I recently upgraded from a 2008 Apple iMac to a 6-core 3.33GHz Mac Pro. The iMac is an awesome computer with a beautiful screen, and I never complained about its speed (3.06GHz dual core) until I bought a Canon 5D Mark ii DSLR. The 21mpx RAW files and stunning HD video took its toll on my hard drive and processor.
In the week that I've had the Mac Pro, I've been nothing but pleased with how great this machine is. Along with that, however, is the painful realization that most software has yet to take advantage of all twelve of those logical cores. Aperture is *much* faster than it was on my old machine, but I'd expect to see more parallelization of bulk tasks such as importing.
Importing isn't ideal, but I just noticed that exporting is! Here's a screenshot from iStat of an 80-file export, successfully using my machine's full potential.
I won't hold my breath for better use of the cores in other areas of the app right now, but I will definitely enjoy knowing that exporting will be nearly as fast as it can be.
I'm not one for New Year's resolutions, but I have been meaning to spend more time tinkering with my Canon 5D Mark II's video capabilities. When my car wouldn't start in the bitter cold* this morning, I decided to take the opportunity to shoot some clips with my new Lensbaby Composer and plastic optic lens system.
First, if it's not yet obvious, I'm no video-processing guru. In fact, this short clip took exactly three times as long as it should have to put together - about two and a half hours in all. It's the most complex video work I've done with iMovie 09, and I'm just now starting to see why advanced users complain about its lack of features and move to Final Cut Studio. You can probably accomplish most of what you need with iMovie, but you may have to jump through hoops to do it. Luckily, it's very easy and powerful for general purposes.
This was shot with a single camera from three different shots: 1. stationary shot with the camera on the seat 2. dashboard shot of the flashing lights 3. death scene with the sun flares
The stationary shot was the longest, so I detached its audio and used it throughout the whole video. I tinkered with iMovie's precision editor to achieve realistic transitions between the different clips. You can nudge around +/- 0.1 second in either direction, and if you're as neurotic as I am, you end up spending quite a good bit of time nudging.
I must say that I'm now hooked on the Lensbaby Composer. Its optics really give you creative freedom. A significant portion of a normal lens' cost goes into its ability to reduce flare. Sometimes, like in the death scene here, flare is beautiful, and boy can you achieve it with the Lensbaby plastic optic! For the dashboard scene, I wanted to draw attention to the flashing lights, so I bent the lens to keep the lower right corner of the video mostly in focus while blurring the rest to hell.
I imagine I'll be flooding my Flickr stream with a tad too many Lensbaby shots over the next few months...
* I consider 21 degrees Fahrenheit to be bitter cold... your milage may vary...
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