Category Archives: Photography

4K displays

Hackintosh

High definition at a bargain price.

These are the most exciting times for photographers, with 4K displays coming to market in the guise of LED TVs.

I wrote the other day of the $220 32″ Seiki TV I bought to replace two 21.5″ displays for my day job. Easily wall mounted it is working splendidly, delivering 1920 x 1080 (1080p) resolution, driven by my back-up economy Hackintosh using an ancient nVidia 9800GTX+ graphics card. The all in cost, with display, is some $1,000 and any failed part is replaceable same day – it’s called a short drive to Fry’s Electronics in Silicon Valley – with the costliest part being the $220 display. Try that with your iMac.

For comparison, the Retina Display in the MacBook Pro is 2560 x 1600. You can expect to see these on most laptops in the new future, as well as on the iPad mini.

Now a new breed of LED display panel is coming to market, generally referred to as ‘4K’, meaning 3840 x 2160 pixels, or four times as many as the current HD TV spec of 1920 x 1080. Sony will sell you 55″/65″ ones for $5-7,000 or an 84″ version for $25,000. But there’s no need to pay those silly prices when you can get the newly released 50″ Seiki – the same as the maker of my modest 32″ 1080P set – for much less:


50″ Seiki 4K TV.

Weighing but 49lbs, it comes with three HDMI inputs and offers far higher resolution than the overpriced displays from the likes of NEC (whose 27″ 2560 x 1440 sells for $930) or the Dell’s like-resolution 30″ U3014 which is $1250. The Seiki offers almost 3 times the display area at 50% higher resolution for $150 more. Optimal photographic use would be to tile the display into two or four tiles to allow, say, Lightroom Loupe/Develop views, as well as Photoshop, all running simultaneously on the one big screen.

Now I very much doubt whether current PC hardware (by which I mean Hackintosh boxes, as Windows is anathema here, though feel free to check back when hell has frozen over) can deliver the 4K resolution of which the Seiki is capable, but there’s good news. Just yesterday, Anandtech ran an article profiling the first Gigabyte motherboards which will run the forthcoming Intel Haswell CPU ($300 for the i7), and we can expect to see these at Amazon within a couple of weeks, probably priced around $100-200, depending on the external connections provided. A related article discusses Haswell and its 4K capabilities, specifically focusing on Home Theater PCs. Their test saw them using the integrated HD4600 GPU which comes with the CPU, but I imagine that an nVidia GTX660 ($200) would provide abundant power to drive the 4K display with no issues. Indeed, they used the same Seiki mentioned above to prove this. Anand specifically state:

They mention some connectivity issues with the Seiki, but I’m confident it’s not something that will remain unsolved for long. Further, they go on to say:

How does all this work for the Mac OS X devotee and Hackintosh builder? I believe we will see a new version of OS X, 10.9, at WWDC in a week’s time or maybe shortly thereafter, which will support Haswell. As for Gigabyte – the preferred motherboard maker for Hackintosh builders, those should be out by the end of this month and you can bet that the excellent software hackers at Tonymacx86.com will be all over the project in no time. These guys live for change! So things look promising, and the appeal of a 4K 50″ display for processing photographs is great indeed. Exciting times.

Will we see a >50″ 4K LED set from Apple in the near future? Who cares? I, for one, do not have the required $7,000 to blow on jewelry, especially when I can build something better for $2,300. Gizmodo has a review of the Seiki, but it’s written by 16 year olds for 14 year olds. You are better off with the comments at Amazon US.

4K on Blu-Ray?

Sure.

Ripping Blu-Ray DVDs

Hackintosh, Movies

Easy.

When I added Blu-Ray capability to the HackMini, it was solely with the intention of using the enhanced reader/burner to play back a handful of Blu-Ray discs. However, the convenience of rapid access to discs stored on hard disk drives nagged at me so I though I would do some testing to see what is involved in ripping Blu-Ray DVDs and storing the results on HDDs.

