Of course! FCP X is installed via the App Store application, and updates are likely also distributed via this route. –And so it is, I check for available updates in the App Store, and the 10.0.3 update is patiently waiting for me.

I’m happy to have found the update, but am a little surprised how unwieldy¹ the process of finding updates has become. Apparently I need to keep it straight in my head that OS, Safari, iTunes, and some other updates are always delivered via the system’s “Software Update” function, and updates for apps installed via the App Store (should I ever manage to remember their provenance) are to be found only in the App Store app. And then there’s 3rd-party apps that have their own update mechanisms — if I’m lucky they use the Sparkle framework, which informs me of updates as soon as the apps are launched –nice.

If I’m confused about where to look for software updates, other users may be as well. An easy stopgap measure Apple could implement would be to add a line to Software Update when App store App updates are available such as “there are also 32 available updates waiting in the app store for you. Launch app store?”. Here’s an ugly mockup:

I expect Apple will either do something like this, or will come up with some wonderfully elegant way to make this unnecessary, or will release a new Mac Pro². Maybe all of the above. If they make this happen via a Software Update, I hope I can find it.

1. One might say “Windowsy”
2. unrelated, but please please please

Time Bandits [Blu-ray] $7.99

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin [Blu-ray] $6.991

But I also showed some restraint. Here’s something I successfully resisted purchasing today:²

White Aphrodisiac Telephone (Salvador Dali, 1938)

1. features commentary by The RZA
2. probably because none were available for sale

PID-Controlled Espresso Machine

The reward for investing $300 in this kickstarter project is a v0.2 model² of this as yet non-extant³ espresso machine. It’s supposed to ship in December 2012, which for me will make it a nice surprise Hannukah present as I’ll likely have forgotten it’s enroute.

$300 sounds steep, but this machine includes a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller to regulate temperature and pressure throughout a shot of espresso’s “pull”, with the aim of producing a noticeably better result. Commercial home machines that include a PID controller tend to start around $700. Many people modify cheaper home espresso machines to add a PID controller, and kits for that modification appear to cost about $2-300⁴.

Kickstarter is fascinating to me. People post the project for which they’d like to raise money, list various reward levels, and other people on the net are invited to invest in it for a limited time. It’s a way for engineers with an idea to raise enough funds to rent space and start up manufacturing⁵. The reward for backing a projects that are manufactured is often a discounted price on an early version of the product. Several successful products have already been funded via this mechanism, the most famous so far being the LunaTik watch.

1. My wife really likes coffee, and gave her blessing to this purchase instantly when I tentatively ran the idea past her.
2. The v0.1’s sold out and will ship earlier.
3. except as a prototype
4. I did see that one person on the net has manage to do such a mod for less with some lesser-known Chinese-made components.
5. or increasingly a way for filmmakers to crowd-fund their filmmaking projects

The iCade is a cabinet for the iPad that features an arcade-style joystick and eight buttons. It connects via bluetooth to the iPad as a wireless keyboard, and support for it is built into several gaming apps, including Atari’s Greatest Hits. Here’s one user’s review.

If you’ve got a jailbroken iPad² you can use the iCade to control imame4all³ and other emulators. It’s great to play such games with a real joystick and buttons. I’ve been using an iCade for a while, and still plan to replace its joystick with a real sanwa, which apparently isn’t that difficult to do.

I don’t know how long this deal will last, but I think it’s a good one.

1. Not my exclamation point, I should perhaps include a “sic” of disapproval.
2. jailbreaking the thing is very easy to do right now and is legal
3. just jailbreak and then install imame4all via cydia

Canon’s discounted the price of some refurbished cameras by 15%. Which brings the T2i down to what must be its record low price.

The Deal:

• Here’s a link to the EOS Rebel T2i Body Refurbished – $475.99.
• They also sell it with a very good, cheap kit lens: EOS Rebel T2i EF-S 18-55mm IS Lens Kit Refurbished – $543.99.

