Category Archives: Photography

Six into One does go

Computing, Movies

Storage changes.

Over half a decade ago I decided it made no sense to own DVDs. Hard to house, ugly to look at and even harder to access. Let me see, is that filed under Actor, Director or Title? Which movies was Bogart in? You get the idea. If ever a product was suited to random access, database storage, it is your movie library.

And movie libraries still make a lot of sense. The much vaunted Netflix, with its 140,000 snail mail offerings, manages to offer only 10,000 of these streamed over broadband and they are some of the worst movies ever made. Even when you find something really good streamed it is as likely as not to have disappeared from your Wish List when you return to watch it later. The Amazon Prime library is near useless and the Apple iTunes one is devoid of classics with content here one day and gone the next.

So I started in a modest way many years ago and ripped my 200 DVDs to a 1tb disk drive housed in a two-drive enclosure with an identical backup clone. As the next 200 came along so did another enclosure and pair of drives, until you get to the mess I have today:

Storage for 1200 movies.

First, you will see that the drive boxes vary. No sooner does a solid box come along than it is discontinued and you are forced to use something else. Second, I do not trust fragile USB hubs so six USB cables make their way to the HackMini which is equipped with no fewer than 8 USB sockets. Third, every box adds a fan and noise is part of the equation. These are still distant enough from the viewing location that noise is not an issue, but you can definitely hear the fans.

So, something has to give. A couple of years ago 3tb drives started coming to market. That means 600 uncompressed movies per drive. But they were costly. Then, to make matters worse, the Thailand floods struck and half of global drive production disappeared. Prices doubled.

Now, drive prices have returned to sanity and there are more good enclosures to choose from at attractive prices. I did the math and concluded the idea of moving what was in six enclosures and twelve drives to one enclosure with four drives made sense, so I plonked down my cash for one of these:

Mediasonic four drive enclosure.

For photographers and cinematographers, there’s a lot that appeals here; it’s not just for movie buffs. While this enclosure does not offer RAID redundant storage, I do not want something I do not remotely understand. A simple clone allows me to switch to the backup if the main drive fails, as it has once during the life of my six separate enclosures. Simple, effective, no nuclear physics involved. CarbonCopyCloner runs incremental scheduled back-ups while I sleep.

The appeal of a modern enclosure like the Mediasonic includes the provision of both USB3.0 and eSata connectors, as well as the ability to take up to four 3tb drives with SATA3 supported. Disk drive buffers are now up to 64mb from 16mb a few years ago and 7200rpm is standard compared with the 5400rpm of yore. If you are moving large volumes of data then USB3.0 and SATA3 are night and day compared to their predecessors. If your purpose is simply data storage and occasional retrieval, as with movies, these technologies add little, but as their incremental cost is near zero, why not have them?

After running the numbers I quickly realized that the $730 spent on the new enclosure and drives (the latter are $150 for 3tb) is less than the $1000 or so the old drives and enclosures command on eBay. A more than ‘free’ upgrade, though I prefer not to think what this hardware ran me over the years. However, in addition to being free, the lower noise, lower heat and power consumption (8 fewer drives means 50 watts less power) and lower space demands make this upgrade a no brainer. Thank you, Moore’s Law. The major potential fly in the ointment here is the relatively unexplored reliability of 3tb drives. Still, with each backed-up, it’s a risk I can accept. I make a living doing other things so that I can watch movies, and do not depend on the movies to make my living. You can read a recent technical review of the 3tb Seagate Barracuda drives I will be using here. The warranty on the (non-XT) drives I will be using is only one year, but drives tend to fail when new or very old. Fingers crossed.

One immediate snag is that DVDpedia, the excellent Mac-only cataloging utility I use for movies, which provides ‘click-to-play’ links to six movie volumes, will now have to have its database rejiggered to point to the two new volumes. Mercifully, DVDpedia enjoys excellent support and the SQL commands which allow an instantaneous batch change of Volume names appears here. (See the following post for updated code). The alternative of manually changing file paths for 1,200 movies is not a realistic one.

The current version of DVDpedia, a mere $18, allows syncing of your home theater Mac catalog with any iDevice so that you can peruse your collection at leisure. You cannot initate play from the iPad or whatever, but it’s a handy feature. Another useful one is the ability to export your collection to the web, which I do monthly, and which you can see by going to the Links at the bottom of this page.

