Chris Jones Blog

Santa has brought me an Apple TV!

Santa came early for me this year. I was given a shiny new and lovely Apple TV as a gift from Lucia, and I am rather excited! I asked for it early as I wanted it up and running before Christmas so that if there was a problem, I can get it sorted before everyone disappeared.

For those of you who don’t know what Apple TV is, for my money, it’s the first real attempt at the future of film distribution in the home – one device delivering all media - video, film, internet, music, photos - that will sync with all my other devices – AppleTV for your TV and living room hi-fi, and iPod / iPhone for music and movies on the go etc.

Hold on a moment! Let me be clear. This is a first attempt into this bold new market and technology – Apple TV is still, in my view, way too limited for most people. Still, I needed to see it in action for myself.

So what is it? As it’s from Apple, it’s a small and beautifully designed small silver box, with no buttons at all. The software is intuitive and extremely well integrated. It syncs with iTunes on my computer and makes all my music available, as well as videos, in the living room (using the home network to sync up). It also streams Quicktime HD so I can rent and watch films at ‘HD quality’.

OK, so here are a bunch of my findings, in no particular order. And let me also be clear, I am not an Apple evangelist. I am a PC guy day to day, so I am immune to the enamour some Mac folk feel when they get close anything Apple designed.

The Good

1. It is a stunning piece of design technology. But it’s also expensive at just over £200.

2. I connected it up via HDMI to both a 1080P TV and 720P projector. The Apple HD video files are in fact, 720P upscaled to 1080P. The pictures and the operating system looks good on a TV, not so good on a projector.

3. Sound is as good as an iPod. I am sure audiophiles will balk, but for me, it was completely acceptable.

4. I can download a film and start watching within a minute or so of the download starting. There are no stutters or glitching. It works flawlessly (though I do have a fast broadband). This is a real winner as it could spell the end of trips to Blockbuster, with no more messing around with LoveFilm and no more limited choice from Sky.

5. I have figured out how to operate two accounts - one in the UK and one in the USA, so I can buy and download from both countries. Very cool (though naughty).

6. Many films are available in HD, even older classics, which is awesome.

7. The remote is small and lovely, and proves to all other manufacturers, you don’t need enormous black bricks covered with so many buttons, it terrifies most users. Excellent.

8. You can watch a trailer for any movie you want to see. Brilliant.

9. It includes short films, and we hope Gone Fishing will be on Apple TV soon.

The Neutral

1. It can use WiFi or a cable LAN for the network. I found WiFi to be interminable, and ended up buying a couple of Home Plugs that use the electricity socket in the wall to transfer data (from eBuyer here). It works really well and is about three times faster than my WiFi (which was already fast by WiFi standards).

2. The amount of films and shows available is quite good, though I would have hoped for more. It’s kind of like how it was for the first few years of DVD, with huge gaps in what’s available.

3. Films are a little more expensive to rent than I would have liked. And I would never buy a film to keep on Apple TV, I would buy the BluRay.

4. It’s surprisingly noisy, the hard drive spinning makes a louder noise than the ‘near silent’ operation I would have expected.

5. It get’s VERY hot, all the time. A result of it never being switched off (see below)

6. There are big differences between the USA and UK iTunes stores – with both countries offering a mixed bag of films, sometimes available to rent, sometimes in HD. All in all a little inconsistent.

The Bad

1. There is no ON /OFF switch. Not even a software standby that actually works. You simply cannot switch this off without yanking the cable out. This is completely ridiculous in 2010 and wholly unacceptable. It draws 28 watts when active, and 14 watts when it’s in ‘standby’ (which just turns the screen off, but the hard drive continues to spin). I am quite angry about this stupid omission in the quest for ultra design aesthetics or nonsensical ‘always in sync’ arguments. Have they not heard of global warming?

2. You know on balance, the films are too expensive to rent! Apple TV should be comparable to Blockbuster – ‘Moon’ cost me £4.50 last night, and that would have been £3.99 at Blockbuster, and much cheaper if I did one of their deals they regularly run (like rent two, get one free).

3. There is a rental gap too. Many new releases are only available to buy in the iTunes store when they can be rented at Blockbuster. Sure it’s only a few weeks to wait, but it’s enough to drive me back to Blockbuster. Silly.