According to the site at which I found the deal, “Shipping is $5 for $150+ purchases with coupon code SHIP11 [Exp 12/11]“.

Shoot right with this camera, and it can look ridiculously good. I bought mine back when the best price for the T2i body alone was $799 about a year-and-a-half ago, and have no regrets. It allows me to shoot video to a large sensor (APS-C size) using my excellent Canon lenses and even old Nikon lenses using an adapter.

A few clips I’ve shot on my T2i can be found here. They’re not best-of-breed, but should give some idea of what video from the T2i can look like:

• my first online DSLR video
• Looong Steadicam Merlin + Canon T2i shot
• On the streets of Hengdian, China

My first video shot on my T2i:

pizza and the dream of not being filmed from ZachFine on Vimeo.

This Voyager 520 is great, I’d highly recommend it if you need a headset. I’ve gone through a few 520’s and have gifted a few over the years, but have never seen them priced this low. The 520 is small, has enough power for 180 hours of standby, cancels background noise well enough that in my experience the person on the other end of the line could rarely tell I was using a headset at all, and it has one of those futuristic blue LED lights that’ll properly mark it as very dated tech when your toddler comes of age and finds it in a shoebox in the garage.

I get no personal benefit or kickback from recommending this product, it just happens to be a headset I really like at an exceptional price. Get it here if you need such a thing. The coupon code expires on 10/22.

1. I’ve since gone on to a fancier, larger, and not necessarily better Plantronics model
2. sale price is $29.99 without the code

Item	Price	Image	Note
The P+S Technik Skater Mini Camera Dolly	$5400		The one that started it all, I think. Costs a little less than the last used car I bought and undoubtedly moves more smoothly. Out of my price range until I start shooting for Spielberg.
Omni-tracker Slim-Line “LITE”	$495		The Omni-tracker looks a bit like a P+S Technik carved of purest PVC plastic and endowed with a carrying handle. This may be the only item in this list that will float in water1. They make heavier duty models as well, it costs $1500 for their top model.
KONOVA Scaled Rotational Axis Skater Dolly	$125		This looks a lot like what I’d probably build if I were to make my own, but I’m not sure that’s such a good thing. Something about them doesn’t appeal to me, but I can’t put my finger on it. If I put my foot on it I could probably skate. +Who named this thing?
DIY Skater Dolly	$20-$∞ + time		Pictured is dvxuser forum member Texanite’s rather gorgeous acrylic skater dolly, he sells them for around $400 when they’re available. This is an example of the kind of thing one could build with infinite time, materials, and skill.
Cinetics Cineskates	$275		An innovative skater dolly consisting of a set of super-engineered wheels that connect to a “GorillaPod Focus”. It’s a Kickstarter project, so the pricing will change soon. I’ve quoted the cost of a full kit, with tripod and ballhead. The wheels by themselves are $150 for a set of 3. I’m a little curious how rigid it’d be, but 930 kickstarter backers can’t be wrong. My resistance to spending $50 per wheel keeps me a step short of buying, but I’m tempted by its bizarreness and quality.
Pico Flex Table Dolly	$65, or $90 with friction arm extension		I give up. This newcomer looks like it will be too much fun. I’d probably spend $65 or more building my own, and mine would be less well engineered. Check out a video of the item in use here. It’s a very simple-looking item, but it does appear to be flexible enough, small enough, and smooth enough for my purposes. Their price for the friction arm is also very good. Ordered.

Cineskates popped up on the net the last week of August and got me interested in thinking again about skater dollies after more than a year of ignoring the category. The Pico Flex, which appeared on the net a week later, is where I’ve ended my search for now. I’m excited to play with the thing when it arrives.

1. I’ll keep that in mind for nautical use

I think Nathan J. Barnatt directed, edited, dances, and flips about in the video as well. Martin Starr tunes it in at the beginning.

Word on the street is that no green screens were used, it’s all implemented using early 20th century filmmaking methods –except for the digital music, camera, editing software, etc.

I like, +1, etc.

