Update: I’m leaving this post here for historical reasons, but there’s a better fix for this issue from the developer of ‘Mobile Substrate’. See the news about the Mobile Substrate update here. Short version: update in Cydia, the new Mobile Substrate will get out of Skype’s way. Great to see a fix so quickly, less than 12 hours since Skype appeared in the app store.

If you’ve jailbroken your iPhone (you miscreant!), you may find that the new Skype for iPhone app crashes within minutes of launch. It appears that this is because you have a hidden application called ‘Mobile Substrate’ installed. ‘Mobile Substrate’, among other things¹, makes it possible for apps like VoIPover3G to enable the use of voice-over-IP applications like Fring over cellular data connections.

I don’t know whether Skype is quitting deliberately because it detects ‘Mobile Substrate’, or whether there’s some other bug in the interaction between ‘Mobile Substrate’ and Skype. What I do know is that it is possible for users with jailbroken iPhones to temporarily disable ‘Mobile Substrate’ and thus run the new Skype app without issue, by enabling something called ‘Safe Mode’. This solution has been posted online, but I was a little unclear on the details. Here are the steps I’ve found that work:

1. Launch the Cydia application installer.
2. Install an application called ‘SBSettings’.
3. Exit Cydia, return to the Springboard.
4. Launch SBSettings (drag a finger across the status bar at the top of the iPhone screen).
5. Hit the little SBSettings power button to bring up a menu of options.
6. Choose ‘Safe Mode’ from the menu. Enjoy. Try not to freak out about the hilarious “sad iPhone” background image, or the error message that says Springboard has crashed –that’s just there because Safe Mode normally is only activated when Springboard does crash, it’s a fail-safe mechanism added to jailbroken iPhones to smooth over any instability.

In Pictures:
The SBSettings panel. Hit the little red power button.	Hit the ‘Safe Mode’ button.	Skypey goodness!

In Safe Mode, your iPhone will look a little different. The time will no longer be displayed in the status bar, which will instead say “Exit Safe Mode”. At this point, you can launch Skype, and it should work. At least, it has yet to quit on me. My friends are all asleep, so I can’t test it on a long voice call, but I’ve been running the app now for about 20 minutes without issue. A call to the skype sound test id ‘echo123′ worked and the audio quality was excellent.

I found the following super-blurry French video helpful when I was attempting to figure out how to use SBSettings and access Safe Mode. Maybe you will too.

Happy Skypeing!

Technorati Tags: Apple, Freedom, Hack, iPhone, iPhone App, Jailbroken iPhone, Skype, software, unix, VOIP

1. I know not what other things, I’m a little unclear as to its purpose, actually. [↩]

Can I get a hallelujah? I wonder what took so long?

My Sony Mylo 2, a device only useful to me because it is a very good wireless Skype phone, will be going up for sale on eBay after Skype launches its long-awaited iPhone app tomorrow. My apartment just isn’t big enough for the both of them.

Articles on the impending Skype application for iPhone:

• Sneak Peek at Skype for iPhone, Available Tuesday
• Skype for iPhone: It’s official
• Review: Skype for iPhone

I suspect it’s only a matter of time before enterprising iPhone hackers manage to circumvent the app’s wifi-only restriction for VOIP.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, iPod, OS X, Skype, VOIP

The things that happen when you domesticate a Doomo-kun…

Posted via email from Zachary’s posterous

Good people of Canon, please note: 1080p20 is NOT an HD video standard. Please strike all mention of “Full HD” that refer to your new camera’s 1080p recording capability from the press release for the Canon Digital Rebel T1i. Thanks.

Now for those of you who don’t work at Canon, the following is a bit of explanation for the above statement.

Canon has just announced the latest addition to Canon’s lower-cost “Rebel” line of Digital SLRs, and like the professional model they released late last year¹, it features the ability to shoot high definition video at both 1920×1080 (1080p) and 1280×720 (720p) HD resolutions. Once word spreads of this affordable ($899 MSRP with kit lens) camera that shoots 1080p with SLR lenses, I expect there will be a wave of initial excitement amongst filmmakers. We’d all love to shoot 1080p HD video with great SLR glass, and achieve sharp images with shallow depth of field.

But this camera has a couple of serious drawbacks for filmmaking that are glossed over in the marketing copy, supreme among them the fact that the camera can only shoot its fantastic 1080p video at a paltry 20 frames per second. I’d excuse this as a simple hardware limitation and be happy they included video recording at all, but the fact that the camera’s press release touts the T1i’s 1080p recording capability while dissing on DSLRs that only record 720p video (cough, Nikon D90, cough), well, that’s just evil marketing.

Except for use as some weird stuttery effect, 1080×1920 footage at 20fps will be utterly useless², unusable, stupid, and the feature is not worthy of inclusion in what otherwise looks to be a fine product. To shoot usable video at that resolution, the Canon EOS Rebel T1i would need to shoot 1080p at least at 24 or 30fps, like it’s pricier cousin³.

The cynic in me wonders if 20fps really pushing the limits of the T1i camera’s sensor and the Digic IV processor, or whether a marketing decision hamstrung the camera’s 1080p recording mode so as to not cannibalize sales of its full-framed 1080p30-capable cousin? Perhaps this issue can be fixed before launch, or after launch with a firmware update? If not, then Canon should cease bragging about how the camera’s useless “Full HD exceeds the quality found in HD ready (720) resolution devices“. If the only resolution the camera can record at 24p or above is 720p, then it doesn’t get to claim automatic superiority to cameras that only record 720p.

