AnandTech on the recently announced Apple Silicon M2 Chip

Ryan Smith has a must read article on the recently announced Apple M2 Apple Silicon chip that is in the new Air and low end MacBook Pro.

Basically while it can be more energy efficient, it can also run more power and be more powerful. And it is larger than the previous generation, and it also includes ProRes acceleration instead of just H264 acceleration in the chip. Also it has more memory capacity, 24 vs 16 and at 100GB/sec vs 68GB/sec in the previous M1,

And the larger chip will have Max and Ultra versions and I am betting the quad version that will be in the next Mac Pro, which makes me happy that they didn’t yet release the MacPro as if it is based on this it will beat out the current Mac Studio, though will certainly be quite expensive.

Been having the weirdest crash, where I can’t shutdown my iMac Pro, on shutdown, it crashes and restarts

So my iMac Pro has been crashing on shutdown. I shutdown and the computer seems to fully shut down, but then restarts and shows a crash. The crash kept showing com.apple.iokit.IOStorageFamily as the crash, so I realized it was hard drive related.

Now I have a lot of hard drives hooked up to my computer, not only for work, but for personal use as well, and I currently have 2 OWC Thunderbays hooked up to my mac, one Thunderbolt 3 which is mine and a Thunderbolt 2 that is works, and about 3 work hard drives, plus 4 external hard drives for storage in one 4 bay from OWC as well as s couple other storage and backup drives, and an external SSD as a media cache and about 4 work hard drives, and the internal on my iMac Pro. So a metric shit ton of hard drives.

Now I started disconnecting drives and trying things and got various results, with the problem occurring with different drives, but then finally it came down to the second OWC Thunderbay, the Thunderbolt 2 one. And if I turn that off the problem stopped happening. So I started wondering if it was the 2 different drives, and I wrote to OWC / Softraid as they are both OWC drives with softraid.

I gave them the crash report, and they told me something I didn’t know.

This is a kernel bug in MacOS. To avoid this, unmount and disconnect the USB drives before shutdown. (or your thunder bay). Its a known bug that 12 drives will cause a Mac to crash at shutdown.

Well how long has Apple had this damn issue. I know most people don’t get close to that, but I have surpassed it and ran the fuck into it.

Sure I can shut drives down first, but that is certainly a pain in the ass. And sometimes I have to shutdown the drives, then restart and then I can shutdown.

Color me frustrated, but OWC was fast and helpful.

AVID Media Composer added over-the-shoulder workflows at NAB 2022

The new version of Media Composer Enterprise and Ultimate added SRT or Secure Reliable Transport for streaming remotely for people who work from home or for clients around the world and it is all encrypted and encoded.

It can go from a single device to a single receiver or to multiple people using additional hardware.

This is very cool, especially the encryption as it means the studios will get on board with it, which will enable more remote workflows.

RedShark NAB 2022: Moving beyong three primary colours

I know I know, I am a bit behind here, NAB 2022 is long past, but this article by Phil Rhodes at Red Shark is very interesting on some of the new tech shown at NAB. I guess 6P Color was showing monitors with 6 primary colors instead of 3 and they look amazing, though are expensive and probably won’t catch on. I am sure it would be an improvement, as it would be with a camera photo-site, though would have to be larger.

Redshark asks if modern cinematography is too dark, and I think it absolutely is

Neil Oseman has a great article from April on Is Modern Cinematography too dark?

An interesting read, though I don’t think it goes into a main reason behind much of the issue. The color bay. Color bays today use the absolute best top of the line equipment, the best and brightest monitors and it is done in a dark room. This method of color correction makes great results for the theatrical experience, where the lights are off, and it is a very dark environment. In this “perfect” situation you can make the image much darker than you maybe should, especially for a TV show.

If you are delivery for a home experience, you should use a lighter room, because that is what most people do at home. Heck at home I have my iPad half the time, so another bright screen. I hate when a show is so dark that you are forced to turn the lights off just to see anything (I can except it with a movie, but not TV).

Oseman talked about the Game of Thrones final season which was so dark it was a joke, and then concludes that it is what the cinematographer wants, but again they should then correct in ideal situations for how they are delivering.