Unfortunate

It's too bad. The new MacBook looks beautiful.

But, though they're still hawking Final Cut Express as a bundle option with the machine, the MacBook's lack of firewire makes it pretty much useless for video.

Not only can you not use it to digitize DV material, but you can't even use an external firewire drive to edit from. This means that the MacBook's a non-starter for anyone interested in so much as experimenting with the medium. Strange for a machine that used to come bundled with iLife. Also strange considering the machine is now more powerful than ever, and even has a 24" LED display made just for it. And annoying that the price remains the same for a far less full-featured computer.

Does the term "value-subtracted" exist yet. I think I'll coin it. Dibs!

And while I'm not personally interested in editing video on a laptop much at all, I certainly know lots of people who are. I guess they'll all be shelling out the extra $700 clams for a MacBook Pro.

Too bad.

UPDATE (I'm all about the updates lately):

Apparently, iLife still comes bundled with the MacBooks:

Sure, nothing about iMovie specifically requires firewire, but many video workflows — especially at the consumer level that the MacBook is aimed at — still use firewire for video capture. iLife apparently does support capturing newer formats (I didn't think it did):

I suppose Apple expects new MacBook owners to use these new formats — in particular, those formats that have a low enough bitrate to work over USB — so it follows that USB capture support is there (I didn't think it was). But there's no mention (that I can see) that you won't be able to use DV equipment with your new MacBook, which I find misleading. But more to the point, it just seems premature to kill DV off as a viable format — and firewire as a viable protocol — especially on consumer-level Macs of all places. There is still a lot of DV out there, and its users really just can't get a new sans-Pro-MacBook at this point.

Not to mention all the other cool stuff firewire has all over USB. I mean, not only would it be slow as shit, but "USB 2.0 Target Disk Mode" just sounds lame.

UPDATE 2:

I'm glad I'm not alone in decrying the lack of firewire on the new MacBooks. Sounds like a lot of folks are up in arms. One meme I've seen a few times, though, is the idea that you can get a USB to firewire adaptor. While this may be possible, it doesn't fix the DV problem. Adapting USB to firewire will still only allow USB data transfer speeds. And USB 2.0 is just too slow for capturing DV video. It's also too slow to use as an external drive for editing said video. So, if you're wondering, this is not a fix.

UPDATE 3:

A co-worker informs me that the Leopard's USB drivers are much improved over older versions. He speculates that this might give USB enough throughput to at least be capable of editing DV from a USB drive. He also thinks you can do Target Disk Mode over USB, but I think he's wrong on that one, at least for now.

UPDATE 4:

More on MacRumors about the lack of firewire, with lots of valid complaints in the comments. The rumor quotes someone claiming to be Steve Jobs saying:

"Actually, all of the new HD camcorders of the past few years use USB 2."

While this is plainly false, what I'm more curious about at this point is not what camera Steve Jobs thinks I should go buy if I want to use a MacBook, but rather what the thinking was behind the removal of firewire from the machine. Did it enable them to keep the cost down? The weight? 'Cause frankly, the only reason I can see is to gouge folks who need or want firewire into paying for a MacBook Pro when it might otherwise be far more machine than they need.

UPDATE 5:

Still more from TUAW, including an excellent dissection of the purported Steve Jobs quote. Looks like this issue has legs. Glad to hear it's not just me.

Go firewire!

UPDATE 6:

I've posted a response to Ars Technica's article on the matter. Another, rather thoughtful piece with some additional info appears at Apple Insider.

Leopard Bugaboos

As big a fan as I am of Leopard, there's always room for improvement. And, though I've covered my major gripes already, I've recently discovered some additional buggy behavior in Leopard.

Application Switching

For some time now, Mac OS X has had the ability to switch between applications using the handy command-tab key combo. This works in Leopard as it always has, but I continually encounter a UI problem when doing this. Let me describe an example: I open an application, and, as it opens, I command-tab to another one. When the first application finishes opening, its windows are now on top of the active application's windows. That is, it's possible, through command-tab application switching, to get into a state in which the active application's windows are completely obscured by a recently opened application's windows. The easy solution is to quickly command-tab between the two apps. But it's pretty annoying when this happens: suddenly I find myself unable to work in an application I've just switched to. Is it a bug? I'd say yes.

UPDATE: I've just discovered that this happens not just when a new application has been opened, but also when switching to an app that has a recently activated process. For instance, in Firefox, I open a new window and then immediately switch to Mail, then back to Firefox again (hit command-tab twice rapidly). While Firefox attempts to open the window, it will appear to remain in the background, though the menubar will now clearly show that Firefox is, indeed, the active application. It seem like, during the time when Firefox is opening that new window (which on my aging Powerbook, takes a second), the OS can bring the app to the foreground, but is somehow unable to display the app's windows, and thus simply displays the windows of whatever app was up last. Ugliness!