Addendum: Stu Maschwitz posted about his disappointment with the camera on his ProLost blog at about the time I began writing this post. If only I’d been following him on twitter I could’ve saved myself some typing and simply posted a link to his more succinct and entertaining post.⁴

Technorati Tags: Canon, Canon Digital Rebel T1i, Canon T1i, Digital Rebel, filmmaking, video

1. EOS 5D Mark II [↩]
2. Useless for filmmaking purposes. It’ll still absolutely cremate the image quality of its 20fps competition –namely cell phone cameras and webcams. [↩]
3. again, the Canon EOS 5D Mark II [↩]
4. Though I am happy I wrote this screed if only for its second footnote. [↩]

I ran across this baked good yesterday and was floored. I had to take a photo for posterity. Apparently brownies¹ are now an official delivery method for a prescription medication, at least in California, where it’s not exactly as illegal as it is elsewhere in the U.S. to inhale, or apparently, ingest –as long as you’re a 25-year-old who can convince a doctor to give you a prescription to help with your “glaucoma”.

I hope they start selling weed kügel over in the Fairfax district if California legalizes the chronic.

Technorati Tags: brownie, California, chocolate, clear plastic container, demon weed, Garbanzo Beans, marijuana, pot, pot brownie, prescription pot, prohibition, forward thinking, so cute, the sky is falling

1. cupcakes too? [↩]

A SmoothCam Test – AJ testing an idea on the piano from ZachFine on Vimeo. Available in larger size for playback and/or download here.

This is a test of Final Cut Pro’s “SmoothCam” motion stabilization filter. I’ve set two videos side-by-side. On the left, the original clip. On the right, the SmoothCam version with the following settings:

Auto Scale: 1
Actual Scale: 138%
Translation Smooth: 1.5
Rotation Smooth: 2
Scale Smooth: 0
Mix: 100

The original clip was shot with a Canon HV20 mounted on a Steadicam Merlin, so it was fairly smooth to begin with. I was pleased with how well the SmoothCam filter ironed out the rotational skewing of the camera without being noticeable about it. I do wish the filter didn’t autoscale the entire clip to match the worst of the movement, and instead the adjusted clip could start with the wide and then smoothly scale in to cover the adjustments, then smoothly scale out for segments that were more stable. Had I shot with a higher shutter speed, the motion blur on the subject wouldn’t be as bad.

I’m sure I’ll end up using this SmoothCam filter on some footage one of these days. It’s a nice effect. I’ve already had FCP batch analyze all my footage from the SXSW festival. The fact that the filter works very quickly on clips whose motion has already been batch analyzed is a deal-maker.

Technorati Tags: Apple, awesomeness, Batch Processing, FCP Tips & Tricks, filmmaking, Final Cut Pro, Image Stabilization, live music, rock, Saint Motel, SmoothCam, video

My cousin AJ edited together a live performance of the Saint Motel song Stories from their 2/15/2009 Spaceland “Zombie Prom” performance, using my previously posted footage along with footage from other video cameras that shot the same show. It’s paired with a non-burnt audio track that’s a huge improvement from the audio I captured.

“Stories” – Live @ Spaceland (Zombie Prom 2.15.09) from SAINT MOTEL on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: awesomeness, entertainment, live music, music, Saint Motel, rock, sound pollution, Spaceland, video

A screenshot of the Final Cut Pro Browser and Background Processes windows showing the SmoothCam Analysis in progress. Click the image to see it at a legibly large size.

I ran around the South by Southwest festival last week shooting behind-the-scenes video of my cousin AJ and his band on my Canon HV20, stabilized with a Steadicam Merlin. I’m still learning to use the Merlin –it is a fantastically engineered piece of kit, but it takes a light touch to float it about, and it’s much easier to use for choreographed moves than for impromptu run-and-gun documentary-style shooting.

Final Cut Pro and Motion both inherited a feature from Shake called “SmoothCam”, which is a motion stabilization filter. SmoothCam analyzes movement within a clip and moves the frame around to compensate for high-frequency movement while preserving the lower-frequency moves –i.e. it tries to remove bumps and vibrations while preserving smooth, intentional camera movements. I ran a few tests on some of my relatively smooth clips, and SmoothCam seemed very good at doing exactly that.

When the SmoothCam filter is applied to a clip, that clip is put into a queue and Final Cut Pro begins to analyze the motion in the clip. Once FCP’s analysis concludes¹ , the SmoothCam filter will have data to use for its calculations and its effect will finally become visible. One can then adjust the SmoothCam settings and see the results instantaneously (with a computer of sufficient power).

I’m happy to note that it is possible to have Final Cut Pro analyze the motion of a batch of clips, and then later if the SmoothCam filter is applied to any of these clips its results can be seen without delay. The motion analysis data for each clip is written to disk alongside the clips themselves.

Since I may or may not want to use the SmoothCam filter on many of my clips, and I don’t plan to do any more editing on my computer tonight, I’ve set FCP to batch analyze the motion in all of my footage from the last week. To do so, I enabled the “SmoothCam” column in FCP’s Browser, selected all the clips I wanted analyzed, right-clicked in the column and chose “Run Analysis” from the clip’s contextual pop-up menu. Now the analysis is puttering away, and tomorrow I can play.

The things one can learn by glancing at the manual!

Technorati Tags: Apple, Batch Processing, FCP Tips & Tricks, filmmaking, Final Cut Pro, Garbanzo Beans, Image Stabilization, Macintosh, OS X, SmoothCam, software, vfx

1. The entire clip is analyzed, regardless whether only a portion of it is in use in a timeline. A clip’s In and Out points are ignored. The analysis can take a while, and I would strongly recommend converting any clips in a long-gop format such as HDV to Prores beforehand for markedly faster analysis. [↩]

Posted via email from Zachary’s posterous

Saint Motel just unloaded and carried all their equipment through the back door of a club and up a long flight of stairs. Show’s in 40 minutes.

Posted via email from Zachary’s posterous