More details when I have converted everything. Here are the current drive performance data for the HackMini which runs a modest Core-i3 CPU and 8Gb of 1333mHz RAM; I also include the Geekbench CPU performance so that you can compare it with your machine:

Xbench disk performance for an external, USB2, SATA2, 1tb Samsung 7200rpm disk drive.

Geekbench CPU performance for the HackMini.

One word of advice. Avoid the Drobo solution. Overpriced with a poor reliability record. Making a capable high volume storage, high speed solution using component parts yourself is every bit as easy and likely to be far more reliable. And it will cost less. Much less.

135 launches

Photography

America’s genius writ large.

Click the picture.

Try to watch this on a big screen. It is in equal parts breathtaking and deeply moving.

Today, our small minded leaders, ever keen to do what gets them reelected rather than do what is good, saw fit to cancel this visionary work. A shame on them and a shame on all us voters who allowed this to happen.

When an America president said we would put a man on the moon within ten years, he did not feel it necessary to ask the American people for permission. He was elected to lead and to espouse a vision of possibilities. In the event, America did it in seven years and the world became a better place.

To put this in perspective, once your pulse rate has steadied, once your objective mind has reflected on what ideals can accomplish, watch the following piece on American exceptionalism; you will be crying again, but for different reasons (refresh the page if not visible):

Click to play.

Mountain Lion – don’t rush

OS X

Fools rush in ….

The recent history of OS X is as follows:

  • 10.5 Leopard – the last to run on G3/4/5 PPC machines as well as on Intel Macs. 32 bit.
  • 10.6 Snow Leopard – the last pre-‘dumb’ UI, 32 and 64 bit, Intel only, will run PPC apps using Rosetta
  • 10.7 Lion – the current OS with many iOS influences, such as touch gestures and the AppStore. Intel apps only, no PPC, no Rosetta. 32- and 64-bit.
  • 10.8 Mountain Lion – more dumbing down of the UI and 64 bit Intel only

On balance, I would have to say that OS X peaked with Snow Leopard. Robust, no nonsense, no frou frou. We are now in the land of chintz, bells and whistles. Faux chrome spokes will be next.

Before being a pioneer at the bleeding edge and upgrading your OS Lion Mac or Hack to OS Mountain Lion, due out any day now, stop and do this simple test first.

It’s the bold words above that should give you pause. If you recall losing the use of NikonScan or Quicken 2007 (both PPC apps requiring Rosetta in Snow Leopard) when you migrated to Lion, you run the same risk in migrating to Mountain Lion from Lion for all your non-64 bit apps. Indeed, as what follows shows, the risk is potentially far worse.

Apple continues to dumb down the UI of its desktop OS, making it more responsive to touch gestures, which sells more Magic TrackPads I suppose (Magic What? Gimme a break, Apple), while in reality the use of touch gestures with a desktop and traditional keyboard is simply poor design. It may work with a laptop but does not with a desktop, in my experience.

The quickest way to find out what will not run on Mountain Lion is to start up all the apps you use then go to Applications->Utilities->Activity Monitor and sort this screen by clicking on the ‘Kind’ column:

Activity Monitor sorted by 32- and 64-bit apps.

Anything that does not say ‘Intel (64 bit)’ in the ‘Kind’ column will not run with Mountain Lion until the application is updated by the maker. And, in my case, there are some real shockers here:

  • CrashPlan menu bar – cloud back-up. I have emailed the maker who replied “We plan to fully support Mountain Lion by the time it is publicly available.”
  • SteerMouse manager – confers enhanced functionality on my ancient Logitech mouse. I emailed the maker who responded: “ML supports 32 and 64 bit applications, but it does not support 32 bit kexts. SteerMouse consists of a 32 bit application and a 64 bit kext.” This means SteerMouse should work fine
  • LogMeIn – permits remote access and control of any computer. I have emailed the maker and they replied that LogMeIn will work fine with Mountain Lion
  • iPhoto – no problem – Apple has just updated to 10.6.3 which works with Mountain Lion
  • SMARTReporter – menu bar utility which provides early warning of imminent drive failure. I have emailed the maker who replied: “SMARTReporter works fine in 64 bit, and mostly fine under Mountain Lion. There is one issue related to Mountain Lion, the I/O error check doesn’t work there. i’ll provide an update for this in the next days and unless the Mac App Store delays things too long, the update should be released before Mountain Lion is publicly available.”
  • MacaroniTool – excellent UNIX utility which repairs permissions overnight with no attention. I have emailed the maker
  • growliChat helper – pops up a window when something important happens
  • i1ProfilerD2LionEditionTray – deal killer. App for running the i1Display2 colorimeter for profiling displays. I have emailed Xrite requesting an ETA. Don’t hold your breath on this one, as they just replied to me as follows: “We have not established final compatibility with Mountain Lion with any of our products. Apple reserves the right to change the OS up until the day of actual first customer shipment. Our software engineers are testing with pre-release copies of 10.8, but our final testing will only begin when the release version is available.” Meaning if you move to ML, be sure to profile your displays in Lion first as you will be waiting for the ML version for quite a while. Xrite did a similarly poor job of releasing the Lion version despite having 2 years notice that Apple was abandoning Rosetta and PPC CPUs. Bunch of amateurs who care little as they enjoy a monopoly in the colorimeter market – Huey, EyeOne, Spyder – yup, all Xrtite, unfortunately.
  • Dropbox – another deal killer. Replaces MobileMe for me and provides an easily accessed cloud storage space for frequently used files. There’s an experimental Mountain Lion version here of unknown stability
  • Bento – database app owned by Apple used for inventories
  • ccc_helper – used by CarbonCopyCloner – though I believe CCC is on top of 64 bit migration. Used for drive copying
  • Temperature Monitor – the maker has written in response to my question: “Yes, of course. There is no reason why Temperature Monitor should not work. The application also has 32 and 64 bit sensor drivers included to support monitoring of Intel’s “per core” temperature sensors.”

So several of these, once disabled, make my Macs and Hacks unusable. Mountain Lion will have to wait until apps are updated or alternatives become available. Running this simple check will warn you whether Mountain Lion is too early for prime time. I suspect that, for many photographers, the answer is a resounding ‘No thanks’ at this time. Better to stop and wait than to find you have just dropped the anchor through the keel of the boat and that you are out of lifejackets.

Some good news. PS CS5 and LR4 are fine – they have been 64-bit apps for quite a while. If you use three or more monitors with #3 and above powered from a USB2 port using a Newer Technology USB-DVI adapter (excellent) then I am glad to report that the maker has just updated the driver to 64-bit. I’m using the Moutain Lion version with Lion on my third display and it’s fine.

Will my Hackintosh or Mac run Mountain Lion?

You need to check if you are running in 64-bit mode. This is done in System profiler (‘About This Mac’) as follows:

If yours says ’32-bit’ you are SOL with Mountain Lion, arguably no bad thing. Mostly it’s the graphics card that is to blame. Good luck upgrading a Mac, but Hacks are easily upgraded to later cards. The Nvidia 9800GTX+ GPU I use is a 64-bit card. It is discontinued, outstanding and easily found used for $50 or less. Apple has published a list of Macs which will not run Mountain Lion and this is probably the issue. Just about any Mac over 3-4 years old will not run Mountain Lion. The list is somewhere on their site and I’m damned if I care to look for it. If you have to, your next desktop should be a Hackintosh.

Disclosure: Lomg January 2013 AAPL call options.

Photoshop on the 2012 MacBook Air

Macintosh, Software

A few hurdles first!

Adobe allows installation of Photoshop on two computers, and requires that if it is to be used on a third that one of the other two be deactivated. Fair enough. It’s premium priced software and shareholders of ADBE should rejoice at any and all attempts to control theft.

I’m on CS5, having started with CS2 ages ago and progressed through CS3 and CS4. CS5 is a fine product, it’s fast and I have never had it lock up on the Hackintosh it calls home. It is blisteringly fast on that machine, with its overclocked Sandy Bridge i7 CPU.

Given the very speedy technology in the latest 2012 MacBook Air, I determined to add CS5 to that laptop which already runs Lightroom 4.1 very capably. But how to get it on the MBA’s SSD?

Good luck finding CS5 for Mac at Adobe.com. There’s a Windows version but for the life of me I could not locate the Mac option, and all current Mac downloads point you to CS6, which I have not yet purchased. I found my original CS5 disc and cloned it to a flash drive using CarbonCopyCloner on the Hackintosh, some 1.2Gb. Inserting the USB flash drive in the MBA and starting the installation process failed. I was asked to insert the installation disk. So I copied over the installation files to the MBA and launched the installer from the MBA’s SSD. After inputting my bazillion digit serial number all ran smoothly.

