Interesting feedback from filming voxpops this week – especially from the women. I paraphrase only slightly:

“Why isn’t yours fluffy? I don’t like that one, it’s to black and stubby. I want one I can stroke. Don’t point that at me, it’s not nice.”

Now, on a minor technical point, stuffing your 416 or CS-1 in a dead cat when indoors is a technical faux-pas. An audio tautology. When you see it happen, you think ‘Film Students’, or a gauche attempt to appear ‘Pro’. Whilst we can discuss the use of a Sennheiser 416 indoors over more suitable short shotgun microphones on one hand, and chuckle at the sort of gut reactions above on the other, I’m a bit shamed to be honest.

I’ve never really thought of the situation from the voxpopper’s position – specifically, someone who isn’t used to the gear we use. We call them ‘gun’ mics, ‘rifle’ mics, it’s all a bit wrapped in that male viewpoint, and when somebody pokes something ever so slightly alien at you, resplendent in its anodised smooth black metal, it can be… well, intimidating.

It can also be confusing. I didn’t have a ‘reporter mic’ with me when we suddenly had a need to do a ‘friendly chat’ between three people, so the participants (to some degree media trained) took my short shotgun Sanken CS1 (crumbs, here we go again) and used it like more like a vocalist’s mic (close to the mouth), to a degree where the mic was dealing with uncomfortably loud source material (never mind the audio circuits in the camera). The next participant would take over and use the mic at the correct distance for a reporter mic. Lots of scrabbling with audio levels, application of limiter in camera and compression in post rescued the shoot.

But I digress. The learning point from that is that, given a mic, media-trained folk will tend to shove reporter mics in people’s faces (including their own) ‘just like on TV’. But there is a sort of mic they KNOW should be wafted out of shot – that’s right, the big fluffy ones. You really can’t stuff that in somebody’s face.

So, here’s the deal. I will get a ‘Dead Cat’ windjammer for my hypercardiod (okay, short shotgun) miss when doing voxpops and accept a little less from them. Yes, it’s funny and unnecessary and to techie crews, ‘poserish’ – but it’s also funny for the interviewee, and that relaxes them. And they’ll keep the miss away from their face.

So roll on the Dead Cats.

On the negative side, there was talk of how video clients were acutely aware of the cheapening of tools and how budgets were so squeezed. On the other hand, there was a genuine feeling of ‘democratisation’ in the markets I’ve frequented. On one hand ‘clients don’t feel comfortable with work-at-home editors’ but big names will now admit to ‘colour correcting on an iMac’. Clients may raise an eyebrow to DaVinci – ‘that’s the free software, right?’ but Grading and Colorists are back in the game. Just need to get our audio back in the limelight too. Broadcast is making it all very tricky again.

The big 800lb gorillas of the broadcast industry are not quite so dominant (!!) – but then, maybe it’s more telling that the show is now far more indie/corporate-friendly. I remember the BVE show was almost hostile to the corporate market. The visitors I met seemed to be 90% indie/corporate. Maybe birds of a feather stick together, but I definitely felt ‘amongst friends’ here.

Maybe that’s the grass roots poking through. Now that we’re hearing the parables of Netflix commissioning their own series, Google investing in content, these are a new round of broadcasters that the Web Generation of videographers and the avant garde of broadcast are taking to heart.

So are there new releases and excellent toys? Yes. The DJI Phantom stand – quadcopters with GoPros and NEX-7s on gimbal heads – was astonishingly busy. Queues to touch and feel the Sony F5 and Black Magic Cine Camera, Nikon out in force with a nod to ebullient Atomos, the Rode SmartLav (snark!) is in demo (tip – the Rode Lav is actually more interesting) and there’s a litany of distractions and shiny things…

Speaking of which, got to see some lovely lamps. Dedo has a booth where you can play with the new line of LED fittings – the 20W ‘son of LEDzilla’ particularly caught my eye. Small, neat, flexible, and can chuck light long distances. Only trouble is, so Teutonic is this company that ‘they’re not quite ready yet’ and have been so for a while. LEDs can be odd beasties, and the broadcast industry have said how LEDs ‘should’ work, but having worked with lesser LEDs and suffered challenges in skin tones, will be looking forward to lamps with true and fair rendition of skin tone.

