store away.

Sony HVR-M15U HDV Deck

I was reading a DV magazine and ran across an ad for Sony HVR-M15U HDV Deck. It seems like an excellent deck to acquire for me, although it's $500 more than DSR-11.

I haven't gotten a work with HDV footage yet, but I can always use a good DV/DVCAM deck.

Although I wouldn't shoot a production with a HDV camera, I'm considering Canon HV10 for my own play camera. Canon just came out with new and improved HV20 model but I like HV10 form factor better. (It's cheaper thanks to new model!)

So many gadgets and so little money! *Sob*

HVX-200 & P2 Workflow

Little frog in high def has good posts on HVX-200 & P2 card workflow. I'm learning while riding this damn thing. Stunning HD footage makes up for the troubles, though.

Rules for YouTube: Make Art, Not Bore

Washington Post: Laugh, link, and think. That's general principals for all entertainment content that I strive to achieve in my works.

Raiding Hard Disks

I'm happy to report that data recovery on the failed La Cie drive--1.5 years old!, was successful although it took full 24 hours to backup 500 Gig of data using Data Warrior.

I met another editor the other day and he recommended Glyph Technologies Hard Disks because they offer 2 years of FREE data recovery service on their hard disk failures. That's nice warranty and proud endorsement of their products. I wonder if that covers serious failures that cannot be recovered using a software like Data Warrior. However, their products seem to target more of audio post houses than video post houses...

On the related note, La Cie needs to mount serious R&D to improve their drives and marketing to improve their tarnished reputations. I'm not buying or recommending any La Cie drive in future.

Invalid B-Node Tree

A hard-disk failure strikes again, on another La-Cie disk, which is the main disk for a hip-hop documentary I'm editing. S! H! I! T!

The drive powers on, and it is recognized by Disk Utility but fails to repair it because of "invalid B-node tree error." It's a hardware failure, which puts the data within the disk at the precarious state. Since the disk didn't TOTALLY fail on me, I decided to get Disk Warrior 4 for $99.95, + $8 for shipping and handling.

After downloading the program and running it, it managed to salvaged the directory and the data, perhaps, by putting it on 'Preview Directory.' Since I don't have extra 500G around after dumped with a couple of hours of DVCPRO HD footage recently, I'll have to ask my director/producer to get another external hard disk and backup immediately.

Technical failures like this drive me to get big-ass Raid hard disk with redundancy, mirrored, disks for editing workhorse disk. (That's after I get a big-ass project with a big-ass check, I suppose.)

Cross your fingers, pray hard, and hopefully I'll get back with the good news of how I managed to recover 500 Gig of footage that my producer/director shot over a year. Sigh.