Month: February 2006

iFrustration: iMovie, QuickTime, GarageBand rant

I love Apple, and I’m a big fan of their software packages. But sometimes there are tasks where Apple doesn’t get it right. Today I explain what caused the bald spots on the side of my head — me pulling out my hair trying to use iMovie, Garage Band, and QuickTime to do something so totally simple.

I hope this rant spawns comments that point the finger at me and something I’ve overlooked or don’t understand, because right now I’m pulling my hair out over famous Apple software. I’d like to be wrong.

Please, keep in mind that I’m not fussing over Apple or their operating system, but over how their tools thwart me at each step in a particularly trivial task: video editing for making raw podcast footage. There are things Apple does that are very right, and there are very few things they do wrong. Here are some big wrongs in my eyes.

Beef #1: Final Cut Blows Up – Normally, I do my video editing in Final Cut Pro. However, it seems that Final Cut Pro blows up and locks up the operating system. Honest. Try this, take a healthy sample of an .m4v file, import it into Final Cut Pro, bring it up in a preview window, and then move the playhead back and forth with the mouse. On my system, Final Cut Pro closes abruptly with no warning message, the mouse goes into the spinning beachball of death, and the GUI locks forever.

    Need a file to try this out on? Try a good sized complicated one one, something you know already works in iTunes, like Channel Federator’s Episode #1.What I think is happening is that the .m4v is actually a container format, and that when Final Cut Pro hit an internal format that it doesn’t know, it blows up. At this point, I think the GUI subsystem loses some important messages about the keyboard, mouse, and which application is in control — nothing works from the console. One has to ssh in from another system, to which the Mac will let you login as if there’s no problem remotely, and issue a reboot command, as no process is consuming memory or chewing up the CPU.
    To be fair, Final Cut Pro works just fine for other formats. What just gets me is that if you pull the same .m4v file into iMovie, the cheaper video editing tool, oh that works — it does a conversion and you’re just fine. So, explain to me why my thousand dollar editor can’t do what the $69 one can… from the same vendor.

So let’s say I want to choose a sound track and export it, so I can add it as an audio track in a video editor.

Beef #2: GarageBand’s One Project At A Time Rule Bites – I’m less than pleased that GarageBand only lets me have one project open at a time; that’s very inconveinent for moving pieces between my audio projects. GarageBand wants to shutdown one instance before working on another.

    Even TextEdit, the simple text editor, recognizes the need for being able to work on multiple things at the same time and cut’n’paste between them. Why don’t other applications do the same? Must we re-learn how users work each time?

Beef #3: GarageBand’s Export Sucks – Oh you should have seen how animated I got at my inanimate computer over this. You’d think that a loop editor, a tool specifically designed for making custom songs and audio tracks, would let you save?!? Hell no. Sure, you can save a project file, but you can’t save your audio output you just created. I want save/export whatever you call it my finalized audio mixdown into a .WAV or .MP3 file somewhere on my disk of a filename of my choosing. I’d love for .AU, .AIFF, and .ACC, too… you know the stuff that QuickTime does already?!??

    See, Apple has made the assumption about the purpose of this tool, that it’s either going to be used for making a song to put in iTunes or that I am going to export it as a Podcast. The fact that one might use it for intermediate stages of audio mixing totally seems to have escaped them.As such the only option is to share. And that means GarageBand burries my song in my iTunes collection or it saves it as an .m4a file, an audio container file. And we know how I feel about container files by now. I don’t want to share – I want to export.
    So fine. I export to iTunes, which now annoyingly plays my “song,” and because iTunes just opened, it wants to update my subscribed podcasts. Great, just great — why can’t I even “share” without open iTunes?Eventually, I locate the new .AIF file, but now here’s a new catch — can I just move it without destroying iTune’s preconceptions of the musical universe? Will there be some burried XML file that will freak out if this file is gone? Scared, I make a copy to the desktop and then use iTunes to permanently delete its version.

So, song file in hand, now I drag it into iMovie with the intention of fitting it to the video.

Beef #4: iMovie Won’t Trim The Audio Length – Okay, admittedly, this makes no sense to me. I should be able to drop in a 23 second audio clip and drag it’s length down to 11 seconds, truncating it. And sure, the help says I can do this. It even shows how: put the cursor on the end and drag. Duh.