Sad to find that there were a few companies I wanted to meet that weren’t here. But conversely, good to visit a show that can’t be swallowed in a day, let alone an afternoon.

3D isn’t here really. This year has a decidedly British take on 4K (jolly nice! Isn’t it doing well! Now, about HD…). If you need it, it’s here. If you think you need it, plenty of people to give you both sides. There’s a whole 4K pavilion, but it’s a separate side show. Another area which I felt sorry for was DVD duplication and its ilk. Vimeo and YouTube have their faults, they drive me nuts, but the concept of burning DVDs seems a little ‘Standard Def’ – and even BluRay seems a little difficult to justify.

If you can get along (this is a self-selecting audience, I know) do try the seminars. You’ll have to queue a bit, or suffer the standing, but unlike other years I’ve not been left out in the cold and there are some great presentations. Hopefully some will make it onto the web (a few are up already).

I have my take-aways from today, some I want to keep for myself, some I’m not sure make sense until I go again, but the biggest take home was the positive sleeves-rolled-up attitude of the people here.Just when many thought of upping stumps and retreating to the pavilion, there are clients out there who need video professionals who get great results because they’re good at what they do (whether on free software or high end systems).

So whilst I don’t feel we’re in recovery mode, maybe the bottom was scraped a while back and the bounce has happened. I’ll learn more on Thursday. If you can make the time to drop in on BVE, it should cheer you up if nothing else.

The job was to record the output from a vision mixed feed from an Outside Broadcast truck, filming an awards ceremony. We had, in fact, each of the 5 cameras recording to AJA KiPros, but there was a need for two copies of the finished programme to go to two separate editors (myself and Rick, as it happens, working on two entirely separate edits) as soon as the event finished – even the time spent copying from the KiPro drive to another disk would have taken too long. So we added Rick’s Samurai to the chain.

We learned a couple of interesting things in preparation for the job.

The first is ‘how to reliably power a Samurai’ – its neat little case doesn’t have a mains adaptor in it, although it will happily run for hours on Sony NP-F style batteries (you can A-B roll the batteries too, so changing one whilst it’s powered off the second battery). However, I didn’t want to have to think about checking batteries – I wanted to switch it to record, then switch it off at the end of the gig, as I had other things to worry about (cutting 5 cameras, after shooting ‘Run & Gun’ style all day).

The Samurai (and Ninja) can be powered off a Sony ‘Dummy Battery’ supplied with Sony battery chargers and some camcorders. Plug the dummy battery in, connect it to the charger and switch to ‘Camera’ mode and behold – one mains powered Samurai.

The second point is thanks to Thomas Stäubli (OB truck owner) and Production Manager Arndt Hunschok who set up the audio in a very clever way which gave me a unique opportunity to fix the edit’s music tracks.

Unlike HDMI, HD-SDI has 8 audio tracks embedded in the signal. The sound engineer kindly split his mix into 4 stereo groups: a mixed feed, audio from the presenter microphones, audio from directional microphones pointing at the audience (but away from the PA speakers), and a clean music feed.

The practical upshot was that I was able to edit several versions of the 90 minute awards ceremony (30, 8 and 3 minute versions) without the music, then re-lay the music stings (from its clean feed, or replace with licensed alternatives for the DVD version) where appropriate, thus producing a very slick result and saving a lot of time and hair pulling (or sad compromises) in the edit suite.

Technically, the Samurai footage came straight in and ready to edit with its 8 audio tracks in frame accurate sync (of course). I was able to slice it up and do a pre-mix of the required tracks.

In the past, this has been a bit of a nightmare. This time, it was easy to take audio from the stage and play with the timings for music cues.