4. Picture quality is disappointing. The HD films are better than DVD, but not hugely. They are not as good as BluRay by some distance, though I accept I am watching on a projector and I also have a spinning propeller on my head. Lucia did not notice it., she thought it looked great

5. There is no real control over contrast, colour or saturation. Instead Apple helpfully explains that I need to make the changes on my screen. Personally, I find the encoded media to be consistently dark and contrasty. Not so much as it’s unwatchable, but enough to bug me. And there is no way I can raise those black levels, no gamma controls, in fact nothing aside from a blunt ‘RGB high’ or ‘RGB low’ setting (helpfully buried several clicks down in a menu so I cannot compare a one with the other quickly. This is a limitation of Apples minimalist approach to everything it does.

6. It’s surprisingly hard to convert your own home films to something Apple TV likes. This may be easier on a Mac but it’s not so easy on a PC. I can manage it, but it’s certainly no ‘one-click’ solution that most consumers exepct.

7. The internal drive is not expandable and a little miserly, though it’s true, Apple TV is really a media extender, so your films and music will remain on your main computer and stream on demand. I would rather have it all locally stored on Apple TV.

8. There is very limited internet connectivity, in fact nothing aside from links to a few sites like YouTube and Flickr.

9. No Bluetooth keyboard support, so a real pain every time I want to enter an email or password. (and why does the iPhone still not have Bluetooth keyboard support?! Ridiculous!)

So all in all, an excellent product, with a couple of dumb design flaws, and an as yet, limited availability of films which are sub BluRay and overpriced. A premium product, just a moment ahead of the curve...

Being able to access the US store (if you know how - I just watched season 3 of Mad Men for instance) is REALLY great, and you can’t underestimate just how convenient it is to download and ‘watch immediately’. 

I can see that very soon, someone like Amstrad or Sky will surprise us all with a cheap box that does all that Apple TV can do, and more, offering a service that is consistently cheaper, with more films, and more bells and whistles. If I were them, I would be giving those under TV boxes away free to grab this market right now.

This is definitely the future, but Apple needs to work a bit harder if it wants to have the impact and saturation of the iPod. I am not sure they are prepared to do that, but I hope they do!

What is REALLY exciting is the opportunities a device like this presents for Indie film makers – one device, all mediums (including home cinema), and one robust (and we hope honest) distribution network…  This kind of technlogy changes forever the way we will distribute our films.

Fingers are crossed!

Onwards and upwards!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author

www.livingspirit.com
[email protected]

How secure is your data? Do film makers create more data than most others…?

It’s that time of year again, when I look to the digital assets created in the last year, and consider the data archiving needed. I know from experience the utter terror and anguish caused by a data loss or a hard drive crash - I had a bad on in the late nineties, and since then I have been relatively vigilant about backup up my data regularly. But computers being what they are, I always get lulled into a false sense of security, and I find it’s been too long since my last backup. It just takes a minor system glitch to remind me though, back up your data NOW!

So this weekend is archive weekend.

And already a minor catastrophe has struck. I bought two, 2 TB USB drives for backups, and one has failed on plugging in – a manufacturing fault, but it makes me nervous when a drive fails as it reminds me that I need at least 2 copies of everything. And due to this failure, right now I have only ONE copy of one of my major projects. The replacement drive will arrive midweek, but until then, I am twitching a little!

I heard via Twitter recently of the woes of fellow Brit film maker, Allin Kempthorne, oh his cult horror parody, ‘The Vampires of Bloody Island’, how he suffered two drive failures and very, very nearly lost his entire film. Luckily he managed to reconstruct it but it was a close call.

For me, data falls into two categories.

Firstly it’s just standard computer files and data – emails, word docs, scripts, graphics etc. That stuff I try and backup every few weeks. I should really do it every day, I know! All my daily data is stored on a small USB drive that I carry around with me, and when I back it up, I do that to a USB drive on my home PC. I use a free little PC utility called SyncBack to automate the process – you can download it here. It works very well for my needs and is free.

The second category is the video media for any editing work I have done. And this stuff is big. Really big.

The Gone Fishing workshop, which I have recently done some extra work on, is now running at 1.5TB in size, and it took pretty much a day to make a copy of the whole project from one external USB drive to another.

It really is very worrying how insecure data on a drive actually is, compared to data on a tape for instance.

Below are a bunch of random thoughts on this issue (which I wrote down as I watched the drives move from 7% backed up to 8% backed up…)

1. Data on a drive is subject to a drive failure that can wipe out everything, not just a snagged tape where you loose a moment or two.

2. Data on a drive is much harder to keep track of than tapes. It just is. I know it shouldn’t be, but it is. You can’t write on a drive and toss in a draw in the same way that you can with a tape.

