I’ve been traveling around the country for the last two months, talking about the impact of tapeless and high-definition video on video editors.

Generally, I begin each session by talking about how “the world is moving to high-definition video” — except, after thinking and talking about this for a while, I no longer believe this is the best way to describe the environment that we are in. A better phrase is that video has become completely divergent. There is now a complete disconnect between how we capture our images (shooting) with how we distribute our images (viewing).

Here are three examples that illustrate our conundrum:

• High-definition video (HD) is all the rage in North America, but Europe seems quite happy with 16:9 standard-definition PAL.
• US networks can’t agree on one high-end distribution format for video, instead we have three: 720p (ABC, Fox, ESPN), 1080i (CBS, NBC, PBS), and the Digital Cinema standard.
• We shoot on HD yet distribute on mobile devices, such as cell phones or iPods.

Yes, the camera manufacturers would like us all to buy new cameras – and the easiest way to get us to do that is to convince us that everything needs the vastly improved clarity of a high-defintion image.

But that misses the bigger point.

What is unique about the times we are in today, I think, is that the format that we use to shoot our images has almost nothing to do with the way we distribute them. There is now a total disconnect between acquisition and distribution.

Some of the most popular ways of distributing a video — YouTube, Google Video, cell phones, iPods — have images which are FAR smaller than even standard definition video.

Adding to the confusion, when we create our video, we now need to convert it into a myriad of different formats, sizes, and resolution for distribution.

Here’s what I think this means for the future:

• How the video is compressed, it’s “codec,” and its scanning (progressive vs interlaced), is more important than image size
• The ease of converting your video from one format to another is more important than image size
• Planning how you intend to distribute your video needs to be done before you shoot
• The image size you shoot is increasingly less important as your final output size decreases

The world is a different place today than ten years ago when our choices were essentially limited to broadcast, cable, and DVD. Today, we need to work backwards: pick our distribution format, then pick the format you want to edit, then pick the format you want to shoot.

And there seems to be a complete disconnect between each of those three stages.

Let me know what you think.

Over on KenStone.net, Andrew Balis has written an interesting article on how Final Cut Pro handles displaying image quality.

You can read it here.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions recently asking why images look different in the Canvas when compared to the Viewer, or why a DV movie doesn’t look particularly great in Quicktime.

Andrew’s article helps answer those questions.

Recently, I wrote about a potential problem with losing data on hard drives which are powered off and sitting on a shelf. (You can read the entire article here.)

The basic problem is that when a hard disk is powered off and stored, the magnetic data on the drive has the potential to “evaporate,” meaning that you can lose all your data. (I’ve been told the term for this data loss is “bit flux.”) This data can start to disappear as early as a year after the hard disk is powered off.

After talking with a lot of hard disk folks, I learned that the easiest solution is to refresh the data on the hard disk before it starts to “fade.” All hard drives are programmed to refresh data as the heads skim along the drive. The key is to get the hard drive to read the entire disk, which would automatically refresh the data.

What I didn’t know was how … until today.

Thanks to Robert Gobeille, I now have a solution and an explanation. I’ll be adding this to my newsletter shortly, but wanted to give you the workaround here first. Feel free to share this with your friends.

When Bob first sent me the procedure, I asked him to please double-check that this is safe, find out how long a scan takes, and tell me how to escape out of it. From those questions, Robert put together the Q&A.

- – - THE PROCEDURE – - -

• Log into your computer as an administrator.
• Open Applications > Utilities > Terminal
• At the terminal prompt, type: sudo cat /dev/rdisk0> /dev/null

UPDATE: The above text was changed on Oct. 14 to speed up the disk reads. The older version worked, but the new version (adding the word “rdisk”) reads about 5 times faster.

- – - BOB’S EXPLANATION – - -

This will do no harm. The following may cause your eyes to glaze, but I’ll attempt to explain all this and keep it simple. Here is the command again:

sudo cat /dev/rdisk0 > /dev/null

“sudo” is a command that says “run the following command with root (administrator) privileges. You need this privilege level to read the disk as if it is one big file (as opposed to reading each individual files).

“cat” is a command that says copy the following file

“/dev/rdisk0” is the name of your primary disk. It is a file name just like a .mov but it happens to represent the entire disk. Since this follows “cat”, this is the file you are copying. (Note the use of the letter “r’ in front of the word “disk”.)

” > /dev/null” says to copy the file (/dev/disk0) to the file named /dev/null
/dev/null is a special type of device. Anything you write to it will be thrown away. It’s like copying things to a black hole.

So the above command means to read the entire disk and copy it to nowhere. I know this sounds strange, and yes I could write a program that reads the entire disk without “copying to nowhere”, but the above is pretty simple.

Start Activity Monitor.app (in your Applications/Utilities directory) and select “Disk Activity”. Then run the above command. You will see lots of data read but none written.