A short technical note: be it HDMI or HD-SDI, your picture is made up of 1s and 0s and so there’s no technical difference in the quality if fed with the same source**. However, the audio is interesting. Most of the time, shooting indie films or simple corporates, you’re not going to need lots of separated tracks. When it comes to live performances or panel debates, however, the 8 tracks of HD-SDI can significantly offset the extra cost of the technology by saving time in the edit suite. Well worth a conversation with your Techinical Director or supplier to sort out the ‘sub mixes’ (separating your audio feed to the channels) and ‘embedding’ (entwining the audio channels into the HD-SDI feed).

It’s odd that this hasn’t occurred to me before – the facility has been there, but perhaps it’s that last bit of kit – the ‘HD-SDI Audio Embedder’ available from suppliers like Black Magic Design and AJA – that’s been hiding its light under a bushel. As such, it is probably the least sexy item on one’s shopping list. Not the sort of thing that crops up for the journeyman videographer, but just the sort of thing when specifying the larger jobs with rental kit.

So, note to self: when dealing with complex audio, remember HD-SDI Audio Embedders, HD-SDI recorders.

And again, my thanks to Thomas Stäubli and Arndt Hunschok for their assistance and patience.

* One of the main business cases for HD-SDI (and good old SDI before that) was that it uses the standard BNC connector that has been the main ‘video’ connector in the broadcast industry. The BNC connector has a rotating cuff around the plug that locks it into the socket so it doesn’t accidentally get pulled out (like XLRs). HDMI – and its horrible mutated midget bastard offspring ‘Mini-HDMI’ can work its way loose and pop out of a socket with sickening ease, thus any critical HDMI-connected kit usually has a heavily guarded ‘exclusion zone’ round it where no mortals are allowed to tread, and sometimes bits of gaffer take just to make sure – in fact there is a portion of the ‘aftermarket video extras’ industry that make brackets designed to hold such cables into cameras and recorders. And, at risk of turning a footnote into an article, SDI/HD-SDI travels over ordinary 75 Ohm Coax over long distances, unlike the multicore short lengths of overpriced HDMI cables. So, yes, HD-SDI makes sense purely from a connector point of view.

** Notwithstanding the 4:4:4:4 recorders from Convergent Design and now Sound Devices. Basically, a 1.5G HD-SDI signal carrying a 10 bit 4:2:2 output will be indistinguishable from an HDMI signal carrying a 10 bit 4:2:2 signal, and many cameras with both HDMI and HD-SDI output 4:2:2 8 bit video signals anyway. But HDMI only does 2 channel audio whereas HD-SDI does 8. Back to the story…

Image © Phyrephox – http://www.flickr.com/photos/phyrephox/

Howard Moskowitz proved (and Malcolm Gladwell presented – which is fun, watch it!) that there is no single perfect spaghetti sauce. If you want to ‘own’ a market, you must divide and rule. This is the current strategy of Sony’s camcorder division as yet another brace of cameras is launched.

Essentially, once upon a time, a cameraman made a decision to become an ‘owner-operator’ – to invest in their own kit to increase their profitability. Video equipment is notoriously expensive – an entire industry has been built up to make a profit hiring kit to production companies and Directors of Photography. A digibeta camcorder – the mainstay of the television industry – will cost the same as a high end executive saloon car, with much higher running costs. To make the jump from renting to owning signifies that you have the clients and the diary full of bookings that says ‘I have passed from Journeyman to Master’ as your monthly work shows that it’s more cost effective to lease your equipment and hire it back to your clients rather than put equipment hire as a ‘line item’ cost on your invoices. If you don’t recognise the subtlety of that statement, take your accountant out to lunch. If your accountant is good enough, then the cost of the lunch is a mere single digit percentage of what you’ll save over your first year. I married my accountant, you may choose a slightly less drastic path.

So, where were we? Oh yes: buying cameras.