Install and Keep Package

In Software Update there exists an option to "Install and Keep Package." When choosing this option, Software Update will download any selected updates, install them on your system and then save them to your hard drive for use later. I've often needed to do multiple installs of an update, and it's much faster to do so from disk, so I've used this as my preferred method of update. But this excellent feature just doesn't work for me in Leopard. In past versions of Mac OS X, these downloaded updates were stored in /Library/Packages. That folder is now gone. When I first installed Leopard, I noticed that "Install and Keep Package" downloaded updates to a different folder in /Library (perhaps /Library/Updates or /Library/Downloads, I don't recall). Then, for a time, the option downloaded updates to my ~/Downloads folder. But now choosing the option seemingly does nothing. The only way I can duplicate this functionality now is to use the "Download Only" option, and then, once the downloads are complete, choose the "Install" option. Using "Install and Keep Package" installs the software, but downloads nothing. Not a deal killer, but still frustrating.

Now I should mention that I keep my home folder on its own, separate partition. It's very possible that this is what's confusing Software Update, particularly considering the fact that Software Update now wants to download stuff to my home account (where it used to go somewhere globally accessible, i.e. in /Library). Still, given that this always worked flawlessly in Tiger, and that the "Download Only" option continues to work properly, I'd have to classify this as a bug.

Or at least a bugaboo.

Another Reason to Use Firefox

Firefox bests Safari in the management of huge numbers of tabs in how it allows access to the spillover. That is, in Safari, once you've opened around 20 or so tabs (the actual number varies depending on the size of your browser window) tabs spill over into an invisible no-man's-land beyond the browser window, and a double-arrow icon appears indicating that fact:

Firefox exhibits similar behavior:

Accessing those hidden tabs in Safari can only be done by clicking that double-arrow and selecting them from a list.

Those no-man's-land tabs never come up in the tab strip, though. If you want to, for instance, drag one of them to a different position (like, say, out of no-man's-land), the only way to do so is to increase the window size or decrease the number of tabs. Sucktastic!

But in Firefox, there exists a similar looking arrow doohickey, but said arrow actually scrolls the tabs right there in the tab strip.

Access to the actual, draggable tabs can be had through this convention, despite their position beyond the visibility threshold. What's more, hover over the tab strip and your mouse's scroll wheel will also scroll the tabs. Nice!

This is another reason why, despite certain bugaboos, Firefox remains my browser of choice.

Firefox 3 and Download Warnings on Quit

This is one of those "what were they thinking" moments. Actually, I think I might know. The fine folks over at Mozilla have been tackling the huge job of streamlining their excellent Firefox browser. One of the best tactics for streamlining anything — be it a workflow, an infrastructure or, indeed, an application — is to simplify through reduction or removal. Apple is famous for this sort of reductionism. The iPod is the classic example: where every other player has offered more and more features, Apple has consistently removed features in favor of a simpler and easier (and better) user experience. My theory is that the Firefox kids have taken a page from Apple's book. Their hugely full-featured — but, yes, often cluttered — Firefox is a lot cleaner in version 3 than in previous iterations. And for the most part I applaud this. But there is at least one option, I'd argue, they should have never removed: the alert that warns you of in-progress downloads on quit.

There seems to be at least one argument that goes, "Since Firefox now automatically resumes downloads, the warning is no longer necessary. The next time you launch Firefox it will resume the download." If this is the thinking, then I can see why they removed the feature. Indeed, Firefox no longer asks you if you want to save your open windows and tabs if you've set it to reopen all previous windows and tabs on launch, and that's really smart. It's a clever way to remove feedback when it's conditionally no longer necessary. The problem with the logic regarding the download alert is that it assumes that the reason for the alert was that you might lose or have to restart the download if you interrupted it, and now, because of the presence of resumability, that's no longer a problem.

In actual fact, however, that is not the only purpose for the alert. To my mind, the main reason that alert exists is to tell the user that he is about to do something he may not want or mean to do: he may be about to unintentionally kill a a process that's running in the background, a process he's forgotten about. He may be about to kill a download. An alert for such a thing is hardly redundant, certainly acceptable, and in most cases probably desirable.

As if this weren't bad enough, this lack of alerts is compounded by three other facts. The first is that, quite simply, this behavior is a drastic and unexpected change, not only from most other browsers, but from previous versions of Firefox itself. It certainly took me by surprise once I realized why my downloads weren't completing. The second is that, if you've selected the option to keep the download window hidden (which I have, and which I really like, mind you) the visual cues that something is downloading are extremely subtle and easy to miss, making quitting the browser during a download a far simpler and more common occurrence.

And the last — and perhaps most practically serious — is that downloads often don't resume after the browser is relaunched. Sure, Firefox is very good about attempting to resume the download, but sometimes your download link is temporary or dynamic, and on reload it fails. This has already happened to me a few times.

Now everyone knows I'm a sucker for simplification. I've certainly done my fair share of it, and I know it's not easy. I also know that you can go too far, and I think the removal of this alert is a prime example. Because this alert is necessary. Without it data loss can, in effect, occur. It's like the dialog that asks you to save open, unsaved documents when you close an application. It's almost that crucial. Would you remove such a dialog from your application?