    Problem is, it’s not working. I get no arrow cursor. I can’t change the size. And, what’s really nibbling my cheese is that it’s not telling me why. I’m sure there’s some stupid setting that is “protecting” me from myself, as if this were a real song I wouldn’t want to crop. I can’t find it, not in the online help, and not in the instructions that were in the box. Why not the latter? Cause there are no instructions in the box. iWork has instructions, why not iLife. I don’t want to have to “discover” features as I go or to guess what keyword was used in the help system to find my topic. Argh!!!SOLUTION: View / Show Clip Volume Levels is on… you can’t resize when you need to see the volume.So, I guess the real beef is that either help needs to be updated, or it needs to be more apparent why I can’t do something. Glad this one was fixable and is me. But let’s pretend I didn’t get that far, as I certainly didn’t last night…

Beef #5: the AIF is Evil – Fine, if iMovie won’t let me trim the length, then I’ll use Audacity, perhaps the best audio editor out there. It’s not Apple, but I know it works, and have used it on many occasions for many projects. So, I open Audacity, create a new project, and Import the .AIF file — which instantly causes Audacity to crash.

    Admittedly, I was using the 1.3.0b beta. How about the 1.2.4b stable release? Yes, that opens the file, but it screams by in an uneven pulse that sounds like it’s shredding the speakers.So, I open the same .AIF file in QuickTime Pro. It plays fine. Finally, I can export to .WAV format and use Audacity to do some creative editing. Still not ideal. And why so many steps and file conversions?And before you ask, why not do my trimming in QuickTime? Because QuickTime doesn’t offer me the granular precision I need nor the visual cues in the form of a visual wave. I can’t clip to the smaller size and force the last 1.3 seconds to fade out. QuickTime Pro is pair of scissors and scotch tape, it is not an editor.

Fine, so now I finally got my background music, let’s create a solid background for a title screen.

Beef #6: iMovie has a Terrible Color Matt Interface – In Final Cut Pro, you want a solid color, you create a color matt, tell the color, and then drag duration to how long you need it for. In iMovie you can’t create a color matt.

    Ok, actually you can. To get a Color Matt, you have to drop something else on the timeline, move it creating a hole, switch to the arrange clips view, that hole becomes a color matt, change the color, and enter a new duration. Only there’s a bug, sometimes the duration looks like a static label and not a text box, even though it’s still editable.
    IMovie Buggy Interface
    Even so, you can’t control resolution at the 10th of a second level, where sometimes you need it.Again, I feel that Apple’s approach is to assume someone is dropping clips on the timeline, and not doing movie construction. For that, they expect you to use Final Cut Pro, which, oh yah, crashes.

Beef #7: iMovie Hides Show Photo Settings – When making a slide show, there’s a neat effect called the Ken Burns Effect, which slowly zooms out or in to a point of interest during a cross fade. It’s wonderfully pleasing under normal circumstances, and I still haven’t figured out how to get Final Cut Pro, that thousand dollar package, to do it as well as iMovie. Problem is, when making my titles, I don’t want that. And, I can’t turn it off.

    Again, actually you can. Select the image and click Show Photo Settings, then uncheck Ken Burns Effect.However, here’s what happens – it’s a usability issue. You drag a photo in, and suddenly it gets converted into a “mini-movie” doing the Ken Burns effect, that’s not what you want, so you delete the “photo-movie” and comb though the menu items. Only problem is, the menus hold no clue, and the button you need is greyed out because you don’t have a photo selected. Thus, until you load what you don’t want, you can’t fix it.Worse yet, the “workaround” to that frame of mind is that you select the Kens Burn Effect clip and choose Edit / Create Still Frame. You think you found the “right” solution, but you get frustrated, especially with a lot of photos.

Beef #8: iMovie and “Sharing” – Again, like GarageBand, I don’t want to share, I want to export, and the export movie takes me to the Share dialog. The software asks me where I intend on putting things, rather than asking me what format I want to save my movie in. I hate this.

    The solution is simple, Apple, let me have total control over my settings, but have a drop down of recommendations to start from. Oh, say, like you do with QuickTime Pro…
    SOLUTION: And, yes, apparently you can — they’re under Expert Settings. Not obvious at first.

Beef #9: GarageBand Won’t Handle Multiple Videos – Sure, I can put multiple photos up and customize a soundtrack exactly for it, but I can’t do that with multiple little video clips. What do I want? The ability to export them as a movie unto itself, or I’d be happy with even just the audio portion knowing it will perfectly fit in some other tool.