We’d look at the market, the requirements, the costs, and you’d end up buying a camera that will last you 10 years at least. a few $k for repairs and realignment, a few $k for insurance, a few $k for depreciation, and you\re done. The camera will keep you going for 8-12 years. We’re happy with that. It sucks a bit, there’s the cost of feeding your accountant, but hey. It all works out.

AND THEN IT ALL CHANGED!

Suddenly we’re in a maelstrom of change: cameras are no longer big fat sausages of technology, there’s a bit at one end made of glass, there’s a bit at the other end that stores stuff, and the bit in the middle is just a computer that crunches pixels instead of spreadsheets.

Suddenly, we must think about the glass up front – that defines our look, glass is the new film stock. Waddaya mean, changing the lens changes the look?

Suddenly, we must think about the storage at the back end – that defines our post, we can take quick and dirty 4:2:0 8 bit AVCHD or we can chew for hours on Red raw files. We can record to SDHC or SSD to record 7 hours or 10 minutes. Become an IT guru or else hand over your rushes to computer geeks and hope – they’re doing more with less than your JobFit clapper loader whose got a better understanding of the value in that there solid state device. You can now swallow your day’s rushes without a glass of water, and you’re handing it over to a spotty youth who has been raised in a world with Command-Z.

Suddenly, we think about our choice and have a major middle-aged moment: Who Moved My Camera? (if you don’t know the horror in that phrase, you have been freelance for too long).

Here’s the beef (and it’s a life lesson):

There is no perfect camera. You must own several different cameras. Just like you must do several different jobs, you must be several different people to your children and you cannot live on one meal for ever:

• You will own a little go pro style camera, disposable, go-anywhere, waterproof time-lapse machine.
• You will own a DSLR to shoot where you shouldn’t shoot, and darn! It shoots great stills.
• You will own a ‘handy cam’ with insane steady shot and an XLR bridge to shoot where you can’t shoot
• You will own a Big Sensor Camera With Interchangable Lenses to shoot sexy looking stuff
• You will own a Black Sausage of Joy Camera to shoot when you really have no idea what’s going to happen
• You will own a 4K 12 bit Raw camera for chromakey, talking heads, beauty shots and stuff for 10 years ahead

And yes, you may even own a big, bad-ass, gas-guzzling Alexa, Red or F55. Or you rent that one after all.

The point is… there is no ‘one’ camera. It’s a collection, a family, a grab-bag, a menagerie of cameras. Call yourselves what you want – videographers, one-man-bands, DoPs, Director/Editors, we’re all going to need more than one camera to make a business plan. To say a PMW500 would make us all happy is to not get it.

If you want as big a share of the spaghetti sauce market, you must have solutions for those who like it runny, chunky, herby, hearty, gloomy and spicy – and whatever else the market wants. If you want to meet your clients’ expectations, you’ll need DSLR, Raw, Timelapse, Underwater/crappy-weather, discrete, showy, small, large and so on.

We all have to own lots of cameras. Tell your accountants. Yay!

This is a ‘blocking’ tool – a visual way of mapping out ‘who or what goes where, does what and when’ in a scene, and where cameras should be to pick up the action. For a full intro to the craft of blocking scenes from interviews to action scenes, check out the DVDs, but whilst they can be – and often are – scribbled out on scraps of paper, Shot Designer makes things neat, quick, sharable via dropbox, and *animated*. A complex scene on paper can become a cryptic mashup of lines and circles, but Shot Designer shows character and camera moves in real time or in steps.

You can set up lighting diagrams too – using common fittings including KinoFlos, 1x1s, large and small fresnels, and populate scenes with scenery, props, cranes, dollies, mic booms and so on – all in a basic visual language familiar to the industry and just the sort of heart-warming brief that crews like to see before they arrive on set.