Most Blu-Ray discs are encrypted so a competent and current ripping application is called for. After wading through the usual collection of suspects – all seemingly from the same maker with just the names changed, and with questionable output quality – I settled on MakeMKV. OK, not the greatest product name in the history of technology, but it works well.


Click the image to go to the download page.

The author appears to keep the product current and there’s a useful Forum where issues are discussed. There’s even a Windows version for true masochists. Windows 8 appears not to be supported, but I can only think that is a feature rather than a limitation. The application expires after 60 days but a fresh download renews it. The purchase price is $50 and it’s worth every penny and is just reward for the developer’s sterling work.

The process is very simple. Insert the Blu-Ray DVD, fire up MakeMKV and direct the output to a destination of your choice. My first rip took 51 minutes and delivered some 46GB of output spread over many files and directories. Most of this is junk which can be discarded – extras, advertisements, menus, etc. All that needs be done is for the one big file to be retained. After a few rips I have found that file – it resides in the ‘BDMV/STREAM’ sub-directory – is typically some 28GB in size. (See ‘Selective Ripping’, below). The file is renamed, moved to the destination of choice and all the remaining 18GB of junk can be erased. Remember to go to Finder->Delete Trash to free up the related disk space. For comparison, a regular DVD delivers a file of 4-7GB and takes 10-14 minutes to rip. For reference, the HackMini uses a Gigabyte H67M-D2-B3 motherboard, an Intel i3 SandyBridge CPU and a modest nVidia GT430 graphics card. RAM is a slim 8GB of 1333MHz speed.

The ripping process creates little thermal stress for the HackMini. The usual CPU temperature of 88F rises to 104F during a rip, and the CPU cooler is the stock (and not very good – though it is very quiet) one which ships with Intel’s CPUs. With a service limit of 176F it’s not like anything untoward is about to happen to the CPU here.


MakeMKV at work, ripping the key file from a Blu-Ray DVD. The total download
time is overstated here, typically falling to ~51 minutes through conclusion.

The ripped file needs no further conversion if played using the applications mentioned below on a Mac. If the destination is an iPad or iPhone, then Handbrake can be used to convert the file but why anyone would waste their time ripping Blu-Ray movies for viewing on those small displays is beyond me.

On my first attempt I placed that file on my external Mediasonic box which is connected to the HackMini using an USB2 cable. There are at least two players which can play the ripped file – the latest version of VLC (free) and the inexpensive Mac Blu-Ray Player which currently sells for $40. Unfortunately, playback was not good, with some stuttering using VLC and heavy stuttering with Mac Blu-Ray Player. I guessed the issue lay with the slow data transfer speed over USB2, and relocated the file to one of the internal drives in the HackMini, a small 2.5″ spinning disc, 5400rpm SATA 2 3GB/s notebook drive. Perfect. The movie played back without hesitation and the sound was excellent. All the various language sound tracks, together with the director’s voice over track were available, as were all the various subtitle features, all seeming embedded in this one file. Nice.

However, the boot and backup drives in the HackMini are very small so this is not a long-term solution. Accordingly, I zipped over to Amazon and bought one 4TB 7200rpm, SATA3 6GB/s HDD, for all of $175. Whether you buy 2TB, 3TB or 4TB, storage cost is the same at approximately $45/TB.


Seagate 4TB HDD.

The HackMini uses a largish SilverStone enclosure which has capacity for two internal full-sized HDDs (four will fit at a push) in addition to the two notebook drives for OS X and OS X backup. It was a moment’s work to install the 4TB whopper which, at say 30GB per Blu-Ray movie, will store some 130 movies at a storage cost of $1.35 per movie. Given that I only buy Blu-Ray movies of all time classics, such as those mentioned here, meaning very few, the ability to store 130 movies on the internal drive should last for ages. By the time that HDD is full I suppose we will have 8TB HDDs available for under $100!