Bottom Line
I had the most miserable night fighting stupid user interface issues with the software. And, mind you, this is software that I’ve used time and time again for the last two years or more. Only now did all of the annoyances converge until I had enough. And let me say that when I use the tools as Apple envisioned for the purposes they envisions, things go without a hitch. They’re wonderful. But step outside that vision by a narrow margin, and the world feels like it’s collapsing.
My whole goal, from start to finish was simply to lay down a color matt, add some titles in time to some music that I made, and append a few stills, and then a video. This should have taken minutes, but it totally drove me nuts. Did I eventually get there? Yes, but it made me feel like I was jumping through hoops and fighting the Mac every step of the way, which is the total opposite of every other Mac related experience I’ve had to date.

The truth of the matter is most of these things are usability issues, amplified by lack of sleep, but that doesn’t make them any less real to the end user, no matter how right or wrong they are.

Bonfire V: Global Warming

Tired of winter, we decided to do something about it. Bonfire!

Tired of Old Man Winter putting a damper on the warm weather, we decided to do something about it: have a bonfire.

This time the theme was Global Warming, and our intent was to create a huge ball of heat so that we could stand in the middle of it and enjoy running around without coats in the middle of winter. We had the recipe from the science books: we needed methane gas, ozone depleting substances, and large amounts of heated carbon dioxide.

So, we had large helpings of chilli, we used hairspray in the potato guns, and lit a pile of wood on fire. Just to be sure, we strangled the ground hog that saw his shadow with our bare hands.

Here are some pictures of the bonfire.

Things didn’t quite go as planned. There was a lot of wind, and that caused the fire to burn unevenly. We used this as the perfect excuse to play with the fire with some amazing results.

Afterward, we went inside and played Werewolf, a social game that involves pointlessly slaughtering your friends and then deceiving them to their faces.

Las Vegas: Pictures

Trying out some new software that produces photo albums; published a number of pictures of things from Las Vegas CES convention.

Trying out a new photo album generator called JAlbum with my recent Las Vegas photos. It’s very close to delivering the kind of photo album I’d like. And, yes, there are booth babes, in addition to animals, the CES event itself, technology shown there, StarTrek, Las Vegas, Tamara, and myself.

Target Practice

More target practice, and got to play with a laser sight this time.

Went out with Mike H. tonight to go target shooting. Tamara normally joins us, but she decided to stay behind and prepare the house for guests and the forthcoming bonfire party.

Used a Glock with a laser sight, though I think the laser wasn’t calibrated. Using the gun’s sights alone let me hit where I was intending.

Bungalow Billards: Argh

Two years after my walkout on Bungalow Billards, I finally revisited the place. Nothing changed. Nothing learned. So, I’m walking out for another two years.

It’s been nearly two years since I’ve set foor in Bungalow Billards after the incident with the evil grey haired catus lady.  And, to my surprise, she was still working there, so we avoided her — she was still doing her rude table pushing.  I almost wonder if she wasn’t a reject from the Vienna Inn, where the service is deliberately rude, the place is horrifically smokey, but the tab is on the honor system.

Our waitress could have just as easily been called an abandonress.  We ordered drinks, and a game of pool later, they arrived.  We ordered food, and a game of pool later, they arrived.  We needed refills from the heavy smoke, and they never came until we got the check, several games later.

Even with the credit card sitting right there, she passed us by three times in fifteen minutes, never picking it up, even though it was in plain sight.

Not happy with the service, not happy with the staff, I plan on making it another two years before stepping foot in the door.   …keep in mind, we used to frequent this place 3-4 times a week, leaving very, very, very generous tips.  No more since their penny-wise pound-foolish management practices.

Body Painting

My wife happened to send me to a link on body painting while I was at work…

An unusal event happened, I was at work when my wife called. She had found an interesting site: The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Collection. But what had struck her, and why she called, was the body painting. They had painted swimsuits on the models and did a photo shoot.

Turns out Google has a lot of similar pictures of body paintings.

The first one I ever saw was an HP Printer add with a young lady in a swim suit, and you were supposed to tell which was the photograph and which was printed. Turns out, if you looked closer, you realized something was up. We contact HP and had their advertisement department send us some posters. They’re around here somewhere.

I’d wondered how they did these, figuring it had to be an airbrush system much like my wife uses for canvases. The problem is, how do you get a template to work on a 3D figure, such as a human body. Turns out, according to these visual instructions, it’s not that hard at all.

Linux: Migrating Slackware to Fedora Core 4

Finally made the switch from Slackware to Fedora Core 4. So now I’m discussing my irrational fears, my thought process for why I held back, and the real scoop of what happened when I transitioned….

This last weekend I migrated from Slackware to Fedora Core 4.