My quick example (taking less time that it would to describe over a phone) is a simple 2-up talking head discussion. The locked off wide is matched with two cameras which can either get a single closeup on each, or if shifted, a nice Over Shoulder shot. A couple of 800W fresnels provide key and back-light but need distance and throw to make this work (if too close to the talent, the ratio of backlight to key will be too extreme) so the DoP I send this to may recommend HMI spots – which will mean the 4 lamp Kino in front will need daylight bulbs. So, we’ll probably set up width-wise in the as yet un-recced room – but you get the idea: we have a plan.

Operationally, Shot Designer is quick to manipulate and is ruthlessly designed for tablet use but even sausage fingers can bash together a lighting design on an iPhone. There’s a highlighter mode so you can temporarily scribble over your diagram whilst explaining it. The software is smart too – you can link cameras so that you don’t ‘cross the line’, Cameras can ‘follow’ targets… It builds a shot list from your moves so you can check your coverage before you wrap and move to the next scene.

Interestingly, there’s a ‘Director’s Viewfinder’ that’s really handy: Shot Designer knows the camera in your device (and if it doesn’t you can work it out), so you can use that to pinch and zoom to get your shot size and read off the focal length for anything from a AF101 or 5D Mk 3 to an Arri Alexa – other formats (e.g. EX1R or Black Magic Cinema Camera) will be added to the list over time. Again, this is an ideal recce tool, knowing in advance about lens choice and even camera choice).

This really is not a storyboard application – Per Holmes goes to great lengths to stress that storyboarding can push you down a prescribed route in shooting and can be cumbersome when things change, whereas the ‘block and stage’ method of using multiple takes or multiple cameras gives you far more to work with in the ‘third writing stage’ of editing. You can incorporate your storyboard frames, or any images, even ones taken on your device, and associate them with cameras. Again, that’s handy from a recce point of view right up to a reference of previous shots to match a house style, communicating the oft-tricky negative space idea, keeping continuity and so on. However, future iterations of Shot Designer are planned to include a 3D view – not in the ‘Pre-viz’ style of something like iClone or FrameForge but a clear and flexible tool for use whilst in production.

There is a free ‘single scene’ version, and a $20 license for unlimited scenes over all platforms – but check their notes due to store policy: buyers should purchase the mobile version to get a cross-over license to the desktop app, as rules say if you buy the desktop app first you’ll still be forced to buy the mobile version.

Shot Designer may appear to be for Narrative filmmaking, but the block and stage method helps set up for multicam, and a minute spent on blocking and staging any scene from from wedding to corporate to indie production is time well spent. The ability to move from Mac or PC app to iPad or Android phone via dropbox to share diagrams and add notes is a huge step forward from the paper napkin or ‘knocked up in PowerPoint’ approach. It will even be a great ‘shot notebook’ to communicate what the director wants to achieve.

Just for its sharability and speed at knocking up lighting and setup diagrams, Shot Designer is well worth a look, even at $20 for the full featured version. If you combine it with the Blocking and Staging aspect and its planning capabilities, it’s a great tool for the Director, DoP and even (especially) a Videographer on a recce.

Edit: For those of us who haven’t bought an iPad yet – this might be the ‘killer app’ for the iPad mini…

Editing is a journey from chaos to order. It defies the second rule of thermodynamics which says everything must turn to chaos. However, film making is a process whereby poo (abelit high quality poo -and in huge quantities) becomes haute cuisine in elegant portions. So how do we get there?

Although we shoot a lot of material knowing most of it hits the cutting room floor, the EDITOR knows to view everything. Amongst the detritus and the offcuts are little gems, little nuggets of gold. As editors, we need to find them and treasure them, and park them in a safe place. It must be a trustworthy safe place for we’ve cut them from their origin and put them there.

Once again, I’m trying to take an impossible amount of rushes and wrangle them into a reasonable selection for editing. Let’s assume that the main trip from rushes to edit is fine – any Non Linear Editor worth its salt can do that. But how do we manage the pre-edit? I’ve been using FInal Cut Pro X for the last year, and it’s been quick and utilitarian. However, 3 projects have gone south for the Winter because the database structure has become damaged. Yes, FCPX has procreated in a decidedly vertical direction leaving me, the editor, up the sewer without a paddle. Not once, not twice, but three times.

