Category Archives: Photography

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”.

A cheap, huge monitor

Hackintosh

All of 32″!

When I asked ace computer builder and Hackmeister FU Steve to put together an economy Hackintosh for me some 18 months ago, the uses and design dictates were simple. The prime use for the machine would be to provide streaming stock quotes and related data feeds on two 21.5″ displays as well as acting as a backup in the event something went wrong with my main desktop machine, the nuclear powered, state-of-the-art HP100+. Accordingly the economy HP10 sports a Sandy Bridge i3 CPU, a second-hand nVidia 9800GTX+ GPU and a couple of regular spinning disk hard drives, each a modest 500GB.

The machine has proved excellent and is running OS Mountain Lion 10.8.3, the current version of the best OS on the planet.

The other day, when upgrading the living room TV from 42″ to 55″, I remarked how inexpensive large CD displays were becoming, and that triggered the idea to swap the HP10’s two smallish monitors for one big one. The cheapest 32″ LCD (actually 31.5″) I could find at Amazon was the Seiki LC-32G82 for $220, delivered from Adorama in NYC. Since then I have discovered that Kmart in the Bay Area peninsula stocks the same set for the same price, and I would counsel buying locally as QC with these cheap Chinese sets seems iffy. A local purchase makes exchange easier.

The screen area of a 31.5″ set is 215% that of one 21.5″ display, so the total screen space is largely unchanged, but in a much more elegant setup. Proceeds of sale of the old displays will pay for the new.

I wall mounted the set – it only weighs 29 lbs, using one of the original 100mm VESA mounts bolted to a $10 adaptor plate, the mount attached to the wall via a batten which is bolted with lug bolts to the studs in the wall. The distance from screen to wall is a total of 7 inches, and the surface is semi-matt, posing no issues with reflections.


Adapter plate for original VESA mount installed. Pillar for supporting plate has been removed, top.


On the wall. Pillar for supporting plate visible underneath, not yet removed.

While the display will be used exclusively for my day job, I took a moment to test it with Lightroom to determine whether it could be used for photo processing. First I tried a Mini DisplayPort to HDMI connector then a DVI-A to VGA one. Surprisingly, the VGA connector rendered considerably higher resolution so that’s what I am using. VGA, an analog feed, is not supported by EyeOne’s Display One software and colorimeter, so I profiled the display using Apple’s excellent utility (in Expert mode) found in Sys Prefs->Displays->Color, with final fine tuning done by eye against one of my calibrated Dell 2209WA monitors attached to the HP100+.

The results are really excellent and I illustrate this below, first with a JPG exported from LR on the HP100+:

Next is a screenshot of the same image on the calibrated Seiki:

Judge for yourself.

So the Seiki is more than usable as a very cost-effective large display for processing images. 32″ for photo processing is really large so your workspace really needs a decent setback so that your nose is not in the display, but after a few minutes use there’s no going back.

What are the drawbacks?

Well, it’s not as elegant as a big Dell Ultrasharp, sporting a relatively broad, glossy bezel. Though it’s only 60HZ that is fine for watching fast moving sports like Formula One through BBC’s iPlayer. By contrast, the same sport viewed on any of my three Dell 2209WA displays is poorly rendered, with much smearing/doubling in full screen mode. At this point I’m beginning to wonder why I spent $1,000 on the three Dell monitors …. The Seiki is 1920 x 1080 (16:9 widescreen), not the higher resolution 2560 x 1600 (16:10 – much nicer) sported by the Dell. And the warranty is one year compared to three. Wake from sleep is some 20 seconds, compared to 1 second for my Dells if that’s of concern.

On the other hand, the current Dell 3014 runs $1,300, so you could get almost six of the Seikis for one Dell. And you can dispense with separate computer speakers or a sound bar as if you are using VGA with a green motherboard socket, a separate 3.5mm coax cable delivers sound through the Seiki’s built in speakers which are quite decent sounding.