SMARTReporter confirms that all is well with the Seagate 4TB Internal HDD.

For reference, I did test the 4TB Seagate drive in the external Mediasonic box and it was both recognized and quickly formatted using Mac OS X’s Disk Utility. Currently my Mediasonic boxes use 3TB HDDs, so it’s nice to know that they will work fine with larger sizes. Each holds four drives.

Back-up? No biggie. I’ll just keep the Blu-Ray original DVDs in the cardboard box in the corner of the garage which the black beetles call home.

Video and audio quality? Identical in every way to the original Blu-Ray DVDs viewed on my 1080p 55″ LCD TV.

If you are not a Hackintosh user, preferring to use something like a MacMini, I would expect that an external HDD enclosure connected to the MacMini using USB3 should provide adequate data feed rates to avoid stuttering, but I have not tested this. Mac users will also have to add an external Blu-Ray reader as no Mac ever made comes with one. For those few very special movies – the newly remastered The Godfather I/II/III and Lawrence of Arabia are stunning showpieces for this technology – it’s worth it. Those movies may be 40-50 years old but they don’t make them like that any more.

Meanwhile, the HackMini has gradually grown to become a powerful home theater PC. Having started life with the sole purpose of routing ripped DVD content from hard drives to the TV, it now rips and stores Blu-Ray DVDs, and acts as a conduit for some 24TB of movies with one mouse click via the splendid DVDpedia application, relays streaming Netflix and Amazon VOD, fronts for the BBC’s no less splendid iPlayer, plays iTunes music and, why, it can even purchase ridiculously overpriced movies from Apple, all controlled with an RF Microsoft mouse, which is superior in every way to any Bluetooth device. Best of all, it comes with faultless voice control whereby I simply turn to my son: “Winston, fire up ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, the Blu-Ray version if you don’t mind”. By comparison ask Siri to do that and you will likely get driving instructions to Bangladesh. If you want the optimal price/performance configuration for a modern build (the HackMini has some now discontinued components) drop me a line and I will be pleased to help. If you are a movie buff, I strongly encourage you to build one. Assembly borders on the trivial and the software hacking is now very easy with the latest free tools available from the Hackintosh community. Today’s construction cost for a HackMini with a single SSD boot/OS drive is little over $500 and no separate graphics card is needed, owing to the excellent HD4000 integrated GPU which comes with the current IvyBridge i3 CPU, more than capable for the intended use.

Waiting for Haswell: I asked ace Hack builder, the pseudonymous FU Steve, to add a few words on Intel’s upcoming Haswell line of CPUs. What follows was written by him.

“Intel’s current IvyBridge CPUs (i3/i5/i7) are about to be replaced with the 2013 Haswell variants. The significant changes are lower power consumption, good for mobile users, and the integrated HD4600 GPU which updates the already pretty competent HD4000 in the IvyBridge line. The i5 ($195) and i7 (starts at $300) Haswell CPUs will be out first with the i3 ($130?) to follow in the summer. While the performance of the existing integrated HD4000 GPU in IvyBridge is more than adequate for a home theater PC (and for Photoshop/Lightroom use) like the HackMini, it makes sense to wait for the Haswell i3 version. Unlike IvyBridge, which uses the same LGA1155 CPU motherboard socket as its SandyBridge predecessor, Haswell has yet again changed to a new socket (LGA1150) dictating a new motherboard, so it makes sense to wait for both if you can. The bottom line is that no longer will Hack builders have to spend money on a separate GPU card, thus saving $100-250. Only hard core gamers will need to make the additional outlay, where premium graphics performance is required for the most demanding games.”

Thank you, FU.

Update: Selective Ripping

After posting a question on the MakeMKV forum an expert replied that clicking the disk icon in MKV would make selective ripping available – someting unclear from the instructions:


Click the disc icon.

On doing so you are presented with selections, one of which is the equivalent of ‘rip main movie only’ common in other ripping apps.