All three projects shared the same characteristics: not just a single project, but each borrowing from several projects over different hard drives. Not through design, but as a consequence of client desires. I had been using the SparseImage trick espoused by many, to great success. However, when SparseImages from different volumes were combined, sublimity turned to slurry.

I had chosen, so I could back up and archive quickly and securely, to import footage as links, rather than suffer the arduous process of copying gigabytes of footage to a single drive. Those links weren’t ‘aliases’ in the MacOS term, they were Unix ‘Symbolic Links’ which are uneditable unlesss individually, via a command line. If 497 links go bad, how long would it take you to fix them via a command line? Find me a Unix Guru who would agree to this in the 120 minutes between suffering the problem and showtime with the client. Yes, I re-edited the whole day’s edit in 2 hours, and FCPX was the only editor that could work as fast as we can.

Well, it’s happened again. I’m now editing in Adobe Premiere CS6 and will stay here. It feels like stepping out of a wonderful Mercedes Limo and getting into a TX1 London Cab. Basic, utilitarian, egalitarian. It sure as hell ain’t as quick as FCPX, doesn’t have the amazing third party support, but it just rattles on.

I don’t want to love it, but hey – it does things like subtitles, it knows about timecode, it respects links to external media, it has a save-vault that can save the editor from his own bad decisions, and whilst it can crash, it neither delete stuff nor forgets so much so you can help it recover.

I miss the air conditioned, hydro-suspensioned, gin-filled palace on four wheels that is FCPX, and I think I’ll still use it for simple little runabouts. It’s fun. It’s great. It’s actually really effective. But next time I’m hired for the long haul, I’m cutting in CS6. A limo can cross town, a TX1 will cross continents.

PostScript: The main issues were finally tracked down to something at the system level, requiring a full Clean Install. There are some hateful things about FCPX, but bear in mind the parable of the Old Woman who lived in a Vinegar Bottle.

So, we have a scale where 0% is black, and 100% is white. 8 bit video assigns numbers to brightness levels, but contains wriggle room, so if you have the Magic Numbers of Computing 0-255, you’d assume black starts at 0, and white ends up at 255. Alas not. Black starts at 16, and white ends at 235. Super whites use the extra room from 235 to 255 to squeeze in a little more latitude which is great.

But that’s on the camera media. Once you get into the edit software, you need to make sure you obey the 100% white law. And that’s where things go a bit pear shaped.

If you can excuse my laundry, here’s a shot with 109% whites – note them peeping up above the 100% line in the waveform monitor:

(Click the images below to get a full view)

Note also, that the fluffy white clouds are blown – there’s ugly detail snapping from pale blue to white around them. Although I shot this so I just got into 109%, the monitor shows us the 100% view, so it’s overexposed as far as the editor’s concerned.

So in my NLE – in this case, Final Cut Pro X – I drop the exposure down, and everything sits nicely on the chart. I could pull up the blacks if necessary…

But I’ve been told about an app called 5DtoRGB, which pre-processes your 109% superwhite footage to 100% as it converts to ProRes:

Note that it is indeed true that the whites are brought down to under 100%, the blacks are still quite high and will require pulling down in my opinion. 5DtoRGB takes a lot longer to process its ProRes files – I’ve reports of 10x longer than FCP7 Log & Transfer, but I’ve not tested this myself.

I did some tests in Adobe Premiere CS6, which demonstrates the problem. We start with our NATIVE AVCHD clip, with whites happily brushing the 109% limit as before. These are just 1s and 0s, folks. It should look identical – and it does. Info in the Waveform Monitor, blown whites in the viewer.