Q: How long will this take?
A: I’m running it on my MacBook Pro as I write this. I see data read at 12 MB/s and the disk capacity is 232GB. So this should take around 5 hours. Nobody will probably run this on a MacBook. A Mac Pro should be considerably faster.

Q: How do I measure how long this takes?
A: Change the command to:
sudo time cat /dev/rdisk0 > /dev/null
and it print out how long it took, when it is done. The output will look funky. For example,
“12345.67 real 2.34 user 345.89 sys”
The 12345.67 is the seconds it took to run the command.

Q: How do I terminate this command once it starts?
A: In the same terminal window where you executed this command, press Control+C. That is, hold down the Control key and press the letter C.

Q: The command above says that it is reading the file /dev/disk0, but I have several disks. How do I know the correct name of the disk that I want to scan?
A: Excellent question! This is a critical point that I forgot to address above. Go into Disk Utility (in your Applications/Utilities directory). You will see all your mounted disks in the left column. This list is indented. It will say something like “232.9 GB Hitachi” and underneath that will be your volume name indented, like “Macintosh HD”.
- Click on the top line (the “232.9 GB Hitachi” line in my example)
- Click on the Info button
- Read the “Disk Identifier” line. It will say something like “disk0″. Where Disk Utility is saying “disk0″ or “disk1″ or “disk2″, … put an “r” in front. This is the name you use in the command (/dev/rdisk0 in this case).

Q: Will this hurt anything? What if I say /dev/rdisk0, like your first example, but I should have put in /dev/rdisk3 (which I learned from the last question?
A: If you specify the wrong disk, you will simply read the wrong disk. There is no harm in reading a disk. Obviously, you need to read the correct disk to refresh the disk but you will do no harm.

- – -

Thanks, Bob. This explains what I needed to know.

The Digital Production BuZZ is one of the oldest, if not THE oldest, podcasts still going. Next week, Oct. 16, we celebrate our 200th show!

This is pretty darn amazing!

The show started in December of 2005 as the DV Guys, then morphed into The BuZZ produced and hosted by Philip Hodgetts. I took over the show in November, 2007, and have been hosting it since then.

As I looked over the past several years, I was amazed at how many guests we’ve had on (over 500), how many subjects we’ve discussed (thousands), and how many new technologies we’ve covered (about eight hundred billion — give or take).

Yet, at the heart of it all, our goal is to make technology accessible. We remain focused on covering digital video production, post-production, and distribution around the world.

Next week, we celebrate with a show that originates in both Boston and Los Angeles. In fact, I’ll be joining Dan Berube live at the Boston Final Cut Pro User Group, while the rest of the gang will be back here in Los Angeles. You can learn more by visiting here: www.digitalproductionbuzz.com.

If you have a minute, call (661) 347-1349 and leave us a voice mail message wishing us a happy birthday – our goal is to play as many of these as we can next week on the show.

Otherwise, join us for the live show – after four years, its time to party.

One of the nice things about getting back in the office after being on the road for a while is catching up on all the reading I didn’t have time to do while traveling.

For instance, there is a fascinating interview in a recent posting of Studio Daily with Peter Symes, director of engineering and standards for SMPTE. (That’s the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.) These are the engineering folks who help determine the technical specifications of new video formats and technology.

In this article, Peter talks about the challenges of working with the current version of timecode (you remember: HH:MM:SS:FF?) as we move to higher frame rates, file-based media, extreme slo-motion, and try to figure out how to get rid of drop frame timecode.

It is a fascinating article – if you like thinking about engineering issues – and you can read it here.

I like Editshare. As a company they make some intriguing products. And, for Final Cut editors looking to share media and projects, its worth a close look.

However, in a recent email blast from StudioBytes, they included a quote from Editshare’s president, Andy Liebman, that speaks to the heart of why video editors need to be VERY careful reading marketing materials. His quote was:

“The fundamental fact is whether you have Fibre Channel or Ethernet, data travels from point A to point B at the speed of light.”

Well, yeah. ALL electrons travel down a wire at the speed of light — or close enough that we don’t need to worry about it. Its what happens to the electrons BEFORE they leave to travel down the wire and AFTER they arrive at their destination that makes all the difference.

Otherwise, we’d all be happily editing uncompressed high-definition video via USB.

Sheesh.

Jody Eldred sent me the following links a few days ago, with these comments:

Look what a guy just shot with the Canon EOS 5D digital SLR still camera. It shoots full-res, 1920×1080 1080P/30 high definition video. 21 megapixels. 12 minutes of record time on a 4GB card. Records RAW images. Its amazing what F1.2 lenses can do. $2,700 retail.

Depending upon your perspective, this camera is either terrifying, exhilarating, or just plain “out there.” But, take a look and decide for yourself. The images are stunning!

http://www.usa.canon.com/dlc/controller?act=GetArticleAct&articleID=2086

There’s a behind-the-scenes piece you can view here:

http://vincentlaforet.smugmug.com/gallery/6021407_xEg87/1/#378608891_Jd2CT-XL-LB

Let me know what you think.