But, firing up CS5 I got the ‘Activation limit exceeded – you have already installed this application on two computers. Deactivate one’ message. Well, the snag is that the other installation was on the predecessor MBA 2010 which I had wiped before sale, so there’s no way I could ‘deactivate it’. I called Adobe (866 772 3623, hit ‘3’) fearing the worst and got an exceptionally competent person to whom I explained that they needed to wipe one activation count off their registration database. After ten minutes on hold I was informed that one activation was erased and that I could proceed. I did so and all was sweetness and light! Thank you, Adobe.

Photoshop CS5.1 running happily on the 2012 MBA.

Some usage notes on the 2012 MBA – mine has 4Gb RAM, twice that of the 2010 predecessor.

Start up takes a mere 3 seconds. Opening a RAW file (Panny G3) from Lightroom 4.1 in CS5.1 takes 9 seconds. Selective Lens Blur preview takes 2 seconds, applying the blur another 10. This is a processor intensive activity. It’s faster on the MBA than on my Core i7 Hackintosh. Applying routine distortions to correct verticals and the like is near instantaneous. The 8Gb RAM MBA would probably be even faster.

Bottom line? No excuses need be made for the 2012 MacBook Air as a Photoshop machine. It is perfectly capable of keeping up with the best.

Disclosure: Long AAPL January 2013 call options.

HP100 adds USB3

Hackintosh

Not without a struggle.

Intel’s LightPeak is currently the fastest way of moving data to or from external storage, claiming 10 gigabits/sec, or 1.25Gbytes/s in regular English. This compares with a theoretical limit of 0.06Gbytes/s for USB2, so twenty times as fast on paper. LightPeak was rolled out in several Macs where it continues to enjoy near-zero market share, owing to a dearth of peripherals using the connector and insanely expensive connecting cables.

Meanwhile we have USB3 which claims 0.63Gbytes/s, is backward compatible with USB2 and USB1.1, and is available on most current Macs. The 2012 MacBook Air supports both USB3 and LightPeak (‘Thunderbolt’ in Apple Hypespeak).

For Hackintosh owners there are two ways of adding USB3. For those with older motherboards (LGA775, LGA 1156 typically) a PCIe internal card has to be added at a cost of $20-40. For more recent builds (LGA1155 and LGA1366 sockets) most come with USB3 connectors built into the motherboard. For Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge machines (LGA1155) current Gigabyte boards include USB3, so when ace computer builder FU Steve upgraded HP1 (LGA775 Core2Quad) to LGA1155 (Sandy Bridge i7-2600K) by fitting a Z68 Gigabyte motherboard, it came with two blue USB3 sockets on the back and a 19 pin USB3 connector inside.

And my HP100 has done nothing to use those USB3 sockets since the upgrade, as I have no USB3 peripherals. Until now. As we are getting into hardware, definitely not my forte, I’ll hand it over to ace Hackintosh builder FU Steve for what follows.

* * * * *

Thanks, Thomas.

When I upgraded Thomas’s HP1 to HP100 I intentionally chose the Z68X-UD3H-B3 motherboard from Gigabyte because it’s easily hacked, comes with two USB3 sockets (and many USB2), and has the 19 pin USB3 connector on the board itself. I envisaged upgrading the USB2 internal, front panel USB2 card reader to USB3 and had Thomas plonk down $33 for a Silverstone FP37B 3.5″ internal card reader. This was easily swapped with the older Sony 3.5″ reader, plugging into the 19 pin mobo socket.

And here the story gets complicated. After installing the appropriate USB3 driver (kext file) using TonyMac’s MultiBeast app, the two rear panel blue USB3 sockets were recognized:

Installing the USB3 driver – check the box and restart after running this.
The Gigayte Z68X mobo uses an Etron EJ168 controller. No instability issues noted.

However, no matter how many different drivers I tried the card reader was MIA. Nada. Zilch. Back she goes to Amazon.

Failure. Not recognized by the Hackintosh.

Plan 2. I had Thomas buy an external USB3 card reader, confident it would be recognized once plugged into one of the rear sockets. $35 and nowhere near as elegant a solution, but having the advantage that it could also be used with Thomas’s 2012 MacBook Air, which has no built-in card reader.

US Robotics USB3 card reader.

This comes with a ridiculous 6″ (yes, inch) USB3->micro-USB3 cable, so another $7 saw a 6′ extension cable arrive which is actually usable on the HP100. Having Thomas cuss me out because he cannot get at the card reader is more than life is worth. The stock, short cable is fine for use with the MBA. The reader is USB-powered, so no power brick is required.

