In LA

The other day I ran from my cousin Andy’s place in Minneapolis over to my cousin Steve’s over in Golden Valley. I snapped a set of photos when I left the Theodore Wirth Parkway and began running next to the 55W. At the time I enjoyed the sunset visible at the end of the road, though it’s awfully small and faint in the resulting panorama. Click to see the image full-size. The separate photos were automatically stitched together and cropped with the iPhone app AutoStitch.

I’m pleased with the look of the footage. The edit was just a quick bit of fun. Mostly this was about testing my DSLR video workflow, with a secondary goal of cracking my sister up.

If you set HD to ‘on’ and go fullscreen, or click through to the video’s vimeo.com page and find the download link low in the right column, you can see this one at 1080p resolution. If the embedded video doesn’t play smoothly, try pausing it and waiting for it to finish loading before hitting play, or toggle HD to off.

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

A little video of an evening of pizza-making and camera-dodging.

Shot and uploaded at 1080p resolution, so feel free to toggle HD to on and play this one back fullscreen.

Video shot with Canon Digital REBEL T2i DSLR set to the “superflat” picture style. Canon 50mm f1.8 lens.
Converted to Apple Prores, edited in Final Cut Pro 7.0.2, graded in Apple Color.

Exported to the QuickTime H264 at 1080p24, restricted to 8000kbps, audio 44.1Khz 16-bit AAC 128kbps.

Music: the first third of “free space incesticide” by Eight Frozen Modules.

Coming soon, the results of my test shoot of several of the most popular “flat” color styles people have been using in their attempts to preserve the maximum amount of picture information in the H264 files recorded by Canon DSLRs.

I shot the same setup with 5 different color style settings, and will be looking at all of them in Apple Color in order to determine which setting I prefer.

I’m well aware that tradition holds that no camera test is complete without a photo of a beautiful lady holding a redundant umbrella and smiling at the photographer, but I decided plastic grapes would just as ably serve that function¹.

1. And the grapes had to stand-in, as no people were around when I shot these tests [↩]

I know a lot of editors who like to leave Final Cut Pro’s “Browser” in large icon mode so that they can see a visual representation of each clip. I happen to think that the Browser’s list view is more compact and displays more useful information for each clip. But that layout is a hard sell for visual thinkers.

Enter the Browser’s Thumbnail column:

To enable this column, just right-click any column header, and select “Show Thumbnail” from the contextual popup menu:

Just as in icon view, you can click on each thumbnail and drag left and right to scan through the clip’s contents. If you press the “control” key any time while scanning through the clip and keep it held down as you release the mouse button, you’ll change the “poster frame” displayed in the thumbnail for that clip to the last frame displayed.

It’s worth noting that the thumbnails, at least in the case of the 16:9 clips I used for these screen captures, are not displayed at the proper aspect ratio. It is also worth noting that the thumbnail doesn’t change size if the user widens the Browser’s Thumbnail column. I’m sure these small issues will be fixed in some future version of FCP (wink wink nudge nudge Apple ;) .

For those who’d like to buy a Canon Rebel T2i without the kit lens, it looks as though Amazon’s now taking preorders for the T2i body:

Canon EOS Rebel T2i (Body Only) – $799.99

I’d expect the fact that they’re taking preorders means they have a shipment coming to their distribution centers from Canon. Just a guess.

When I bought my T2i, it seemed only the kits with lens were available for purchase. I decided I didn’t mind having the extra lens, as then I could loan my Rebel XT to people with a decent lens that I didn’t care too much about. But maybe that was just rationalization and if the body-only version of the T2i were available I’d have gone for it.

My previous post, on how to get a discounted price on a Canon T2i, might still apply (if you want to buy the camera on eBay).

For those wondering why I’m so excited about this camera; It’s because the T2i is a way to shoot decent HD video with a relatively large sensor and great lenses for under $1000. Such tools for good-looking budget filmmaking are hitting the streets and will change the nature of online video, if not also segments of television and theatrical film.

If, like me, you’re excited about the new Canon Rebel T2i DSLR¹ and plan to buy one when the price falls a bit, and you’re in the USA, you’re in luck. Though I expect all stores will sell the camera at exactly its MSRP² for months, I’ve found a way to chop that price down by about 10%.