3. We all assume our data is secure. That is until we lose it. I can’t tell you how often I have helped a film maker and asked… ‘where is your backup…?’ only to get the blank expression.

4. Apple and FCP users are more vulnerable than they think. As there is very little threat from viruses, and because Apple users tend to think of their operating system as being superior to Windows and 100% secure, they forget that drive failure is operating system agnostic. Drive failure just does not care if it’s Apple or PC.

5. FCP users are also vulnerable IF they do not take care to track media within in a project. The very ‘open’ way that FCP works invites users to ‘loose’ their data on a long project. Avid forces you to use its own media management process and thus, it’s harder to lose media (though you still need to use your brain when digitising and make sure you know where everything is going).

6. I have a separate laptop for video editing only. I am amazed at how most film makers use their editing laptop for all manner of other stuff and then wonder why, six months into a project, they run into problems. On any big project, set up the system and DON’T upgrade the operating system or editing software until the project is complete.

7. Video media is HUGE. No matter the film project, by the end of it, I have needed nearly twice as much data storage than I first imagined. Don’t underestimate this, and don’t underestimate the time needed to copy, backup and transfer these files.

8. I have switched to an external desktop USB box that accepts E-IDE bare drives, making it cheaper to buy the drives and easy to switch.

9. I regularly replace my USB memory stick, roughly once a year, as I know these devices have a limited amount or read / write before they fail. So I replace before I ever get close to failure. Usually, the new one costs about £10 and is twice as big as the old one.

10. I also archive my email and Outlook daily – these files are, in my experience, the ones most likely to be damaged or corrupted.

11. I really worry about friends with Mac’s who really believe their computers are fail safe and secure. They just aren’t. Backup your data now (never mind how secure the OS can be, what about a spilled cup of coffee or a laptop thief?)

12. Online backups of data is a great idea, but for me, impractical as my data storage needs are so great as to make it unviable. I have tried several times and abandones each time as its SOOOOO slow.

13. I know I should build a home and office Network Storage Device system, but being an indie film maker, that would mean I am IT support, and I have enough on my plate already! So it’s swapping USB drives for now.

14. When doing post on ‘Gone Fishing’, the raw scans (when archived) ended up filling a half terabyte drive when we completed the grade at Midnight Transfer. That was a 13 minute film and it took their tech guys a whole night to transfer the media (note - format your drives with NTFS and NOT FAT32 as, if memory serves, FAT32 only supports up to 64,000 files, which is not enough if you are saving your movie as individual frames – if I am wrong on this, please correct me – I do recall this being a problem with Gone Fishing and caused us to need a second drive in order to copy all the frames).

So ask yourself, is your data secure? If not, add that 2TB USB drive to Santas list… They cost about £100 now, and 2 TB is a lot of empty space!

Onwards and upwards!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author

www.livingspirit.com
[email protected]

3D technology and using Telepresence

Over the last few days I have been working with some corporate clients on a very ambitious film. I can’t say what and who, but I can tell you of a few exciting things I have experienced. First off is 3D on a TV (we may be making a film in 3D). I saw a demo on a 3DTV at the PGA conference a month or so back and was blown away. I had heard rumours and myths of a 3D TV that needed NO glasses. Sounded like the Loch Ness Monster or Yeti to me. But then I saw one last week! WOW! Yes 3D on a TV, moving images, no glasses. OK, so it has some limitations. First off, it uses technology similar to those 3D posters and cards we have all seen over the years. So the resolution is low, and if you move, so the image shifts uncomfortably. Also, the image only goes backward and ‘behind’ the screen and does not pop out at you. It’s a show stopper for sure though. The first time you see it, there is a moment of awe. But you would NEVER watch Lord Of The Rings in 3D on it.

The other technology I used was a telepresence video conferencing suite, designed by Cisco. I had heard that these systems were amazing, and seen them in TV shows like 24, when Jack Bauer needed to speak to the president. All very cool. But I was completely blown away when I used it. These guys really thought it out and delivered a world class piece of technology.

Basically it’s a dedicated room with a circular desk. You sit on one side and on the other side are three massive plasma screens that look like the other side of the table – except that the other side of the table is somewhere across the world linked by three super fast video and sound feeds.

Three cameras film one side of the room and feed it to the ‘other room’, and vice versa. What impressed me most was just how useable it was – high resolution, massive images, no lag in time, clear sound – it really felt like the guys were just across the table form me. There is a link here from Youtube which will give you a taste of it in action. Awesome. Truly awesome. 

Onwards and upwards

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author

www.livingspirit.com
[email protected]