I love being in the Pixel Corps!
I first joined in December 2005, and have been a member ever since! Their forums for production and post-production are top quality, with a very high signal-to-noise ratio. Plus, their podcasts are the most informative I have heard for industry news, particularly This Week in Media.
But that's beside the point. My main cause of celebration is access to Toon Boom Digital Pro and training materials! I was recently looking at Toon Boom Studio as an alternative to Flash, after much dislike of Flash's interface (I've used Macromind Director, and want to remember as little of those days as possible). Just as my 30 day trial was running out, I noticed the Digital Pro software up at the Pixel Corps, and installed it immediately! They have licensed an Educational version which puts a Toon Boom watermark in the corner of the screen, but for practice and tests it will be brilliant.
Unfortunately, the course I plan to do requires Flash for it's 2D animation component. I wonder if they'll let me use Studio or Digital Pro instead...
Update: Digital Pro has a Personal Learning Edition available, so now there's no excuse not to give it a try!
Friday, 29 February 2008
Friday, 22 February 2008
... but Apple Qmaster doesn't love me
After setting everything up, I had 5 computers (MacBook Pro, Quad G5 and 3x latest gen iMacs) ready to go and all the video files in the queue. I hit submit and... only 2 computers started processing, the MBP and one of the iMacs. Initially I thought it must be copying the source media to one machine at a time, or maybe the iMac was sent a really short clip, but the Batch Monitor showed otherwise. So what had happened? Had Apple Qmaster lied to me? Did I need each machine to have Final Cut Pro?
After much hair pulling, I discovered that in this case it did - the program was shot on XDCAM, and edited in the native MPEG IMX format, whose codec is installed along with Final Cut Pro. So to take advantage of all the machines, I would have to re-render the clips into a format that FCP-less Quicktime can open, and without compromising on quality it would be Animation or Uncompressed, which would not only require a significant amount of storage but would strain the network (which had a 10/100 router).
Not everything was explained by the codec complication, though. It was strange that the Quad G5, which had been used to edit the program, would not accept the render request from Apple Qmaster. Strange, that is, until you compare the versions: the Quad G5 ran FCS which has Compressor 2 whereas the MBP and iMac had FCS2 which has Compressor 3.
In the end, I decided to keep it simple and dump Qmaster in favour of rendering all the clips on the MBP. Still, lessons learned:
- If you're going to use distributed rendering on machines without Final Cut Pro, don't use proprietary and FCP-only codecs to output to Compressor/Qmaster.
- Ensure all machines are running the same version of Qmaster.
- Unless you have a fast network, or have very compressed source footage, or have an unsecure network, avoid having Qmaster copy the source footage to each node. Instead, allow the Cluster manager to set up a shared directory which the other nodes can access.
After much hair pulling, I discovered that in this case it did - the program was shot on XDCAM, and edited in the native MPEG IMX format, whose codec is installed along with Final Cut Pro. So to take advantage of all the machines, I would have to re-render the clips into a format that FCP-less Quicktime can open, and without compromising on quality it would be Animation or Uncompressed, which would not only require a significant amount of storage but would strain the network (which had a 10/100 router).
Not everything was explained by the codec complication, though. It was strange that the Quad G5, which had been used to edit the program, would not accept the render request from Apple Qmaster. Strange, that is, until you compare the versions: the Quad G5 ran FCS which has Compressor 2 whereas the MBP and iMac had FCS2 which has Compressor 3.
In the end, I decided to keep it simple and dump Qmaster in favour of rendering all the clips on the MBP. Still, lessons learned:
- If you're going to use distributed rendering on machines without Final Cut Pro, don't use proprietary and FCP-only codecs to output to Compressor/Qmaster.
- Ensure all machines are running the same version of Qmaster.
- Unless you have a fast network, or have very compressed source footage, or have an unsecure network, avoid having Qmaster copy the source footage to each node. Instead, allow the Cluster manager to set up a shared directory which the other nodes can access.
Thursday, 14 February 2008
I'm in love with Apple Qmaster!
I started working on a DVD project last week which contains about 6.5 hours of footage onto 2 dual layer DVDs (2.5 hours and 4 hours of extras). We need to produce a glass master as soon as possible, which means I need to do some high quality 2-pass encoding - a time expensive process. While adding a bunch of files to Compressor, I noticed the little option that said 'Cluster: This computer' and a light went on inside my head.
I haven't used Qmaster for Compressor before - I don't normally encode hours of video footage at once - but as it's the weekend most of the other computers in the office will be idle and i started thinking 'how easy would it be to set up a render farm?'
The last time I did this was using an ancient version of Qmaster - possibly the first version - where I could send Shake and Maya command line instructions and it would create a shared partition over the network and all four processors (2 dual-cpu G4s) would crank out the render. However, I do remember the pain of setting this up, which in the end required me to give them both static IP addresses and have the shared storage on the same volume as the cluster controller.
