I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
I had a bit of play with the new iMovie 08 today. It’s complete different from the last iMovie. Apple brought the technology and has taken a bit of flack.
I’ve done little with movies before and found I quite like it. I had a quick walk through the tutorials, and within 15 minutes I had video playing on my AppleTV. My little boy loved that.
You soon discover that movies chew disk. iMovie allows you to save ‘Movie Events’ (your raw tape) to an attached Firewire disk. I found this a bit strange as I have a USB disk attached to my Airport which can’t be used, but a bit more research and I understand that it needs to be directly attached Firewire to be usable.
So I think this is how my home network topology is playing out.
The big USB drive attached to AirPort Extreme is primarily a back up drive. Each Mac pushes its User Directory down to it each night.
I’ll have a separate FireWire disk, just for movies. That drive will live at home and I can change that between machines. I will also back its contents up to the USB Drive.
Of course it would be great to in turn back that drive up over the Internet somewhere on a trickle/diff basis. Maybe Amazon S3. More research required. I also want to work out how to manage iPhoto and iTunes between each Mac and the Server.
blog
Sounds like you have a good system going there.
After some research I’ve just signed up with Mozy (mozy.com).
It does the incremental online backup you mentioned, however, its pretty slow getting the first lot of information up. From what I can tell it looks like its going to be about a gigabyte a day to upload everything. However, once its up its a lot easier. I know I’ll rest a lot easier knowing that if something serrious happens to my local backups then at least I’ve got another set out there.
Be great if there was a local version. Thanks for the tip.
you can conserve space by capturing the video in mpg format (if you are not editing it), mpg’s need to be re-rendered for editing, avi’s are better for that
i have 20 video projects on my pc, and it takes over 180 GB
> Chris
what happens with mozy.com when you need to restore the backup, do you download a gb a day until your machine is restored ? uploading only seems like half the problem
Nothing in NZ that I’m aware of, this is an application that peering would make a lot of sense for. Damn, I’m not allowed to agree with you am I? :-)
http://www.rsync.net/ comes well recommended, including geo-diverse backups if you are paranoid. It isn’t free, but the pricing scales well.
Bruce
Don’t use the AVI format for video - more recent standards offer much better compression with fewer artefacts. Also, AVI is notorious for poor synchronisation between video and audio.
Have you though about getting yourself something like a NetApps FAS250 filer and talking to one of the outsourcers like Revera to back it up across the Internet for you. :-)
I’m guessing that evil Asymetric part of ADSL isn’t helping with upload speeds. Perhaps I need to move into the center of Wellington and hook myself up to some fibre.
The Mac version of Mozy is still in ‘beta’ so there aren’t as many restore options as Windows users currently have. You can select individual files online, or they will ship you a dvd with your data on. Again, not great being in NZ and relying on the postal service. It’s certrainly not perfect, but its easy enough.
I won’t turn this into a boring codec debate, but my personal favourite on the mac is the innocuously named H.264. It creates beautiful, small files. It’s what the iPhone YouTube videos are in.
The idea of the FireWire drive is to store the video as lossless as possible. Who knows what size screens we’ll have when the kids are 21.
You then export it to what ever display format you like.
I’m thinking seriously about getting an HD Camera as well.
Chris, agree, the iPhone YouTube quality is stunning. Bumped into one of the Sidhe guys at Mojo today who is using his iPhone as a portfolio demo tool. Very, very cool.
A while back I figured out how to use rsync in Windows, so I setup a cut-down Linux box and after doing an initial local backup (to bypass the whole problem of sending the initial full backup over the Internets) I sent it offsite and performed incremental backups from then on. I was amazed at how well it worked.
rsync calculates checksums at each end independently and only transmits the block-level differences, and to make it even more efficient, you can tell it to compress what it sends. Absolutely amazing how good it is; e.g. my Quicken files are ~15MB, and rsync would figure out what had changed and upload maybe half a meg each time I rsynced, which given that it is a binary file that could change anywhere is pretty amazing. Same for ~100MB PST files.
The other really cool thing you can do with rsync (which I was doing also), is that you create daily snapshots using a built-in feature of the UNIX file system (called hard-links) that duplicates an entire directory structure by pointing at copies of the files that already exist on the hard drive. So… you upload your initial full backup and that becomes the base. After that, for every time you invoke your backup script, rsync will create a whole new directory structure, identical to the base (you can’t tell the difference), but it is pointing to the base files, and is only storing any changed files separately (so it is using only the storage needed for the modified files). This basically behaves like Apple’s new “time machine” backup system. You login to the Linux box, cd /home/backups/2007-06-22/ and voila, you are seeing exactly what your file system looked like on that date. And the best part is that it is doing it in a very storage-efficient way, so you can keep months worth of snapshots.
I don’t know how well I explained that, but it’s super cool anyway. Offsite backups are the ONLY way to go.
I lost my hosting location, so I no longer have it operational. But if you have somewhere in Wellington you could host something like this (and I’m sure you do), let me know and I’ll set something up for you. Getting it going on the Mac will be an extra little challenge.
Call it a spring project.
–John
Great bumping into you yesterday Rod - The iphone just keeps getting better. I ran this easy little hack successfully today. It allows you to use the voicemail hotlink icon to access your vodaphone voice messages: (posted at bottom)
One click video encoder, transfer to iphone app I use:
http://www.videora.com/en-us/Converter/iPhone/
To chime in on the sheer amount of video data discussion. We’ve had huge problems moving into the HD era for creating trailers on our games. Capturing native 720 or 1080p running at 30, 60fps is a logistical nightmare. We’ve sourced an HDMI capture card from Protel that seems to be working - getting sufficiently fast and large enough hard drives to write out at 200 mb/s+ is the next challenge…
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/
iphone voice mail hack:
1. First, take note of what your voicemail number is with your current provider (for example, in Spain the Vodafone voicemail number is 177).
2. Click on the phone button in your iPhone.
3. Click on the keypad tab.
4. Tap the following code:
*5005*86*xxx#
The xxx is the voicemail number, in our example it will read: *5005*86*177#
5. Tap call.
6. After a second, the code will have been set.
7. Tap now on the voicemail button and it will automatically call your usual voicemail service.