I like the stuff; Very light, non-greasy, no smell, and one 16oz bottle has lasted me a couple of years –but today it ran dry. I went searching the net, and am happy to note that finally some wholesaler is selling it via Amazon, and since I’ve got Amazon Prime I get free 2-day shipping. Neato.

Small victories FTW.

Now if only DML could stop trying so hard with their circa 1983 graphic design and simply package it in a plain colorless bottle, all will be well with the world.¹

1. With the exception of wars, plagues, and the design of the even worse “DML Forte” packaging. Is that gold Tekton with a pink squiggle? Ew ew ew.

These images show the combination of weights used, the span angle setting, the hole in the mounting plate to which the camera was attached (hole N), that the gezornenplatz screw was in place, and the position of the mount plate.

Full setup

middle weight and span setting	end weights	mounting plate
mount plate position

1. i.e., a single message sent to me on Vimeo
2. as opposed to unattached?

I get no kickbacks or referral fees from providing this link, I just think it’s a useful piece of software and it’s not normally available at this price.

A still from the film "The Prestige". Shot on film, photochemical finish, the entire film looks fantastic. Obviously, film can be awesome. Wally Pfister should be allowed to shoot on film, or sparklevision, or whatever he wants, for the rest of his days. See more stills from "The Prestige" at Beautiful Stills from Beautiful Films

Some of this year’s most acclaimed and talked-over movies, for starters, including “The Social Network,” “Black Swan” and “Tiny Furniture,” were either partly or wholly shot in digital. It’s no wonder that more than a third of my 30 favorites this year — because, really, why stop at 10? — were a combination of the two. Does it matter?

Does it matter?

It matters to producers, as digital, used properly, can lower the cost of a shoot.

It matters to telecine and processing facilities, as –telecine? What’s that? Such facilities are quickly diversifying the services they offer, or are closing.

It matters to assistant editors, as they either have to deal with the constantly-changing workflows designed around different digital formats, or have to deal with transfers from film and keeping track of the relationship between the digital clips in the editing system and actual pieces of film.

It matters if you’re a Director of Photography with exacting standards, and you’ve spent your entire career building your knowledge and ability to achieve the images you want on film, surely. That’s probably the person to whom this debate matters the most, from the aesthetic side of the argument. But should it? Would adapting one’s style of shooting to a particular sensor be any different than adapting to a particular film stock? Can one choose particular cameras and sensors based on the needs of a project, as one did film stocks? I think this is already happening. But I can’t speak for DOPs.

But for audiences and cinema enthusiasts, “Does it matter?” was a good question, a year ago. Now it’s an afterthought.

Celluloid film is an amazing technology, and it’s dying, quickly. I’m no purist², but I’m a little sad about this, and hope I can work on a feature film that’s shot on film before it completely disappears.

A still from an as-yet unreleased short film I edited this year. Shot on the Red One with anamorphic lenses.

Dargis continues, and my mood darkens:

Digital images still don’t look as rich and sumptuous as film, which was developed to reproduce the way our eyes see the visible spectrum.

I can’t let either of these sorry old canards⁴ go unexamined.

A still from the film Cyrus. Shot on the Red One. Click to see more screenshots from the film “Cyrus” in blu-ray.com’s review of the disc.

Back to print. Has National Geographic stopped looking sumptuous since they started publishing photos shot on digital cameras? Have people been writing complaints in to Playboy? The shift of the field of still photography from film to digital is relevant to this discussion, as digital sensors for moving imagery and for stills are as closely related as their celluloid counterparts are. The complaints, worries, and about digital for stills seem to have vanished over the past decade as the technology improved to the point that only an engineer could tell the difference.