Another technical note: the FCPX Waveform Monitor talks about 100% and 0%, but Adobe’s WFM uses the ‘voltage’ metaphor – analogue video signals were ‘one volt high’, but 0.3 volts were given over to timing signals, so 0.7 volts were used to go from black (0.3 volts) to white (1 volt). So… 0.3 = black in Adobe’s WFM. And another thing – I’m from a PAL country, and never really got used to NTSC in analogue form – if I remember correctly, blacks weren’t exactly at 0.3 volts, also known as IRE=0 – they were raised for some reason to IRE=7.5, thus proving that NTSC with its drop frames, 29.97 fpx, error-prone colour phase and the rest, should be buried in soft peat and recycled as firelighters. But I digress. Premiere:

Let’s get our Brightness and Contrast control out to bring the 109s down to 100:

Hold on a tick, we haven’t adjusted ANYTHING, and Premiere has run a chainsaw along the 100% line. That white detail has been removed until you remove the filter – you can’t get it back whilst the Brightness & Contrast filter is there. Maybe this isn’t the right tool to use, but you’d think it would do something? Not just clip straight away?

I tried Curves:

It’s tricky, but you can pull down the whites – it’s not pretty. Look how the WFM has a pattern of horizontal lines – that’s nastiness being added to your image. The highlights are being squashed, but you can’t bring your blacks down.

So finally, I found ‘ProcAmp’ (an old fashioned term for a Processing Amplifier – we had these in analogue video days). This simply shifts everything down to the correct position without trying to be clever:

At last. We have our full tonality back, and under our control.

With all these issues, and probably some misunderstanding about 109%, I can see the desire for something safe and quick using the new FS700 cinegammas in the form of CineGamma 2, which only allows 100% whites, ditto Rec709 in the FS100. But forewarned is fore-armed.

I donate the last 9% of my brightness range to specular highlights and the last shreds of detail in the sky, so I can have that ‘expensive film look’ of rolled off highlights. But if I didn’t haul them back into the usable range of video, all that stuff would appear as burned out blobs of white – ugly. However, I also spent a bit of time testing this out when I switched from FCP7 to FCPX, as the former took liberties with gamma so you could get away with things. The bugs in FCPX and Magic Bullet made me check and check again.

It’s been worth it.

A showreel from a team that are really passionate about not just slomo, but trying to film the moments of life, making reality into a picture, describing visually that fleeting moment of bliss or horror. Slomo is fun, but it’s also about telling a story. And it’s not about cameras.

UPDATE: Writing >2GB files on SSDs >240GB with the Seagate GoFlex Thunderbolt Adaptor can cause the drive to unexpectedly dismount from your computer with an error (-50). Read the full story and the solution by Wolfgang Bauer.

Following on from my USB3 testing, I’ve finally received an interesting box – the Seagate GoFlex Thunderbolt Adaptor, now in stock for about £100.

The cool trick is that you can connect any ‘bare’ Solid State Drive (SSD) to it, and the price of SSDs is coming down quickly. A 256GB SSD can be had for under £140. Of course then you have to add your £40 cable, but assuming we can use one adaptor and cable for all your SSDs, finally we have a solution for Thunderbolt SSD for editing (and archiving/Backing up to USB3).

The downside is that you’ll probably want to keep the bare drive in the adaptor with some elastic bands or something – very high tech.

So, why would you want to do this?

Because it’s freaking fast. That’s why. Editing with Final Cut Pro 10 on this drive is the sort of experience we assumed it would be. No spinny beachballs of death, no stuttering, just ‘slick demo’ performance.

We’re talking 5x the speed of FW800 write, 8x the speed of FW800 read. And then there’s file access times.

With the same cable and adaptor, you can purchase additional SSDs for £140, and pretty soon we’ll see half a terabyte for under £200.

For my little industry niche, that means one SSD per edit for the duration of that edit, then archived off to hard drives so the SSD can be recycled, but happy to have maybe even a dozen of them – which I couldn’t afford with the current clutch of Thunderbolt/SSD combinations.