Select the main movie (if there are two, the larger is likely the one with the director’s commentary, as here – avoid):

And off you go – saving 7 minutes per rip and having all chapters arranged into one file for you in those few cases where the DVD maker has tried to obfuscate issues by spreading the big movie file over several smaller non-contiguous ones. Not that uncommon.

If MakeMKV cannot decide which files to join for the main feature, read the above linked post, go to AVSforum for the file names to join, rip the full DVD then join those files into one using Mkvtoolnix.

North by Northwest

Movies, Photography

The best thriller ever.

In mentioning some essential Blu-Ray DVDs the other day, Hitchcock’s North by Northwest was naturally in the list.

The reasons are simple. From Saul Bass’s opening titles superimposed on the UN building with a reflected First Avenue gradually coming into view to the oh! so suggestive closing shot of the train entering the tunnel, this is the perfect thriller. Bernard Herrmann’s score of yearning beauty complements two equally beautiful leads, Cary Grant and an extraordinarily beautiful Eva Marie Saint.

But it’s Hitchcock’s love for the vastness and variety of America, perfectly realized in Robert Burks’s cinematography, which is the real reason to see this outstanding movie. Some examples:


A perfectly poised Eva Marie-Saint in the railway sleeper.


Cary Grant runs from the United Nations building.


Grant at Prairie Stop 41 in the middle of nowhere.


“Are you Mr. Kaplan?”
“Cain’t say I am ‘cos I ain’t.”


One of the most famous images in the cinema.
Grant is chased by the crop dusting plane.


At Chicago’s Union Station the cops try to
find a disguised Grant in a sea of Redcaps.

The extended train scene in the first third of the movie is the finest ever made. It takes place on the Twentieth Century Limited which ran between New York and Chicago back when train travel was glamorous. At that time this meant magnificent Art Deco design by Henry Dreyfuss; watch and you will agree that travel was never finer.


An image worthy of a latter day Edvard Munch.
Grant now doubting Saint’s motives is torn between
caressing and throttling her.


Saint shoots Grant. Owing to the many takes,
the little boy at the right got tired of the
noise and wisely stuck his fingers in his ears.


Grant climbs Mount Rushmore to avoid the bad guys.

The Blu-Ray version improves markedly on both video and sound compared with the regular DVD; maybe not as much as Lawrence of Arabia does, but enough to make it worth the very modest outlay.

Essential Blu-Ray movies

Movies, Photography

A small collection.

Having successfully added a Blu-Ray reader/burner to the HackMini I went about buying a few Blu-Ray movies, all of which I already own in standard definition DVDs. These are distinguished by exceptional cinematography, often more reminiscent of still images and come highly recommended in these new transfers based on user reviews at Amazon.com. I regard most of these as essential viewing for any photographer. These are the ones I bought:

  • 2001: A Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece remains one of the very few science fiction movies I will watch. It’s a genre I mostly detest as it’s all to easy to conjure up fantastical plots which bear no relation to reality by some asinine construct like time travel or teleportation. Poor excuses for proper writing. But Kubrick’s movie is different, not just for its startling foresights and extraordinary imagery but also for its pervasive sense of mystery. You place your own interpretation on what you see and have no need to explain it to anyone. And there is, of course, the most breathtaking cut ever in world cinema, being the moment the monkey hurls the weapon in the air to the space station in orbit. Exceptional video and sound. (Full disclosure: For the past 5 years my screensaver has been the Hal 9000 lip reading).

  • Funny Face: Stanley Donen’s 1957 confection has Fred Astaire acting Richard Avedon and Audrey Hepburn as the ingenue fashion model. The Gershwin score completes this exercise in champagne perfection and you have not lived until the multiple fashion ‘shoot’ scenes have overpowered you, set in the most beautiful city on earth, Paris. If you are a photographer and do not have this movie …. well, sorry, you had better stick to reading gear reviews.

