The Darkmatter Weblog • Brent Daniels [aka Free]

Studio Upgrades - 3D previz

2009-02-02T15:45:00.000-08:00

This week I began scoring the feature A Lonely Place For Dying. I'm excited. I'm going to score and mix it in surround, so I needed to upgrade my studio from stereo monitoring to a 5.1 system.

Currently I'm using two JBL LSR4328P speakers as my main monitors. They're networkable via ethernet cables and in a surround setup they can automatically calculate the appropriate delay time for all the speakers relative to the mix position, which is really cool. So I picked up 3 more and the matching subwoofer and a ton of custom cable. (BTW if any of you are looking for one killer guitar cable or a bunch of mic cables or whatever, I've been using Lava Cable, a custom cable shop, for all my cabling needs for the last couple years. Mark Stoddard's got every kind of cable and connector on the planet over there, and runs a business with incredible customer service. My order was a little behind because he was swamped due to the NAMM show and he hooked me up with some free upgrades including overnight shipping to meet my time frame. Highly recommended!)

The room I'm isn't terribly huge, and that sub is going to cause some low end havoc so I sprung for some real treatment, which was long overdue anyway. I ordered a bunch of bass traps from RealTraps, which I should get tomorrow. I have a feeling I'm going to need more, but I'm going to see how it works out with what I ordered first, which is the Starter Kit. I have a hunch I need a second one of those though, as it was designed with only 2 speakers in mind.

I snagged a second audio interface so I wouldn't lose any of my current outputs which are wired into a patchbay for my semimodular synth rig, two more Mackie Control extenders, a bunch of soft synths including Native Instruments Komplete 5/Kore 2 bundle, and a couple cases of Asahi. Okay, that last one's not really studio related, but I have a hard time coming out of Trader Joe's without a bunch of beer. ;)

When Daniel Lenz was here working on my music video with me for the single for ALPFD, we found it hard to get two chairs in front of my rig because I have a one inch thick bamboo chairmat (harvested from sustainable forests, fear not), and it's not wide enough. The place I'm in is a rental and it's carpeted, and I need to be able to roll around my workspace unencumbered, so for a long time I've been unsuccessfully trying to find large laminate chair mats, or parquet would flooring solutions that I didn't have to make myself. Justin Evans came up with a great idea -- portable dance floors! Seriously. Way cheaper ($3 - $5 per square foot), portable, and available in different finishes. And no I will not be using it for its intended purpose, ever.

A couple years ago when I was first designing my room I wanted to pre-visualize my space so I could make sure I could reach everything in my racks with ease. And, frankly, I wanted to make sure it looked cool. I had already one major piece of studio furniture (the desk, an Omnirax Force 40) and was planning on expanding that with a custom-built chassis to support an expanded mixer control surface, keyboard controller, and standard keyboard and mouse (which ended up working out really well), as well as a side rack for out-of-the-box effects processing. I discovered Sketchup, another app acquired by and made free by our future overlords (Google), and was blown away. I was able to reconstruct every element in my studio down to the millimeter. Then I was able to build any piece of gear or furniture in 3D using published dimensions and images from the manufacturer's websites. It worked out exceedingly well. I updated my Sketchup model last week to drop in the center and rear speakers, some of the RealTrap MiniTraps, and the floor mat to check the sizes and placement before I purchased them. If you're building a house, designing a room, or anything at all really, I highly recommend Sketchup. It's really easy to use if you watch the short, included tutorials, and best of all it's free. And except for a couple gear changes in the racks and the absence of detritus in the Sketchup model, it looks almost EXACTLY like my finshed room.

Check out some of the pics output from Sketchup, or better yet, download Sketchup here and download my model and have a look around the room.

UPDATE 02/03/09 It turns out James over at RealTraps is a Sketchup user as well, and has made components of their traps; he downloaded my Darkmatter model and dropped in the traps I'm getting as part of the Starter Kit in the appropriate places, which will work better than what I've got pictured here. How cool is that? Thanks James! The model has been updated, so if you want some RealTrap components for your own studio model, re-download it.

UPDATE 02/12/09 The portable dance floor turned out to be no go on carpet - not enough support. So I cut two pieces of 3/4" MDF into a 6' x 7' subfloor, and put the dance floor on that, and it worked perfectly. My chair rolls around on it smoothly.

3 Days with a Drobo

2008-12-31T18:08:00.000-08:00

Well, after voicing my frustration in a previous blog post about data loss, I got a great deal on firewire 800 Drobo from Newegg: 50 dollars off for using a 1 day PayPal promotion, 50 dollar rebate from Data Robotics, makers of Drobo, and what looks like a standard 50 dollars off from Newegg for a total of $360 bucks. Killer.

I installed it on Monday, and finally finshed shuttling around several Terabytes of data today. So far, so good. I was a little worried about the fans in it, and how loud it would be, since my studio is basically a converted bedroom that functions as the control room and the tracking room, so all the gear is in one spot, and any fans in this room are noise issues. The Drobo is definitely not any louder than my Mac Pro. It's for sure quieter, but I can't tell by how much It's right next to my Mac Pro and when I put my ear down there all I hear is the Mac Pro, but I know the Drobo is making noise, so, it's a win in that category.

It looks beautiful, and the Drobo dashboard app, which comes with it, is a very informative app that also shows you the status of your drives, so remote access monitoring of the lights on the front from the road (echoed in the app) should be a snap.

3 1.5TB drives and 1 TB drive gives me 3.6TB of redundant backup. 1TB of that is reserved for aTime Machine backup on the studio Mac Pro, and the Drobo is formatted for 16TB so I'll be able to grow the volume up from 3.6TB as bigger drives come out without reformatting or hopefully ever shuttling data around again. Or for at least a very long while.