Despite this painful experience, I was also well aware of our looming deadline and I became curious to discover whatever I could do to speed up our encoding. In the Apple Qmaster's help menu is a link to a PDF file called "Distributed Processing Setup", which put all my fears at ease once I reached page 50:
Turning it on was simple: System Preferences -> Apple Qmaster -> "QuickCluster with services" -> Start Sharing
So that's the cluster controller set up. But the client machines! They might not have FCP installed! Thankfully Apple has provided an installer on the FCS2 Install disk that sets up a computer as a Qmaster node - perfect! The caveats are that it won't encode AC3 without a unique DVDSP license and you can't take advantage of distributed rendering directly from FCP or DVDSP without each node having it's own unique license. But we're using Compressor...
So I fired up the installer on my trusty PowerBook G4 and restarted. The installer asks if you want the node to be active right away - brilliant, don't have to wait to restart and then set it all up! I clicked 'No' so I could do it myself so I knew how to set it up manually: and it took 2 clicks.
That's right: 2 clicks. "Services only" and "Start sharing". The Cluster Controller found it right away, and a the only extra step required in Compressor is to change the Cluster from "This Computer" to the Cluster's name. I tested with a short clip, and it produced a flawless MPEG2 file, complete with parsing information. Another caveat: it automatically attempts to copy all the assets onto a shared volume created in the system disk, I just had to redirect this in the Advanced panel of the Apple Qmaster preference pane to the RAID drive and it was screaming away.
So the Powerbook test was fine, let's see how it holds up with more than 2 machines...
I haven't used Qmaster for Compressor before - I don't normally encode hours of video footage at once - but as it's the weekend most of the other computers in the office will be idle and i started thinking 'how easy would it be to set up a render farm?'
The last time I did this was using an ancient version of Qmaster - possibly the first version - where I could send Shake and Maya command line instructions and it would create a shared partition over the network and all four processors (2 dual-cpu G4s) would crank out the render. However, I do remember the pain of setting this up, which in the end required me to give them both static IP addresses and have the shared storage on the same volume as the cluster controller.
Despite this painful experience, I was also well aware of our looming deadline and I became curious to discover whatever I could do to speed up our encoding. In the Apple Qmaster's help menu is a link to a PDF file called "Distributed Processing Setup", which put all my fears at ease once I reached page 50:
QuickClusters offer a simple and automated way to create and configure clusters, and an alternative to creating and configuring clusters manually with Apple Qadministrator. QuickClusters with enabled unmanaged support will auto-configure themselves and use any available unmanaged services on the same local network (subnet). QuickClusters listen for unmanaged service advertisements and may mark orremember any of them for later use.
Turning it on was simple: System Preferences -> Apple Qmaster -> "QuickCluster with services" -> Start Sharing
So that's the cluster controller set up. But the client machines! They might not have FCP installed! Thankfully Apple has provided an installer on the FCS2 Install disk that sets up a computer as a Qmaster node - perfect! The caveats are that it won't encode AC3 without a unique DVDSP license and you can't take advantage of distributed rendering directly from FCP or DVDSP without each node having it's own unique license. But we're using Compressor...
So I fired up the installer on my trusty PowerBook G4 and restarted. The installer asks if you want the node to be active right away - brilliant, don't have to wait to restart and then set it all up! I clicked 'No' so I could do it myself so I knew how to set it up manually: and it took 2 clicks.
That's right: 2 clicks. "Services only" and "Start sharing". The Cluster Controller found it right away, and a the only extra step required in Compressor is to change the Cluster from "This Computer" to the Cluster's name. I tested with a short clip, and it produced a flawless MPEG2 file, complete with parsing information. Another caveat: it automatically attempts to copy all the assets onto a shared volume created in the system disk, I just had to redirect this in the Advanced panel of the Apple Qmaster preference pane to the RAID drive and it was screaming away.
So the Powerbook test was fine, let's see how it holds up with more than 2 machines...
Sunday, 10 February 2008
Experience
This is just a short list of software programs I am familiar with:
Final Cut Pro: I have worked with all versions since FCP 1 in 2000 right up to FCP 6, have worked in many formats including DV, Uncompressed 10-bit SD, ProRes, DVCPROHD and Uncompressed HD, with various content including long form events and concerts, short films, animations, music videos, advertising and web-based content.
DVD Studio Pro: I have used DVDSP versions 1, 2 and 4 and have experience preparing material for dual layer discs, creating a cutting master and designing, building and animating menus.
Adobe Photoshop: 5 to CS3 Mac/PC
Adobe AfterEffects: 5.5 Pro to CS3 Mac/PC
Autodesk Maya: 4.5 on SGI to 7 on Mac/PC
Apple Shake: 2.5 on SGI to 4.1 on Mac
AVID Xpress Pro: 5 on PC
MAMP (Mac Apache, MySQL, PHP): 1 on Mac
Apple MacOS X Server: 10.4 "Tiger"
Friday, 8 February 2008
Beginnings
Digital Media is a modern wonder of technology, and two simple words encompass so much: information technology, forms of communication, artistic creativity, multipurposing content...
I'm a digital media artist. I'm still trying to work out what that means, but it's the best description of what I do.
I've decided to call this blog the Ardent Pixel, because I really like the meanings of ardent:
Ardent (adj): 1 Feeling passion 2 Showing great enthusiasm 3 Shining or glowing with a fiery quality
As I come across challenges and solutions I hope to be able to post them up here, both as a personal reference and as a resource for the wider digital media community.
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