  • Lawrence of Arabia: Like Kubrick, David Lean made very few movies and no bad ones. This was his best. A beautiful Peter O’Toole in his acting debut and the second greatest cut in cinematic history after Kubrick’s in 2001, the moment when T E Lawrence extinguishes the match. Maurice Jarre’s unforgettable score completes this exercise in perfection.

  • North by Northwest: Take the all time leading man, Cary Grant, match him up with Eve Marie Saint and an evil James Mason (surely the most beautiful, sonorous voice ever, back when beautiful English still set the standard for enunciation and could still be heard on the BBC) and set them on a cross-country chase across America from the bar in New York’s Plaza Hotel to Mount Rushmore, throw in a fabulous, memorable score by Bernard Herrmann, and you have the best thriller made. The Blu-Ray transfer is exceptional.

  • Once Upon A Time In America: Sergio Leone not only made the greatest Western (it takes an Italian!), see below, he also made this exceptional gangster movie about the Jewish Mob during prohibition. The early New York scenes at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge tell of a longing for a simpler world which never ages. James Woods, with his typical intensity, and a fine Robert DeNiro make the movie riveting, but it’s the youthful actors in the flashbacks, especially a divine Jennifer Connelly, who make the movie. Despite its vast length, almost four hours, the set design and art direction are to die for, and the movie is over before you know it. Sticking with the best of the best, Leone had Ennio Morricone write the haunting pan pipe music and Tonnino Delli Colli did the masterful cinematography.

  • Once Upon A Time In The West: Forget third rate players like John Wayne or limited range ones like Clint Eastwood. OUATITW is a unique melding of acting (Bronson, Fonda, Robards, Cardinale), directing (Leone), cinematography (Delli Colli) and music (Morricone). The regular DVD is already very fine but the Blu-Ray adds nicely to the visuals and greatly to the sound. Listen to the steam train ‘breathing’ in that magical opening sequence. The Blu-Ray comes with not one but two versions of the movie, the 165 minute theatrical release and the 166 minute remastered one. Watch the latter.

  • The Third Man: The finest monochrome photography, still or ciné, is to be found here. No self-respecting photographer should be without this movie and the Blu-Ray transfer is beyond words wonderful. Karras’s zither has never sounded better.

  • To Catch A Thief: Another confection with two of the most beautiful people who have ever trodden this Earth – Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. This is the last of three movies Kelly made with Hitchcock (after ‘Dial M for Murder’ and ‘Rear Window’) before her new job as Monaco royalty and she has never been more beautiful. The setting and cinematography on the French Riviera are to die for. Once my son graduates Harvard and I have made a fortune, I’m retiring there ….

* * * * *

These all ran me $10-12 except for Funny Face which was an exhorbitant $35, remastered in Sweden for some reason. It’s OK, it’s in English.

It’s not like classics like those above come around every day. The most recent was made 20 years ago, which tells you something about the CGI-digital garbage and poor writing with which we are presented by modern movie makers. There’s lots of film grain to be seen in the above movies, and thank goodness for that.

With disk storage so inexepensive, I rip my Blu-Ray movies to disk and give the originals to the local library. Nothing beats (cataloged) random access.

Workarounds to Adobe’s tyranny

Software

No bullies allowed.

As I mentioned the other day, Adobe has bet the farm that it can stick it to customers, depending on its quasi-monopoly in image processing (Photoshop) by making the app available solely on line.

In addition to the artistic implications (Will I lose my files if I cease paying the monthly rent? What happens to my images when I die?) and economic issues (Will I get hosed down with rent increases just because ADBE’s greedy C-suite wants a pay hike?) there are simple obsolescence issues. As we know, seemingly every new digicam with RAW capability needs a new RAW converter before applications can import the images. When the Nikon D900 or Canon 5D/IV come along, you can bet they will need new RAW converters, so what’s a hold-out to do if he refuses to subscribe to Adobe’s tyranny by not signing up for Creative Cloud?