Eventually, it will hang off my Airport Extreme router via USB as a NAS (network attached storage) with RAID 5-like capabilities, and everyone on my house network (A Mac Pro, Powermac G5 and a Macbook presently) will be backing up to it, with 3 1 TB Time Machine sparse bundles for each Mac (Currently the Airport Extreme limits you to 1 TB for a Time Machine backup if the drive is not directly connected to your computer).

Note that even though the Drobo gives you three chances to replace three dead drives, nothing's perfect, and the Drobo should definitely not be the sole backup solution. I still have a clone of my studio Mac's boot, dedicated project audio and soft synth library drives in my Mac Pro that are being synced nightly with Chronosync or incrementally updated with Carbon Copy Cloner in the case of the my boot drive. I'm also using a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) solution, various raw SATA drives triple backing up the most important stuff using the Thermaltake BlackX, and storing them in Weibetech static-free cases. A couple of these will be stored off-site, in case of fire/flood/theft.

Anyone with massive amounts of precious data, especially any of you audio or film people, should definitely consider a Drobo. Hell, anyone with any precious data.

Click on the image at the top for a closeup view of my studio desktop and the Drobo Dashboard App.

Music video anecdotes

2008-12-30T23:42:00.000-08:00

Justin Evans, my friend and director of A Lonely Place For Dying and our music video for the theme song for said film, just made a post on his blog about the process of making the video (which we are near completing).

Check it out here.

I added my two cents in the comments. ;)

Justin Evans/A Lonely Place For Dying win Heineken Red Star Award

2008-12-26T15:55:00.001-08:00

A Lonely Place For Dying (the film) was screened at the Santa Fe film festival without the score (well, it did have my theme song in it, but that was it musically), final visual effects, or sound design, and it still won the Heineken Red Star Award. Killer. Read more about it in this post on Justin Evans' blog.

Additionally, IFC is running an interstitial throughout the month of January featuring ALPFD and Justin. A clip from the a trailer for the film (cut specifically for the American Film Market) is playing in it, and you can hear some of the music I wrote for the trailer.

Check it out here.

I begin preproduction for the score January 5th 2009 for two weeks, then head to Phoenix, LA and San Francisco for two weeks for a short tour, and am back in the studio February 3rd to begin scoring throughout the month of February.

I'm excited!

Drive Death

2008-12-07T15:07:00.000-08:00

So I got back from my tour and found two internal 500GB SATA drives in my Mac Pro rig went down --Each within days of each other (I had been remote accessing my system all the while on the road and noticed the first one died a few days ago, then I got home and heard the horrifying chattering of a stuck spindle coming from the second one). One was a volume dedicated for my soft synth library (personal sample library and factory content), and the second was a clone of that. So I lost the primary and the backup basically at once. Most of the data is replaceable, and Daniel has a copy of our custom Hednoize sample library, but I'm sure I lost some stuff I won't know is missing for awhile, and I did lose some recent stuff, like some kits I programmed in MachV 2 that I used in my remix of ALPFD, which I'll have to reprogram, which of course takes time, of which I seem to have less and less.

At least I got some satisfaction out of throwing the drives across the room a couple times before stomping on them a few times and boxing it up to send back to western digital. I could've take a dump in the box for them too, but that would've probably been overkill. And not very nice to the hard-working US Postal Service, especially at this time of year.

The point is that while I know this is going to happen with all hard drives at some point, I'm sick of it, and as much as I backup (I'm up to three clones of my boot drive for example), I always end up losing some data, somehow. I currently have about 16 raw SATA drives in and out of several computers at my place, and I have to get at least 4 of them warranty replaced annually.

I seriously need a couple Drobo's. If you haven't heard of them, check it out. Amazing, simple redundant backup that'll let me use all these extra SATA drives lying around and take the sting out of a drive dying. I can't believe I've gone this long without getting one.

I guess I was holding out for a long time for RAID5 on the Mac, which is a redundant solution, but stricter in it's requirements to work (all four drives need to be the same size, for example). I bought a software solution called Softraid based on an email exchange with the developer, who said they would have Raid5 implement

ation "probably in six months." That was May 2006. As of December 7 2008, still no Raid5. Thanks for nothing. I'd like my $129 back.

Note to self: "Don't buy an application based on it's future potential to maybe have a feature you need." Duh.

Anyway, Drobo FTW. Apparently you can r

ip out 3 of the 4 drives while you're reading and writing data and that sucker will still chug along, rebuilding all your data on the final drive. Crazy.

And as excited as I am to have 4TB SATA drives, the mechanical problems inherent with them are not going to go away. Maybe the sound of bad bearings will just be 4 times as loud. ;)

Bring on the large capacity Solid State Drives. Read this in depth AnandTech article about the SSDs Intel is making, particularly the sections on how long they last, and what happens when they fail. Cool.

Brent Daniels Music website V 2.0 finished

2008-11-19T20:28:00.000-08:00

Dang! Took me long enough. I've been on tour the last five weeks, and spending every spare moment (when I not driving, sleeping or performing) coding.

It was worth it though, I learned a bunch I didn't know before about meta tags, keywords, and more than I want to know about html. I should be able to just make blog posts and upload images to flickr and video to vimeo from any browser and my front page should update dynamically, which is cool.

Now on to getting some sleep....

"A Lonely Place For Dying" maxi-single released

2008-11-11T17:49:00.000-08:00

Brent Daniels' new single "A Lonely Place For Dying," the title song for a feature film he is scoring in 2009 of the same name, has just been released. It is available now, along with remixes by Brent, Daniel Lenz (Hednoize, Psykosonik), and Bern Locker (Urban Voodoo, Godhead). Click here for purchase links and more details.