It’s an enticing proposition for photographers on a budget. If you decide on one, be sure not to get the $20 cheaper 720p version. That’s false economy. The correct model designation is LC32G82. While you can pay many times the amount asked for slimmer, more chic-looking sets, the finish of the Seiki is first class with tight seams and no blemishes on my example. The stand is very sturdy and the massive support pillar easily removed (six screws), replaced by a supplied blanking plate for wall mounting.


Easily read on a 32″ display. Click the image for a larger version of this Seiki screenshot.

Oh! and one other thing. You can always watch the TV on this display!

Adobe’s Creative Cloud

Software

Smoke and mirrors.

The funniest thing about the above piece of prize BS is that Adobe would think its consumers so stupid as to publish it. Behind this self-serving and disingenuous prose is the fact that Adobe will no longer issue disc updates for Photoshop. CS6 is the last one there will be. Thereafter, you either sign up for a monthly rent (fee) to get the new CC and updates, or you are stuck with CS6. Adobe says the rental rate will be the same as the upgrade fee we have all been paying them every 18 months or so, and if you believe that will prevail I have a nice bridge for sale in Brooklyn you might be interested in.

Of course, every business wants rental income, a steady revenue stream beating a staccato one. But the reality here is the following:

  • Photoshop has peaked. The tinkering at the margins in CS5 and CS6 are hardly compelling upgrade reasons.
  • Adobe’s pricing for new buyers of Photoshop is beyond ridiculous. $600 for the first time buyer. All this has accomplished is the creation of a burgeoning piracy industry with ‘free’ copies available for download on any number of illegal torrent sites. To attract first time buyers Adobe should do what Apple did with OS X. Reduce the price to discourage piracy and spur legal purchases.
  • Adobe’s pricing recognizes that Photoshop is about done. They can blow smoke telling you that your software will always be up to date but significant updates – like CS3->CS4 etc. will likely disappear.
  • Professional users may well like this as will teachers, but you have to wonder what the effect will be on the broader user base.
  • Adobe has stated that while Lightroom will be available through the cloud, disc copies will remain available. I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts this option will go away soon. Thus the large amateur population of LR users who look for free upgrades for the latest RAW file formats will be forced to choose between the CC rental model or will simply go elsewhere. I’ll go elsewhere.

We will see what sort of push back Adobe gets from users and whether they will change their spots. But to say that your customers “…. are some of the most influential people in the world” while simultaneously emasculating them is not what I would call a basis for a long-term relationship.

The Hackintosh and Blu-Ray

Hackintosh, Movies

Another step forward.

It’s no great secret that Apple has never included a Blu-Ray reader/burner in its computers. Maybe they are right. With the increasing availability of HD streaming video they have concluded that BR makes no sense. Maybe their greedy profit margins on their mostly mediocre hardware couldn’t survive the markup? Who knows?

A related problem is the dishonesty of the movie studios. Ever interested in hosing the consumer down for something claimed to be newer and better, a lot of classic movies have been cynically copied to BR discs with no effort made to go back to the original film stock, no enhancing of signal-to-noise ratios, no scanning of the original images and no great sound. That’s a lot of no. So you often get a poor transfer whose major distinguishing feature from the SD DVD is the price.

My choice for my inaugural Blu-Ray movie is Lawrence of Arabia. Robert Harris is recognized as one of the most adept restorers of old movies, and every frame of the original 65mm film has been scanned, retouched, color corrected and so on. A true labor of love. So I started with a Blu-Ray disc created from his restoration.


El Orance at the Red Sea, Aqaba.

But first the technical details.

The HackMini, my TV Hackster, uses a modest Gigabyte H67M-D2-B3 motherboard and an equally modest EVGA GT430 graphics card, the last sporting VGA, HDI and DVI outputs. It runs OS X Lion 10.7.4 because there’s no earthly reason to upgrade. I have long used it with VGA connected to the TV set with a separate 3.5mm coaxial cable for sound. It has worked really well. An expert Hackintosh friend (thank you, PB!) had alerted me that getting the HDMI port (it conveys digital video and audio) working is quite a challenge. For those into Hack matters, the DSDT.aml file has to be edited extensively and depending on your hardware, additional drivers (‘kexts’) may have to be installed. It all looked a bit forbidding, and my ace hacker and Hackintosh guru FU Steve was out of town, so I got down to the hardware part first.