As I edit on site a lot, this can mean little gotchas like power suddenly dipping or going off entirely. Not talking third world style, just leaving a render in your hotel room and Housekeeping thoughtfully remove your room key that you taped into the slot to keep the power on. Or that moment after a big event where you’re backing up, and the 3-phase power you’ve been living on gets pulled for the de-rig. Which is why I’m so passionate about bus-powered drives that can work with a laptop editing computer.

And then there’s the scary ‘let’s edit this in the car’ or ‘let’s log rushes on the plane’ – with spinning disks? No. Ah – how about SSD? Fine. I’ll be archiving ‘media managed’ videos to thumb drives next.

It makes hard disks feel as old fashioned as tape.

After all, the Mac world is still full of USB2 devices: cheap, slow hard drives and computationally undemanding stuff like mice and keyboards. Little USB sticks for storage to perpetuate ‘sneakernet’ file sharing. There is of course, that funny USB3 sticker on most PC drives that claims high performance and that may be good enough for our PC using brethren, but we’re Mac users – why not sidestep the USB3 ‘upgrade’ for the super fast world of Thunderbolt?

That’s the mindset that Apple appears to want us to hold.

But the new set of Ivy Bridge equipped Macs will get, courtesy of their new chip set, USB3 functionality. Will Apple connect this functionality into the OS? Or will they find a way to block it? Should we care?

The world of PCs has been using USB3 for quite a while, scratching their heads over the Mac user’s obsession with FireWire and the ‘Unicorn poop’ status of Thunderbolt. Why are Mac users so precious about FireWire? USB3 blows it out of the water! They want Thunderbolt speeds – for what? And connect them with $50 cables? If the devices are blessed with pass-thru ports – which so many aren’t? (see sidebar below) USB3 has hubs!

I purchased the CalDigit USB3 card which fits into the ExpressCard slot of my MacBook Pro 17” – the choice of CalDigit is significant, as it’s the only one that’s touted to work with pretty much any USB3 drive – other manufacturers of USB3 cards tend to only work with their own drives and thus missing the meaning of the U in USB.

I’m used to working on FW800 drives, and so intended to use cheaper USB3 bus powered disks for backup and for handing over to clients, who could use them on their PCs. However, when used as the main working drive with a disk intensive application like Final Cut Pro, it was obvious that the USB3 drive was a lot faster. FCPX was running far better on USB3 than on FW800.

Enthused by this, I did a quick series of tests of drive performance with the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test app, available for free from the App Store. And so, in reverse order, here are the results:

Of course, what’s missing from this test is the ultimate: SSD in Thunderbolt drive, but these are still eyewateringly expensive.

The £75 Western Digital drives represent the kind of value we’ve been used to with spinning disks, and I can affirm that they work very well with Final Cut Pro 10 – the WDs on USB3 have been my drive of choice for onsite editing, with the added advantage that they’re cheap and compatable and can be passed over to the client without too many caveats (having archived to other drives).

Is USB3 better than Thunderbolt? No – it’s a different beastie. Should we give up on Thunderbolt for USB3? Of course not.

Should Apple now accept USB3 as a non-competitve alternative for non-specialist media use? Of course.

In the days of Steve Jobs, I’d fear that USB3 would be disabled in the new Macs in a fit of pique. The adoption of USB3 in the new Macs would demonstrate a more universal approach from Tim Cook et al.

At least CalDigit offer the option to MacBook Pro 17” users – and for everyone else, there is, of course, the Thunderbolt adaptor for Express Cards. Oh the irony.

Side bar: Thunderbolt devices can be powered via the cable from the host, but only one device per port. So, Thunderbolt powered devices do not have a passthrough port. Powered devices can have passthrough ports, but these are a rarity as most manufacturers seem to feel a single Thunderbolt port is enough.

However, when you’re paying top dollar for a new technology, the idea that a device will only work as the single device on the chain is frankly anathema. Video ingest device with no pass through to a storage device? Storage device with no pass through to a display device? No wonder Thunderbolt is taking its time to get accepted when device manufacturers assume their product will exist in its own lonesome prefecture.