Remember Microsoft Bing? The search engine that Microsoft will pay you to use? That’s step 1.

1. Go to www.bing.com, sign in or create a “windows live”³ account, then search using bing for popular product lines like “ram” or “xbox”.
2. Look at the top of the search results for a “Bing cashback” link to eBay like the one I’ve annotated above. Click the words “Bing cashback”.
3. You’ll be taken to eBay. There’ll be a banner at the top of the page telling you that you’ll get an 8% “Bing cashback” if you purchase the item using eBay’s “Buy it now” link and if you pay via paypal. The key thing to note here is that the cashback happens regardless what item you buy at eBay, it doesn’t have to be RAM or XBox. In your case, search eBay for a Canon T2i.
4. In your search results, click the “Buy it now” tab to filter your search to only show items that can be purchased using that method.

Unless you want a gray market product, I’d advise you to be wary of any vendor with less than 99% positive feedback, or who is located overseas, or who doesn’t explicitly state the list of items included in the unopened box and that it comes with a Canon USA Warranty. But there are plenty of legitimate physical camera and electronics stores who use eBay as their internet storefront, and they’re listing the camera for the same price as Amazon and B&H.

Microsoft’s cashback takes a while. But a month or so after your purchase, they’ll deposit the cashback value directly to your paypal account. eBay has their own sort of cashback program going on, called “eBay Bucks”. For your purchase, you’ll earn 2% of its value in eBay Bucks, which can be used for future transactions. So within a month or two after your purchase, you’ll have received 10% of the total in Bing Cashback and eBay bucks.

I’m sure if you can wait six months a better deal will come along. Maybe the Canon T2i will be available at Dell Small Business store and you’ll be able to get %15 off buy using a coupon. But if, like me, you’re ready now to replace your several-generations-old DSLR, this is probably not a bad way to go.

1. At least in part due to its HD video capabilities [↩]
2. $799 for the body, $899 for the body in a kit with lens [↩]
3. The terms “windows” and “live” are meaningless Microsoftian buzzwords that are completely unrelated to this context. But the marketing folk at Redmond are only satisfied when those words are platered on top of every product. [↩]

I was at work the other week, doing a repetitive task of the sort that provides an opportunity to listen to music. I’d recently purchased an album and had stored it in the iTunes library on my home computer, but had not yet loaded the new songs onto my iPhone. There had to be a way to make iTunes at home share its music to my work computer so that I could listen to the new music. A few internet searches turned up some interesting information as well as a solution.

The crippled feature to be healed and exploited

Apple’s iTunes software has the ability to share selected playlists or entire libraries of music to other computers on a local network running iTunes. This means that if you have a large collection of music on your desktop computer, you can browse and listen to music from its library from a different room, streamed to your laptop. Or if you work in an office, and your coworkers have iTunes running on their machines and set to share, their shared libraries will automatically appear in the left column of iTunes running on your machine and you can play from them. It all works very seamlessly, on a local network. Possibly due to agreements made between apple and the recording industry, the sharing feature only works between computers on a local network, not between computers on the internet at large.

How iTunes sharing works

When a user tells iTunes to enable sharing in that application’s preferences, iTunes advertises that service on port 3689 of the local network using “Bonjour“, the name for Apple’s implementation of the Zeroconf standard. Bonjour is used by iTunes, iPhoto, and other applications to advertise and to find servers on a local network, such as within a home or office.

If a copy of iTunes is running on any other computers that are on the local network, those instances of iTunes will notice the advertisement of an iTunes share on the network, and will display the name of that iTunes share in the left column of the window. The user can then click that shared Library and play songs from it on their computer. The playlists and songs stream over the network from the sharer to the sharee. Unfortunately in my case, iTunes running on my laptop at work couldn’t see the iTunes share served from my computer at home, because my home computer is miles away and not connected to the same local network as my laptop.