The inexpensive nVidia GT430 – this is the VGA/HDMI/DVI version in the HackMini.

The cheapest Blu-Ray reader/burner I could find was an LG for all of $44 – prices seem to fluctuate daily:

As you can see, the size is the same as that of its predecessor, and replacing the original Sony drive was a matter of a few minutes, helped by the ample space in the HackMini’s enclosure. MacMini owners need not apply ….

Next I connected the drive to the TV using an HDMI cable and rebooted. Naïvely thinking that I could use the latest version of the VLC video payer with Blu-Ray enhancements added, I fired up the app and got an error message. The Lawrence of Arabia BR DVD is encrypted and will not play through VLC.

So I hunted around a bit and came up with BluRayDVDPlayer and had a perfect picture first time but …. no sound over HDMI. You can try this app free, the $40 price registration removing the obtrusive watermark. Sure enough, looking in OS X’s System Preferences->Sound disclosed no HDMI output. I checked out the hacking instruction at Tonymacx86 and was less than enthralled, so I reconnected the drive to the TV using a VGA cable and separate sound cable. Ha! BluRayDVDPlayer takes the digital sound feed and makes it available to the analog VGA feed. Wonderful. Video and audio was now working. So the all in cost was $44 for the hardware and $40 for the application. But nothing is every clean in Hackintosh land. For once, those unfortunates who do not get it, AKA Windows users, can click right through.

But try and buy the Mac app from the BluRayDVDPlayer site and nothing happens when you click the ‘Buy Now’ icon.


Click the image.

However, right click or ‘control-click’ on ‘Buy Now’ and ‘Open in a new tab’ and you are up and running. A code is immediately emailed to you, easily input, and the watermark is gone. The interface is exquisite, the tuning Preferences engineered by users – lean and mean, fast, unobtrusive – and the app appears to be regularly updated for the latest nefarious copy protection schemes of the fools in Hollywood who earnestly believe that buyers will make 35GB copies for distribution to their friends. Right.

Update September 24, 2013:

Since updating my TV media PC to a Mac Pro using the same excellent nVidia GT430 card, I have had great success using the HDMI connection from the Mac Pro to the TV using this HDMI hack referenced here with BluRayDVDPlayer. A fine product. The only anomaly was that on occasion a Blu-Ray movie ripped using MakeMKV would not reproduce sound, somwething that could be remedied by going to Audio->Audio Device->HDMI (Encoded Output) and switching to Audio->Audio Device->HDMI. I dropped the developers a line asking how to make the latter the default audio setting, as it works with all movies (and also respects the scroll wheel on my BT mouse for volume control) and immediately received the following response:

This works perfectly. Try getting this sort of service from the big boys in Cupertino or Redmond ….

Update ends.

So what about the experience?

Lawrence of Arabia in Blu-Ray is truly starting at the top. A photographer’s dream. As I wrote in the introduction of this piece, it is overwhelming, one of the greatest movies made, its great length but a flash as you sit, enthralled. I once saw it at the Carnegie Theater on 7th Avenue in NYC in 1985 on a large screen and really that is the way it should be seen. But a decent sized home TV and this splendidly remastered Blu-Ray DVD come pretty close. I’ll leave you with two images, a mere 1000 pixels wide – no prizes for guessing which is which.



Subjectively? Blue-Ray leaves HD streaming content in the dust. Regular DVDs? Not a chance. Netflix will happily rent you Blu-Ray DVDs for a monthly premium of $4. Their catalog now numbers some 3,300. Just make sure the ones you rent have really been remastered (Amazon reviews are good for this) not some slimy hack copy of a low quality DVD file.


The home screen on the HackMini.