Micro-USB3 extension cable.

Don’t bother with that old male-female USB2 extension cable in the brown cardboard box under the stairs. It will fit but you will only get USB2 speed. A USB3 cable has more wires and contacts. There is no free lunch here.

The card reader was immediately recognized, and though System Profiler reports the maximum speed is the 480Mbits/s of USB2, rather than the 5000Mbits/s of USB3, the full USB speed is available. Here’s how it’s seen in System Profiler:

USB3 card reader with a Class 10 SDHC card inserted.

USB3 is reported as ‘USB Super-Speed Bus’, and you can see both sockets are recognized.

Confirmation of the transfer speed was easily done by running the Xbench disk test. Here’s USB2, which takes 10 minutes (!) to run:

Xbench – USB2 (extension cable) with SDHC Class 10 card.

And here’s USB3 which takes a 75 seconds:

Xbench – USB3 cable with UDMA CF 400x card.

Like, whoa!

So USB3 is working properly on the HP100. I ran the same tests with the card reader connected to the 2012 MacBook Air, with identical results, except that the MBA reports the card reader’s speed correctly:

USB3 card reader as reported by the 2012 MacBook Air.

How about some real world tests?

Import and processing of 20 Panny G3 RAW files from the SDHC Class 10 card (not especially speedy as cards go) using USB3 compares with USB2 as follows, using Lightroom 4.1:

  • Import 20 files: 20/20 seconds. No difference.
  • Generate 20 1:1 previews and apply lens correction profiles: 43/48

Hmmm. Not very impressive. Why is USB3 no faster?

The limiting factor here is the slow SDHC Class 10 card. Here are the speed specs for the various SDHC card classes:

As you can see both USB2 and USB3 are working at maximum efficiency in HP100 – meaning one second per file, with files being around 10Mbytes in size. SDHC simply cannot go any faster, and is not helped by USB3 at all. More recent high-speed CF and SDXC cards however should benefit, as they support data transfer rates of 32Mbytes/s or more and here USB3 should realize the benefits. Thomas’s Panny G3 does support SDXC cards, his earlier G1 does not. He needs a faster card to realize the benefits of USB3 with the Panny G3.

Now repeating the same test using the Lexar 400x CF UDMA card from the Nikon D700:

  • Import 20 files: 3/20 seconds. Seven times as fast
  • Generate 20 1:1 previews and apply lens correction profiles: 46/48. No material difference.

* * * * *

Thanks, FU. So USB3 in the HP100 will work great with external USB3 drives, and with SD and CF cards. If the card is fast, USB3 is 7x as fast importing files with a 400x UDMA CF cards (and probably similar with recent SDXC cards), and all at a fraction of the cost of LightPeak/Thunderbolt. Processing time remains unchanged as that’s a function of the CPU and GPU, having nothing to do with the card. For users of the latest DSLRs like the Nikon D800 which generate 75Mb files USB3 is a cheap – and highly recommended – fix for fast import – the time will fall from 6 seconds a file to under 1 second.

And, of course, any USB3 external disk drives will be much faster, especially if SATA3 drives are used in preference to the older SATA2 designs.

As for the processing speed when importing to LR, that’s hardly a limitation. Once the files are imported, you can let LR grind through processing while you simultaneously start developing your picture. Processing occurs in background mode and only a faster CPU and GPU can speed that up.

So if you want the best transfer speed per dollar, USB3 is the way to go at very modest increased cost – $35 for the card reader plus $7 for an extension cable.

Update January 27, 2013:

I managed to bend two of the pins in the US Robotics USB3 card reader when inserting a CF card from my Nikon D3x. The pictures on the card were corrupted, but were easily recovered with the wonderful DiskDrill application. Mercifully, I have retained the original internal USB2 Sony card reader in my Hackintosh, so download could proceed. I dismantled the US Robotics device (you have to pull off the four rubber feet hiding the screws) and managed to straighten the bent pins and all is well again.

Moral: Be very careful to insert the card straight into this device. The guide channel is short – misalign your card and the suspect engineering design of the CF card which requires perfect alignment will trip you up, much as it did me. SD/SDHC/SDXC cards are a far more robust design, using broad contacts on the card, addressed by wipers – not pins – in the reader. Yes, you hear of CF cameras with bent pins too, but Nikons are fairly well made in this regard as they use a very long channel to ensure proper alignment of the card in the slot.