Webster Art

motherboard and Macbook

My 4 year old MacBook can’t handle editing HD video. It will do it, but very slowly, and many functions of Premiere are not functional.

After a lot of research, I drove up to Frys in Renton and bought a box of computer parts. This box included case, motherboard, ram, processor, cpu fan, couple of hard drives, power supply last but not least, Windows 8.
After getting my MacBook I swore I would never go back to the dark side…and I probably never would have had it not been for getting into video editing. My Mac was never intended to be a video editing machine. It has been awesome…beyond awesome really, compared to my earlier Windows laptop. But when you look at this picture of my old Mac, next to my new motherboard, it all becomes clear. True, I could have build a Hackintosh, or spent $7000 on a new Mac tower, but neither of those were good options…not the least of which is lack of funds.

I built a couple pc’s back in the last century with friends. But this was the first one I built alone. It went surprisingly well. It was so fun I wore myself out burning the midnight oil during the work week. Before I even started I watched these three videos on youtube from newegg. They explain the process…really good stuff!

motherboard

Windows 8 is freaky, but there are tutorials on that too. A good friend of mine works for Bill and told me it’s worth the trouble to learn. The build took me 8 hours.The only hitch I ran into was some bugs in my video cables…had the wrong ones for the card to monitor match up. During that confusion, I tried to remove my video card, and forgot it was locked into the motherboard with a little plastic lever. It’s the old “bull in a china shop” story.

I heard some cracking somewhere and stopped pulling on the video card. I almost destroyed the motherboard and the card. Sheesh, that would have been extremely expensive. But all is well now. What used to be a 3 hour render time on my Macbook is now a 5 minute render.

This is my latest video, edited on my new Windows 8 box.

I’ve bounced back into video. I took two sound recorders and 3 video cameras down to dads and recorded a live interview of he and I talking about  family history.

I did three 10 minute segments. In each segment, I created 5 files:

1. Canon 7D video *.mov
2. Canon T3I video *.mov
3. Sony RX-100 video *.mts (AVCHD)
4. Tascam DR-40 audio *.wav
5. Zoom H4N audio *.wav

I also had two studio lights and 3 tripods. And I had no help at all. Lisa and Sue were there, but they left to go shopping, so it was just me and dad.

I knew I’d mess up something and it turned out to be the white balance, and a memory card that was too small, both in the Canon T3i. It was a borrowed camera. I’d never used it before. I’d set the white balance to tungsten for stills, but you have to set it separately for video…who knew?

And the card was too small. It maxed out on the third video.

I spent all day Saturday editing video. Man, I need a faster computer if I’m going to get serious about DSLR video. These 1920 x 1080 video files are huge! My poor old laptop takes 4 hours to render a 8 minute video. Thats rendering it out to 1280 x 720.

All the numbers in video are confusing. 1080p, 720p, megabits per second, progressive vs interlaced. I have very little idea what it all means.

We skied Stevens today (Sue, me, Lisa and Tim). The snow was just barely ok. I climbed at Vantage last weekend with Ritchie, Laurel and Daphne. For the two weekends before that I climbed at Index one day. I’ve been struggling with a chronic sprain in my bicep. But my ankle is a lot better…almost normal.

At work I’ve been creating a 3 week lesson on animated banner ads in Flash. It’s something I’ve wanted to teach for years, and I just figured out how to do it recently. No one teaches this stuff, or, not targeted and tight like I want it taught. So I recorded it in Camtashia, as 3 one hour lessons. It took me 2 weeks of research and testing to figure it all out, before I could create the lesson.

I haven’t written in a while. We are were 15 years overdue for new avalanche beacons. Our beacons were so old they didn’t work with my son’s beacon. And if Lisa get’s one, it will also be the new frequency, which we didn’t have. I bought two of the BCA Tracker 2 beacons  for me and Sue. Those were $350 each.

I lost my latest pocket camera…that waterproof Panasonic. I hated the quality of that thing from day one. At 100% in Photoshop the pixels looked horrible. I shot a few photos in Vantage that were badly burned out in the highlights, and plugged in the shadows. Without raw, you can’t fix it. I had a bad attitude about the Panasonic and sort of lost track of it. It may have fell off my rack, or got left in someones car. I’ve looked all over the house and garage for it.

Lisa has bought tickets for a one month trip to Europe with her cousin Pam, who wanted one last blow out adventure before starting medical school. Lisa is too much of a penny pincher to buy a nice camera. I sort of needed a portable camera to carry up hard climbs, and to carry when I don’t want to haul my big DSLR. Just going to work and the gym it’s nice to have a decent camera for unexpected moments of beauty.

Nothing can replace a DSLR, but a camera that can pinch hit is nice. I’d heard about the Sony RX100, but didn’t believe the hype. Still, I kept thinking about it, and reading up on it from time to time. Saturday I asked Lisa if she would pay for half of it. I offered to let her take it to Europe so she could get some decent photos, and then I would buy out her half when she returned.

Or that’s the plan anyway. I’ve been playing with it and the hype is actually true. It takes lovely 20meg RAW files that compare favorably with my Canon 7D. Obviously it can’t compete on really difficult shooting, the sensor and glass are simply too small, it can’t overcome the rules of physics. But for well lit scenes it shoots pictures that are quite close to my DSRL. I mean so close I’d have to spend some serious time pixel peeping to find the differences.

I’ve not done a true photo test comparison. But trust me, I done my share of pixel peeping, and the Sony RX100 holds up fine. I can’t wait to do some shooting in bright light. Everything has been either indoors, or rainy winter light.

As the old saying goes, “the best camera is the one you have with you”. When I have my DSLR I love it, but it’s so big and heavy I leave it home a lot. Now that I have  a decent pocket camera, I can more easily shoot casual photos around town, and in places where it is awkward to be the geek with the big camera. Two years from now I will probably hate it…but maybe not. I still have my 5 year old Canon SD1100. And it still takes decent pictures…if a bit marginal. I bent the lens on Easter Overhang. It hangs now and then. But the pictures are useable, if not pretty.

We are changing and improving our program in the spring. A lot of my classes will either change, or go away. We have removed Illustrator 2 and Photoshop 2, as will as Dreamweaver and Flash 2 and 3. We also got rid of drawing and 3D. The media program will be all video all the time. I’ve started shooting more video again, especially after realizing I’d forgotten it all in just 6 months. I will try to post some images and video soon.

I had an awesome trip to Jtree. I’m not going to post pictures here, it’s too much trouble. Rather, they are on my main website.

Since returning, I’ve been working at refining the painting in my back bedroom. I’m hoping I didn’t kill it. Sue didn’t like it when she first saw it down there, and she is a very good judge of what will appeal to a gallery. So I worked it over for a few hours, tweaking this, and taming the sky, which looked like a bad LSD flashback.

We are both still recovering from that trip. It was far too much driving for 2 people. I did it in 28 hours on the way down, but with two of us we shaved 4 hours off that. I was glad I didn’t mount the studded tires. There is no reason when the snow is only 1 hour of the whole trip. As Sue said, you just have to drive slow.