Bringing the remote network closer

The following link pointed the way to a solution:¹

REMOTE ITUNES SHARING

I recognized a familiar Unix trick in their tip: Port forwarding over a secure shell connection. Of course! If one could make a secure shell connection (abbreviated in the command “ssh”) to a remote computer, one could then do what’s called “port forwarding”, and forward all communications on a port on the remote machine to a port on the local machine. This would transport both the advertisement of the iTunes share and the actual sharing itself from the remote network to the local network. I’d never actually executed port forwarding over ssh before, but I’d heard of it, and between their example and the man page for the ’ssh’ command, it all became clear. The tip first requires that one knows the IP address of the remote computer, and then shows the command to connect to the remote machine, grab any communications on port 3689 (the port used by iTunes sharing), transport it encrypted to the local machine, and repeat it on port 36890 of the local machine. The command looks like this (hover your mouse over any portion of the command to see an explanation of that portion):

$ ssh -fNL *:36890:127.0.0.1:3689 USER@REMOTE-HOST

After that command successfully concludes, the iTunes share on the remote computer will be accessible to computers on the local network, except they won’t be able to see that it’s there. The second command in their document uses OS X’s built-in “dns-sd” command to advertise that there is an iTunes share on port 36890 of the local computer. It is this advertisement that will make the iTunes share appear in the sidebars of any copy of iTunes running on the network:

$ dns-sd -R "Remote iTunes" _daap._tcp local 36890 &

I was confident that this would all work, but for one snag. Like most people, my home computer only has an address on its local network, it doesn’t have its own internet address. The computer is connected to a router. The router has an IP address on the internet and an IP address on the local network and uses what’s called “Network Address Translation” to distribute connections from the outside internet to all the computers on the local network. If I tried to connect to the IP address of my home connection, I’d be connecting to the router, not my home computer with its trove of music. Luckily a solution was within reach.

Locating the remote computer using Back to My Mac

I recently purchased a “MobileMe” subscription, which includes a service called “Back to my Mac“. I’ll let Apple’s marketing folk, who’ve obviously seen Buckaroo Banzai, explain “Back to My Mac” for me:

Wherever you go, there’s your Mac.

Back to My Mac puts any Mac OS X Leopard- or Snow Leopard-based Mac you use within easy reach. MobileMe finds your remote Mac computers over the Internet and displays them in the Finder on the Mac you’re using. So you can connect from anywhere with just a click. Edit and save documents, open applications, and move folders. With Back to My Mac Screen Sharing, you can control your remote Mac as though you’re sitting in front of it.

I have been using the Back to My Mac service to copy files to and from my remote computer from work, and to occasionally take control of my home computer’s screen from work. The service must be punching through the router using port-forwarding and registering a temporary domain name for my home computer which can be accessed from the outside internet. I figured that if I could find out this domain name, it would be worth a try to use it to connect from work to the home computer and set up ssh port forwarding of the iTunes share. A search turned up this article:

10.5: How to use ssh using ‘Back to My Mac’

The writer of that article explains exactly how to determine the Back to My Mac domain name at which one can find their remote computer. When I tried the first method described, it did not work. As it turns out, that method works for short computer names, but my home computer’s name is long, and Back to My Mac truncates it and adds a few random (?) numbers when assigning the domain name. The second method they mention does work. I can easily determine the name assigned to my remote machine by choosing “Shell > New Remote Connection…” in the Terminal application’s menubar. In the “New Remote Connection” window that appears, I choose ’ssh’ in the service column and my remote computer’s name in the ‘Server’ column. There, in the field at the bottom of the New Remote Connection window will appear the command for making a ssh connection to my home computer. It’s not the same ssh connection command that will be used to do port forwarding, but the last portion of it does show me the exact domain name that will resolve to my home computer.

Victory

Whenever I feel the mood, I can now run the following two commands and then sit at work listening to streaming music stored on my home computer:

$ ssh -fNL :36890:127.0.0.1:3689 myComputerName.myMobileMeID.members.mac.com.

$ dns-sd -R "Zach's Remote iTunes FTW" _daap._tcp local 36890 &

Thanks Y’all

Thank yous are due to the writers of:

• http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080428132615192
• http://atomized.org/2008/10/remote-itunes-sharing/

1. All the solutions written below involve the use of the Terminal application and the command-line. If you’ve never played with such, give it a shot. Stop kvetching and open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal. You paid for a Unix operating system when you bought your Mac, you might as well try exploring some of its inner awesomeness. [↩]