Drobo vs 32Bit Snow Leopard

A lot of you out there have Drobos and are running Snow Leopard with Drobo Dashboard; if you are and are running under 32bit there may be performance issues with your Drobo. Mac OS X Hints has some more info on this and a solution.

Clients DVD-R's Lifespans

OSTA says that the average lifespan of a burned CD-R and CD-RW is about 5-10 years. DVD-R's likely have a similar lifespan.

So you have a few options when it comes to storing your digital data:
Optical Media you burn.
Professionally made Optical Media.
Tape Backup
Mechanical Hard Drives
Solid State Hard Drives
RAIDs
Offsite RAIDs and Vaults
and now DiamonDiscs.

Cranberry says they only last 2-5 years so they've come up with an optical burnable disc that they claim lasts 1000 years. Yes, one thousand.

How's it work?

A Cranberry DiamonDisc is a DVD made of high tech stone.
Memories carved on a DiamonDisc will last as long as the pyramids. No reflective surface. No ink layer. No fading. Problem solved. The Library of Congress is studying our technology for storage of the national archives. It’s the only solution for permanent, digital storage.

The hitch is you have to buy an expensive ($5000.00) proprietary burner or send them your data and have them burn the discs for you. Their product page is here.

One thing I like on their site:

We need your money. How's that for transparency? The technology behind the DiamonDisc is so expensive that we cannot make much money selling you the DVD. We need you to subscribe to the DVD vault service so that we can pay the bills.

HHD vs SSD

I've been asked more than a few times on what I think about HDD (spinning mechanical hard drives) vs SSD (solid state drives).

I've noticed a difference between the two during heaving editing. Dropped frames, longer seek times etc...but my experience is pretty limited, too limited to form a complete opinion yet. I did however run across this nice introductory article on the differences and limitations of SSDs compared to HHDs.

The two points that really caught my eye are:

As a primer for the following, we mention two major issues with SSDs:

1) HDDs can be put into storage for a decade and then, provided that there are still systems out there that support the interface, they can be plugged in and the data will be readily accessible. NAND flash-based SSDs will lose their data over time, even if they are powered down and in storage.

2) HDDs will show some degradation of performance over time, primarily relating to filling up of the outer diameter tracks and fragmentation of the drives’ media but a defragmentation will restore the performance since it is defined by spindle speed and media area density and those parameters never change. SSDs will show some initial extreme performance but degrade rapidly after heavy usage.

HDRtist - a FREE HDR image application

Looking around for a way to make an image I've used way too much in a series of commercials look somehow different I ran across HDRtist, a FREE application that is a one-stop shop for creating an HDR image or making a pseudo-HDR image from one single image.

If you're unfamiliar with HDR photography you can read about it (and Tone Mapping) here. And for some photoshop how-to, check out this.

Add Audio Edit ... only

Here's a potentially time-saving tip that maybe isn't all that obvious.

If you're mostly editing audio (taking out the Director's long loud direction, timing beeps, etc...) but don't want to adjust or edit the video and you're in the habit of using Control + V like I am to edit all you need to do is turn off Auto Select for the Video tracks and Control + V away to just edit the audio tracks.

Lock & Load Stabilizer

A new stabilizer called "Lock & Load" was updated to 1.0.4 today. It purports to be the world's fastest and more intelligent than SmoothCam, the free stabilizer that comes with FCP, but Lock & Load is $149.00. There's a video of it in action and a free 15 day trial (with water mark) here.

I haven't tried it yet. If I do I'll report back here. It may be fun to run a comparison of the two on the same footage.