Let me start off by saying I grew up on Slackware when it was a brick of 20 floppy diskettes. I liked the complete and utter power of being able to hand compile anything specifically for my processor. I like that it didn’t bring with it a lot of bloat. I liked having my custom installed applications, data, and logs in /usr/local; this way if I upgraded, all my personal software stuck around. I had hand rolled Apache, PHP, and MySQL, setting our server exactly as I wanted it. I used sendmail, and bind, and a number of other packages. We had nearly every modern programming language out there. Silently, I’d look down my nose at anyone would relied on a package manager when the commands to build anything were usually: ./configure ; make ; make install

But all this fine-level granularity came at a price… it was a bear to maintain. Keeping up with all the service releases, security patches, and new updates was complicated, tiring, and difficult. Often a package would get upgraded that had horrible domino effects down the line, usually ending with some other package that wasn’t ready. It was this kind of insanity that lead to the ongoing myth that PHP5 won’t work with Apache2 (it does… we’re doing it… it required nothing special). Things fell behind, we couldn’t keep up.

See, I wanted use my system, not become a slave to maintaining it.

What held me off from switching distributions? Comfort level with what I knew, fear that going over to something Red Hat and corporately managed based was selling out on my principles, and the knowledge that the file system would have things in different places. This would have great manual consequences for porting our web over, and, admittedly at this date and time, there’s still bits and pieces needing tweaks.

The Reality
It turns out a total system rebuild with Fedora Core 4 wasn’t so bad, the installation is actually quite simple. Using the yum utility, which has a graphical version as well, it is possible to keep the system perpetually up to date by issuing: yum upgrade ; yum clean all

Every installed application gets patched to the latest version. Yum can also install packages, or, if you like, you can still hand roll source code yourself. I lost nothing, and gain far more!

Maintenance is just as easy with webmin, a web-based administration program. At that point, general system administration is a cake walk. I was pleased to see Apache2 with SSL, PHP5, the latest MySQL, and a ton of modules I’d have to coax into working are just standard now. For mail, we’re using postfix (a drip-in replacement for sendmail that’s secure, easy to configure, and has tons more features) and dovecot, which made it easy to add smtp-before-pop, procmail, fetchmail, SpamAssassin, and SpamProbe. Getting SSL/TLS as well as SquirrelMail to work was easy. Manging complex firewall rules is a snap!

And, to top if off, every evening I get a security report showing me problem areas of the system that are needing my attention.

Lessons Learned
So, what changed…? What made my life difficult…? What would someone else going through this face that I could pass on some advice?

Well, first of all, I did a lot of work in /etc/rc.d … and it took a little getting used to that everyone now has scripts for everything. The big treat was learning that /sbin/service service_name command was much easier than hunting processes down by hand. Even nicer was /sbin/chkconfig service_name on|off|reset could control boot time configurations, no more editing. Even then, /etc/rc.d and /etc/init.d have the real meat, while everything seems to be controlled by symbolic links.

And, while /usr/local still lives on, Apache’s binaries are placed with the system’s resources, the configuration lives in /etc, as do other application’s config files (and even these are busted out into smaller, manageable pieces), and the content, logs, and things that change live in /var. For as much as I initially disliked the idea of an application being split all over the system, I have to say I have yet to have a problem finding anything. Even better, most configurations are similar now.

I did run into a kink when trying to install pine, it wasn’t in yum’s packages. And, while I could download the source an install it, I wanted to do it the maintainable way. That turned out to be quite simple by simply adding a resource for yum to use. And, according to The Perfect Fedora Core Setup page, adding apt gets you most everything that isn’t in yum.

The hardest part was overcoming the file permissions. We used to have users belong to a group called ‘users’ — however, now each user has their own private group. It hasn’t gotten it the way, but it did mean we have to go through an educational phase, letting users know that when they beam up a file for the web server, they must also give it permission to read it.

Aside from that, the change over was far less painful than I imagined it would be. And, I can’t believe I’m saying this within that than a week, I really think I like it more.

Bryce3D: Working with OS X 10.4.5

As an owner of Bryce 3D v5.5, I, like many other people, ran into problems with OS X 10.4 came out — Bryce stopped working. Worse yet, the version 5.5c upgrade to fix the problem had its own installation problems. And, even worse, getting tech support to recognize the problem was real was impossible. “Uninstall and Install again” doesn’t cut it.

So, I made a movie about it. And, after making the movie, I figured out a simple little hack to fix the problem.

Last year, I happened to purchase the latest Bryce3D package from DAZ3D. All was going well until I upgraded to OS X v10.4.

