The Daily Grind

Blogger and SF author John Scalzi reports on the new $27m Creation Museum near Cincinnati airport. Be warned that this is long, pulls no punches, and is … er … mind-blowing. Captioned photostream starts here.; for a taste, an example sign reads:

“Is there any other evidence of ‘Dinosaurs’ living after the Flood?
Dragons may have been dinosaurs. Dragon legends exist all over the world, depicting creatures that lived with humans. The country of Wales has a dragon on its flag as its national emblem. Many of the dragon descriptions, carvings, and paintings fit with our understanding of dinosaurs.”

Want to go? Plan your visit at the museum website. Note that you’re not allowed to take firearms inside.

Just… amazing. Quite amazing.

Multicamera shoots. Oh hell, multicamera shoots.

SciCast has a modest little collection of cameras, bought on the cheap from production chums in Scotland upgrading to better gear. So despite being old, our cameras are a distinct step up from even the latest domestic kit.

Trouble is, they’re also something of a hodge-podge. While three of them are identical Sony PD100s, each has different capabilities depending on which buttons have failed, are flaky, or have plain fallen off. They all, however, shoot DVCAM, a curious pseudo-pro Sony-only format that puts more-or-less standard DV format onto standard DV tapes… 30% faster than normal. Thus, one-hour tapes last 40 minutes.

This makes multicamera work interesting, because my master audio camera (a PD150) will shoot for an hour, and I usually clamp my old domestic camera somewhere for a funky wide-angle shot. That’s an hour runtime too.

Setting up four cameras on my own is a pretty full-on job, but actually shooting isn’t too bad. A couple of cameras will, of necessity, be lock-offs, and I’ll usually accost someone to run a PD100 as a loose mid-shot camera. They never resist the temptation to zoom in on detail, however much I admonish them to let me cover that, but I’ve mostly managed to pick people with enough visual sense to get the job done.

The problems come in post-production, when I have to resync the multiple cameras into a stacked multicam sequence in Final Cut. Get it right, and vision mixing is trivially simple. The challenge, of course, is finding adequate sync points.

In principle, all you need to do is get all the cameras running, line them all up on somebody’s hands, and — in a quiet room — have them clap those hands together, flat. That gives a nice sharp visual and audio signal. Do that after every tape change and resync becomes trivial.
The trouble is, nobody understands what the hell you’re tryng to do. Hence, they do it wrong: there’s too much background noise, or the clap is out of frame, or it’s too soft to hear, or there are multiple claps. And you can never get people to do another clap after you change tapes — they’ve already clapped for you, what are you playing at?

The solution is, I think, trivial: I need to buy a clapperboard.

Everyone understands clapperboards. They’re those things they use in the movies, they’re dead professional, and ooh look, we must be serious, we have a clapperboard. Never mind what it’s for, feel the production values.

The irony is that in a dozen or more years of broadcast TV, I’ve used a clapperboard on precisely one project (a multicamera location drama with independent audio and flaky timecode sync). On that occasion we had to repatriate Scottish TV’s only remaining clapperboard from the managing director’s mantlepiece — it hadn’t been used for that long.
But away from a world of kit that genuinely works, and without enough people to operate it properly anyway, importing a little bit of professional mystique could be just the ticket.

If only clapperboards weren’t so damned expensive…

I don’t have many, to be honest. Which isn’t to say it’s all sweetness and light — neither of my systems updated entirely smoothly, thanks mostly to errant video codecs (I’m looking at you, DivX), old Wacom drivers, or some other voodoo. But in general the fit and finish of Leopard is terrific. While you hear plenty of gripes around the web, my impression is that it’s an extremely solid point-oh release.

That said, here are my niggles:

• Spaces is mostly terrific, but frequent switching between Spaces induces motion sickness in me. I wouldn’t mind a choice of transition in there — personally I’d pick a dissolve/slide over a slide, to maintain a hint of spatial relation without actually making me ill.
• My Spaces issue is exacerbated by what appears to be a bug; some application window updates will pull that application’s Space foreground. That can just stuff right off — release notes for the latest OmniOutliner suggest that it’s Apple’s bug, and it’ll hopefully go in 10.5.1.
• Say I have Finder windows in Space 1 and different Finder windows in Space 2. I’m working in Final Cut in Space 2, and I tab out of it to the Finder. Where do I most likely want to go? The Finder windows in Space 2, obviously. So… why does Spaces throw me back to Space 1? The practical upshot of this is that one has to assign Finder to all spaces, so its windows travel with it — which limits the utility of Spaces, for me.
• Speaking of Finder windows: this new-fangled idea that new windows open in whatever view style the most recent previous window you opened was set to… that’s awful. If I set a Folder to Icon view, I want it to open to Icon view next time, and I don’t want to have to set that via a fiddly view preference thing. Reports suggest this behaviour was filed as a Bug with Apple, only to be closed as ‘expected behaviour.’ Not here it isn’t, mush. Put it back how it was. Now! QuickLook may rock way more than anyone expected, but having to operate the Finder with one hand hovering over command+1/2/3/4 is just shitty.
• You know, I actually don’t mind the new Dock that much, despite the widespread grousing. Same goes for the translucent menu bar, though that’s partly because I have a grey texture desktop picture, so I don’t really notice the change.
• Dock Stacks using composite icons needs to be a per-Stack preference. It’s plain silly for Applications and Documents folders. The trick here, incidentally, is to put an alias to the folder inside itself, and rename it ‘!Icon’ so it sorts first alphabetically. Then the Stack icon looks like the folder. Stupid work-around, though.
• More on Stacks: command+clicking the Stack should open it in Finder, not reveal it in its enclosing folder. This was the old behaviour for folders in the Dock, and it saves a fiddly click if you really do want to open your Applications folder (which most of the time is what you want to do. My Applications Stack goes as far as Skype, thus missing Soundtrack, TextMate, Transmit and VLC. Each of which I use daily.)
• Spotlight can search file names! Oh, happy day!
• Sorry, this is a gripes list. I forgot.
• …

Finally, I can forgive everything for the option to use an iPhoto album as a screensaver in ‘Matrix’ mode. That. Utterly. Rocks. Do make sure it’s running slowly, though, or you really will make yourself ill.

Conclusion: Leopard continues its wobbly march towards desktop nirvana. While I value Apple’s doubtless-painful decisions leading to the omission of preferences for most things, sometimes it’s possible to simplify too far. Overall there’s progress, and I’m not going back to Tiger… but damn, the Spaces and Finder view things hack me off.

…and then we see things like Google’s video showing off their Android mobile phone platform, and we realise that there is a future for factual video specialists.

Sorry Sergey, but just because the platform’s called ‘Android,’ you don’t have to sound like one.

Also: what’s with the whacko camera moves, weird demo actions, invisible zoom affordance, lagging scrolling, … and don’t get me started on ‘Welcome back.’ Gaaaah!

I need to write more. I like writing, but I’ve not done much since Scope and can feel myself getting more workmanlike. The key is probably this blog — I need to get back into the habit of posting. The trouble is, I just don’t like it very much right now.

I need to spend some quality time with Movable Type 4, getting this site design (and crucially the typography) to the stage where it’s sufficiently pretty that I want to write text to show it off. Things like the old swash-italic drop caps used to spur me to pick opening words I knew looked sensational — notably not ‘I,’ which looked rubbish. And I need to re-impose Markdown formatting, because practically everything I type these days is Markdown.

I also need to fix the comment system. It’s working right now, but people seem scared off by the new default ‘isn’t actually a user registration scheme, but sure looks like one’ behaviour. Plus, published comments look like crap.

Finally, I’m taking more pictures with my N95 (it’s a rubbish phone, so I might as well use it as a camera), but uploading pictures is still more hassle than I’d like. I need to sort that — and ideally get to the stage where I can moblog properly.

Oh, and it pisses me off that my Facebook status lines are trapped within Facebook, so I might start doing Twitter -> (Facebook & blog).

Time to sweep everything away and start over, I think.

Ecto 2 has some problems with Leopard (about the only app I have that does, it seems), so I’ve installed this beta of the next version to try it out. Interesting choice between Ecto and MarsEdit.

For the longest time, I desperately wanted to see a total solar eclipse. Eventually I did, albeit for a scant seven seconds — and in those seconds I came to realise that sometime, one day, I will chase after another eclipse in hope of a better view.

I’d like to see Cherenkov Radiation. Just because it exists.

And — perversely? — I’d like to see a nuclear bomb explosion.

A bit tricky, that last one. Perhaps I’ll have to settle for these astonishing pictures.

Matt Gemmell says:

“Leopard isn’t about the Mac desktop; it’s about the Mac platform.”

…which sounds about right. For evidence, consider Core Animation, which allows developers to build fluid interfaces and data views. Which sounds dull, right?

Well, yes. But then you see things like this, and realise that maybe — just maybe — the world might be a little more pleasing in a few months’ time.