Regarding Canard #2: So much of the film vs. digital argument has for so long been couched in pseudoscientific mystical pronouncements, and the idea that film is somehow better suited to replicating the way the human eye sees the world than digital is one of such. Both film and sensors designed for photography are designed to create pleasing images for people to stare at. Neither technology really reproduces “the way our eyes see the visible spectrum”, nor would anyone really want that.⁶ What film and sensors can do to reproduce the qualities of the visual spectrum that our eyes can sense, they do. Digital sensors follow film note for note in this regard. Both have the same design goal. The statement that film was designed to reproduce the way our eyes work and the implication that digital sensors are not, is simply wrong from any angle.

Nit picking aside, the article’s worth a read.

The battle that made the question “Does it matter?” relevant, is all but over. But “Will it blend?” –I think celluloid’s got a lock on that one.

1. I nearly put the word “films” in quotes, but if I did that I’d have to start calling the “bins” in Final Cut Pro what they look like: “folders”.
2. That should be obvious, given this blog post.
3. It’ll be all, by the end of 2011
4. Well, if they haven’t achieved canard-status it’s not for lack of trying.
5. It’s also worth noting that many of the digital films shot until recently chose to go digital for reasons of flexibility or cost-containment, and didn’t place a priority on picture quality. The results speak for themselves, and should not be compared to the visual impact of films that put a priority on appearance, such as Lawrence of Arabia, but instead should be compared to similarly oriented uses of celluloid such as 60’s man-on-the-street news footage or Monty Python’s outdoor segments.
6. Human vision is fantastic, but that’s mostly the brain’s doing –in many ways our eyes are surprisingly crappy. The brain creates fantastic imagery out of surprisingly little information, and a lot of what we see is the result of pattern recognition and quick deduction in the visual cortex. Our impressions of color and light are relative to neighboring colors, rather than absolute measurements, and the way we see images is in a sense hallucinatory.

   Though neuroscientists and opthalmologists would love to get together and watch a sequence that actually reproduces the way our eyes see, it’d be jarring to an audience to watch footage that features a tiny, darker circle of very high detail and color saturation in the center with blues that tend to the violet, a larger empty black spot nearby, and all surrounded by an increasingly blurry and warped bright green-blue miasma in which motion is detectable but not details. Of course the view would continuously jitter around at high speed and never hold still so that the tiny spot of clarity can flit from detail to detail and take in enough for the brain to make its assumptions and create what we see.

Click the thumbnail at right to get hold of a png image at the exact resolution required for the iPhone 4G’s “retina” display. 960×540. Perhaps you can spot the game of Pong in it?

If you feel like using it on your phone, click through to the full-size image, then click and hold on the image to save it to your library, then navigate to and choose it in the wallpaper settings. Neato.

To make your own damask pattern, sit yourself down in front of a computer running Adobe Illustrator and check out this great tutorial over at tutsplus.com.

1. Don’t you just love it when people are proud of an achievement, and they express their pride couched in diminutive adjectives and verbs that indicate the achievement took a minimal amount of effort. e.g.: “Oh, those little baubles I tossed off the other day? The full-scale model of the pyramids at Giza? It was nothing.” In this case, I think I’ve come up with a pattern I like (partly due to subject matter) but the pattern will probably please very few, (partly due to subject matter). I’m using the diminutive out of respect for those who hate retrogaming or hate damask patterns or just hate life in general.

The greenscreen shoot. That 16:9 frame at right represents the frame of the video player that’s part of the facebook page. Clamps hold breakaway blocks with tracking markers.

A small section of a final result, composited live in a web browser.

All’s well that ends well eh? Now go see the film. How else are you going to see excrement fly at the camera in 3D?⁴

1. Or you might not. There’s no accounting for taste.
2. As far as I know.
3. And far far less annoying. It also doesn’t spam your friends with every smiling sheep you’ve mulesed or smiling automated milking machine you’ve installed or whatever people do in that Farmville thing whose updates drove me from Facebook. And seriously, what’s better, virtual happy farming, or dudes hitting baseballs into each others’ nuts? The world’s answer to that question can be found in the box office receipts for Jackass 3D.
4. Neither a trip to the zoo, nor the blue Navii “tribal bio-expelled tactical paste” seen in the upcoming director’s cut of Avatar count.