Right now the answer is simple. Lightroom users are not being forced to move to CC so they can import the new RAW images to LR – which has been very good about ACR/RAW converter updates – then round trip them to Photoshop CS6 or lower when the great processing powers of Photoshop are needed. Aperture users (Mac only) can do likewise, though Apple’s updates to its RAW converter have been generally significantly slower than Adobe’s to LR and PS.

Yet I suspect these are both short-term fixes.

Mindful of the lucrative prosumer user base for Lightroom (you know, old farts with disposable income who are not driving their net worth) it will not be long, I suspect, before greed trumps reality at Adobe and Lightroom will suffer the same fate as Photoshop and become available solely through CC. In fact that seems a certainty to me given what I wrote above. Meanwhile, the delay gives Adobe the chance to grease its whores, people who make a living from teaching Photoshop and the like, and tell them to convince the world that CC is a Good Thing.

And the Apple picture is no brighter. First, it’s Mac only so that leaves out 80% of computer users. Second, Apple has never shown any enthusiasm for the product as the increasingly slow delivery of new RAW converters confirms. Sure the same RAW converters are engineered to work with iPhoto but let’s face it, your average iPhoto user is not waiting breathlessly for the D900 to create and process RAW images in what is a decent if limited application.

Thus given that the next (last?) standalone version of LR will still have the great database and processing features on Macs or PCs, what is called for is a replacement for PS for those cases where LR (or Aperture) cannot do the job. These are increasingly few and far between but when you need PS, you really need it.

If you have one of the later versions of PS – CS4/5/6 – then it’s likely you are set for many years. Enhancements in PS are very minor nowadays, so you are not likely to be missing some killer feature which Adobe has added solely to the CC version. If you do not own PS, either buy a used version or try something like GIMP which I tried a couple of years ago and liked. There is a learning curve but the pain is eased by knowing that Adobe’s hand is no longer in your pocket.

And GIMP has one truly ‘priceless’ feature. It’s free.


Click the image to go to the GIMP download area.

It’s Mac OS X only. PC users can try Corel’s PaintShop Pro for all of $70. It’s not the fastest on RAW updates but at $70 it’s cheap and is highly regarded, though as an OS X-only user I have no way of testing it.

How about RAW conversion for that D900 or 5D/IV? Mercifully there are many manufacturers of RAW converters which will allow the user to bypass Adobe. First, there’s the software which comes with your new D900. It may be awful, have a frightful UI and generally be a PITA but you only need it to convert your RAW files to lossless TIFFs then off they go to Aperture or Lightroom. That will always be a solution as digicam makers are not about to sell you a camera with no way of importing the images it makes. Doubtless Adobe will offer them bribes to include only CC licenses with the hardware but I do not see any digicam maker as being so dumb as to restrict buyers to one ugly solution.

Alternatively, you can use an aftermarket solution. While the piece is a bit dated, Steve Hoffmann does a fine comparison on his site here.

Phase One’s Capture One has a stellar reputation, seems to be a survivor, runs $300 for the whole thing and $100 for upgrades, and comes in both Windows and OS X versions.

Finally, many DSLRs offer the ability to save images to their SD or CF card in uncompressed TIFF format. I checked my Nikon D2x (7 years old) and D3x and both support TIFF. However, neither my Panny G1 or G3 offers this nor, best as I can tell, does the new Fuji X100S. TIFF is lossless and while the files are larger than RAW format ones, there is no dependence on a RAW converter to get to the processing stage.

Bottom line? Adobe will doubtless move Lightroom to the Creative Cloud and new RAW formats will not work with the desktop version. RAW conversion can be done in aftermarket apps far cheaper and Photoshop-like capabilities can be found at no cost in GIMP. Adobe’s prosumer base has started the long amortization to zero as of now. Once Adobe sees the numbers I would think there’s a fair chance they will reverse their policy but as the old saw has it “Cheat me once – shame on you, cheat me twice – shame on me”.