See, unlike Microsoft, Apple isn’t afraid to move the operating system ahead in terms of features and security patches even if it breaks something. They’re good about letting their developers know something agressive is coming out, and that they’ll need to fix it.

Take a case of memory management. In Windows, you could request some memory, use it, and then release it (so it’s not yours anymore), but some applications continued to use that memory (by accident!), and by sheer dumb luck, the application still ‘worked. ‘ Windows is wrong, because the specification and implementation should never allow that; the application designer is wrong because they have a serious bug. But in this example, the two problems appear to cancel themselves out.

Now, fast-forward to the next release of the operating system — Microsoft has fixed the problem. However, users pulling an old game off the shelf would quickly find the game crashing. And, who do they blame? Microsoft. The should be blaming the game designer, but from their stand point, that’s not what changed because it ‘used’ to work.

Here’s the bad and ugly. Microsoft’s solution has been to maintain backwards compatability for the user. They make a special exception in their operating system that says if the user is trying to run that specific old application, then re-emulate the buggy behavior so the thing will work. This creates bloat and future security holes.
Apple does not do this. Apple fixes the problem so things work as they are supposed to, and the application developer is quickly forced to correct the problem. Suddenly we find the application is well behaved, and not only does it work on the new operating system, but it works better on the old one. It’s a win-win. And, yes, it’s true there are cases where one library is replaced with another not-so-similar library that has enhanced features, but this event is rare and not impossible to deal with.

Such was the case of Bryce 3D. The latest OS improvements exposed a problem, and that problem was easily fixed in terms of an update. Problem was, many users were having a terrible time getting the Bryce 5.5c update to work.

Like many cases of support, sometimes when you have a small handful of users having a problem, and a large body of users who don’t have the problem, it isn’t cost effective to go digging out what’s happening. Let’s face it, the majority of those kind of problems are often user created. But what happens when it is actually real?

While I can’t prove it, I think that’s the case with what happened with Bryce’s installer. Something about the patch’s install doesn’t quite set up the files as they should be. To document this, I made a humorous little movie of the actual Bryce 5.5c upgrade install process happening. You get to see that things aren’t right when it’s done.

Luckily, I managed to figure out how to twiddle things back with a simple hack, rendering the software useable again. I hope DAZ3D investigates and corrects the installation process, if that’s where the problem is.

FreeBSD, Jumping In With Both Feet

I’ve decided to try running a pure FreeBSD installation from total scratch and using it as an experiment. I’m comparing how different the experience is to that of Linux.

Tonight I’m letting TiVo do it’s thing, snarfing up the Friday sci-fi lineup off the SciFi channel, while I do other things. In this case, installing a fresh copy of FreeBSD from scratch to use as a stand-alone server.

In the past, I’ve tried FreeBSD and found the experience slightly frustrating compared to Linux. However, after a number of emails with a FreeBSD-loving friend, he’s answered some fundamental questions and got me all excited about trying the new release of FreeBSD.

This is actually an interesting excercise for me. I want to see what it takes for a Linux person to setup and migrate a system over to FreeBSD. If all goes well, I should have a pretty exotic development server when I’m done.

Flight Simulator Must-Have: X-Plane

Looking for an absolutely killer flight simulator? Check no firther than X-Plane.

A friend turned me on to X-Plane a few days ago, and my copy just arrived, and I’m in awe. Total awe.

This is like the flight simulator to end all flight simulators. It has gobs of air vehicles from real planes to science ficition ones, it has totally fantasic topographical data, amazing imagery detail laid over that, and can utilize incredible input devices. So good is it, I’m given to understand the FAA will allow time in the simulator to count as flight time.

Even more impressive, the software was written on a Mac so that it is capable to work on Linux and Windows as well. The price is cheap, cheap, cheap …like in the $59 ballpark. For that you get seven DVDs jammed packed with the software and detailed world images. The rendering is more realistic than any other simulator I’ve seen. And you can add real-time current weather! Plus, if you want to splurge, for an additional $15 bucks or so, you can get two moer DVDs with the full topographical and image data for Mars. Yes, Mars. Fly a plane, or even the space shuttle, around Mars.

A downloadable demo is available online, and honest to God, undoctored screen shots are presented on the site. The software even lets you make movies of your flight, plus the software is deliberately networkable and hackable, so you can play with other people, beam your data to programs, or have your software control the planes.

And that’s not all, if you like dog fighting in the dark verse, snag a free copy of Space Combat. All platforms supported!