Firefox 3 devs need to put back that alert.

Final Cut Pro and Gigantic Frames

Recently, one of our producers needed to cut a 20+ minute planetarium show down to a 3 minute trailer. So he needed a way to edit an image sequence comprised of extremely large, non-standard frames. We decided to use Final Cut Pro for the editing software, but Final Cut is decidedly not built for working far beyond the confines of its presets. Nevertheless, it is a flexible enough tool to get the job done, with a little effort and a fast computer. Here's a blow-by-blow of what we did.

1. Make Reference Movies of Frames The first step in the process was to make reference movies of the near-30,000 or so frames. Nothing about this entire process was straightforward, and this first step was certainly no exception. Attempting to import the entire range of frames invariably crashed Quicktime. But we were able to work with a subset of frames. So we ended up breaking the frames into folders of 5000. Of course, trying to move that many large files in the Finder would overwhelm the GUI, causing it to hang for vast stretches of time, so we moved the files via the command-line. This went exceedingly quickly. The Finder still really needs some help handling large groups of files apparently. But in the end, thanks to Mac OS X's UNIX core, we had six folders full of images, and each folder was opened as an image sequence in Quicktime, then saved as a reference movie.

   

2. Make DV-NTSC Movies from Reference Movies Since we were going to be editing this material, we wanted to get it into a good, edit-friendly CODEC. We chose DV-NTSC since it looks pretty good and is really easy to work with in Final Cut. Making our DV-NTSC movies actually went pretty well. Quicktime has done better at keeping current with the latest hardware capabilities than has the Finder. And, once we'd broken our image sequence down a bit, Quicktime made relatively short work of exporting them to DV-NTSC. And, blessedly, Quicktime was able to load and export multiple movies at once and take full advantage of our eight cores to process them.

   

3. Import and Edit at DV-NTSC Quality Well, okay... This was the easy part... In fact, making this easy was the whole point of all those other steps.
4. Create Custom Sequence Settings DV-NTSC was nowhere near the resolution we needed for our final product. We just bumped down to it in order to make editing more feasible. Eventually we wanted to output this puppy back out to gigantic frames once the editing was done, so we needed a custom sequence preset that matched the properties of said frames. Later we'd use this preset to create our final, high-res output.

   

5. Create Offline Project with Custom Settings Final Cut has a nifty feature called Media Manager, which allows you to consolidate your media and get rid of unused clips in order to reclaim disk space. It also can be used to conform from an offline — or low quality — version of your project to an online — or high quality version. Which is what we did. In Final Cut, we went to the Media Manager (under the "File" menu) and chose "Create offline" in the pulldown in the Media section where it says "media referenced by duplicated items."

   

6. Reconnect Media to High-Res Source Once we had our offline project, we needed to re-associate our DV-NTSC clips with the original, full-quality media, i.e. our reference movies. This was fairly easy to do: simply right-click the media and choose "Make Offline..." from the menu. Then right-click the movies again and choose "Reconnect Media..."

   

   When prompted for the clips, we chose "Locate," and then selected our high-quality material. Be sure to uncheck "Matched Name and Reel Only" when selecting the high-res clip.

7. Export Back Out to Frames with Compressor Once the movies were reconnected to the original source material, we needed to output back out to the original source type, which in our case was a TIFF sequence. There are a few ways to do this, but we had the best luck (i.e., the fewest crashes and slowdowns) sending the job right from Final Cut to — believe it or not — Compressor. This is certainly the first time in my storied history that I can say Compressor was the right tool for the job, but indeed it was. It knocked it out of the park. We, of course, had to set up a preset in Compressor that exported TIFF frames and apply that to our job. But once that was done, Compressor did it's thing and did it well.

In the end, what we got was a virtually lossless edit of our show. Because we used the original TIFF frames to render out our final trailer cut, and because Final Cut and Compressor shouldn't need to recompress those frames unless they've been altered somehow (which they only were in spots where effects or transitions occurred), our final output looks just as good as the original, even though we edited in the edit-friendly DV-NTSC CODEC. Which is exactly what we were going for.

There were a lot of hiccups along the way. One thing we noticed is that Final Cut does not take advantage of multiple processors, though, blessedly, Quicktime and Compressor now both do. Also, the Finder is still pretty damned abominable when it comes to dealing with a very large number of large files, which is a real shame since it's main job is file management. Quicktime, too, had some performnace issues with the large number of files. These things certainly slowed us down a bit. But, with some ingenuity and tenacity we were able to accomplish a pretty difficult task in a relatively short time. It was pretty cool, and now, if something like this ever comes up again, I'll have a process for it.

I want to say, too, that this is just the sort of challenge SysAdmins look for. Or at least SysAdmins like me. It's projects like this that make me happy I am where I am in my job and my career.