The Mac Pro - a year in the studio

Interesting write up about using the Mac Pro in a 3d studio for a full year. They start testing it with Redshift and Octane at the end which is interesting. The USD previews are cool as well. The biggest thing for me is when they are caching a Houdini sim and can continue working in another program. My computer could not handle that for sure. But after being burned by the trash can mac, I don’t trust them to continue support for it. Interesting though.

“The Mac Pro has given us stability in complex workflows and enabled us to create larger, more detailed worlds than we have ever attempted before. We can animate more characters, paint larger textures and simulate more realistic effects. It allows us to work seamlessly across multiple applications simultaneously and we can continue to work while waiting for heavy tasks to process.

There is now more support than ever from developers. It’s great to see support for new technologies that take full advantage of the hardware like the Redshift and Octane GPU renderers and game engines like Unreal. Apple’s dedication to professionals and studio workflows is apparent with the integration of USD in the core of macOS.

The Pro Display XDR has given us the ability to work in the P3-DCI colour space for feature films and develop workflows for HDR which is something we can now offer to our clients with confidence.

We must address the elephant in the room, Apple silicon. We feel reassured that Apple has aided the transition with Rosetta 2 and noticed the cheeky inclusion of Maya already running on it in the announcement keynote. It’s also great to see the developers of the software we use announce support, like Chaos Group noting plans to support ARM based architectures with their V-Ray rendering engine later this year.”

Man, that is is freaking UGLY though……

Stanford study into “Zoom Fatigue” explains why video chats are so tiring

“The first cause for Zoom Fatigue suggested by Bailenson is the state of stressed hyper-arousal generated by excessive stretches of close-up eye contact. Unlike an in-person meeting, where participants will shift from looking at a speaker to other activities, such as note taking, on Zoom everyone is always staring at everyone.

The anxiety generated by a number of faces staring at you can be likened to the stresses of public speaking but amplified to a degree regardless of who is talking. Bailenson explains, from a perceptual standpoint, Zoom turns every participant on a call into a constant speaker smothered with eye gaze.”

I am not a fan of the zoom call. A) I have to do a hard search on everything in the studio to make sure nothing from another client is visible. B) I have to scrub my desktop if they want to screen share. Move their project to a seperate hard drive so and turn off all notifications in case a email or slack pops up. Which as far as I know, is really difficult to turn on in windows. It’s just too much of a risk for us here. And don’t forget, zoom calls are not encrypted. Then there is something about the video quality that gives me a instant headache. Conference calls are garbage enough, now lets add in shitty video with terrible lag, syc issues and bad lighting, YES! I WANT THAT!

Also, get off my porch. Ahem.

Reaper

So I dabble in recording stuff, because, hey, why not? But with COVID, not being able to record new stuff, and all of that I have been pretty burned out. Also, I have been using Pro Tools for the last few years and it has gotten really stale. Just opening the program is depressing somehow. They are like the Maya or Photoshop of DAWs. Don’t like it? Screw you.

But recently one of my friends has started to track stuff at their place and wanted me to lay down drums on it. I think I recommended Reaper to him as an affordable way to record years ago, but not too sure about that. But after working with his files a bit I figured to make sending the project back and forth smoother I would give Reaper a try.

Man, it so far has been way nicer to use than Pro Tools. I took the entire project from Protools to Reaper without even have to google anything. The UI is just that easy to follow and find stuff. If anyone else is looking to escape the Pro Tools nightmare of dongles, license crap, crashes (oh my god the crashes!), I highly suggest giving Reaper a shot.

Folder instead of busses are just so simple and awesome to use. Guitar bus? Just make a blank track and drag them in. Done. Super clean and customizable interface. So far the only real hitch is that the free plug-ins that ship with it are downright ugly, lol! The 7 band EQ is pretty slick and has some nice functionality but it just looks like something from 98. Also, I can’t get my Sound Toys plugs in to load which is a bummer. But FET compressor and pretty much all my other ones load no problem. Get FET now. It’s so worth it.

The next step is to install it on my recording rig and get all the mics configured and try out some tracking with it. In Pro Tools I have been having a lot of crashes that when I am playing and it locks, it just starts screaming in your ear. So bad….

A little hope shiing in this dark void?

“Facebook hit with massive antitrust lawsuit from 46 states”

“A huge collection of states filed an antitrust lawsuit Wednesday accusing Facebook of suppressing its competition through monopolistic business practices. Forty-eight attorneys general across 46 states, the territory of Guam and the District of Columbia are behind the lawsuit, with only South Dakota, South Carolina, Alabama and Georgia declining to join.

The lawsuit, which looks at Facebook’s actions throughout the company’s history, alleges that the company bought competitors “illegally” and in a “predatory manner” in order to grow and preserve its market power. The suit cites Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp as prominent examples.”

Oh man, this would be so awesome.

Is it possible to play music together over the internet?

Here is something my friend Steve sent my way that I have yet to test out, but it looks like it might work? The Windows client is in Beta though which could be troublesome. If I get the time to run some tests, I’ll post the results here. Musicians Together Apart.

The hardest number to hit for most people will be the ping which from the Network Testing page needs to be under 50ms, best if under 30ms. All the other stats seem very doable with most broadband.



Apple M1 new info.

I have been on Windows for a few years here now, but I recently started following the Apple M1 chip info that is coming out and it’s pretty interesting. New update today from Bloomberg talks about a MAc Pro possibly next year.

" Apple’s M1 chip was unveiled in a new entry-level MacBook Pro laptop, a refreshed Mac mini desktop and across the MacBook Air range. The company’s next series of chips, planned for release as early as the spring and later in the fall, are destined to be placed across upgraded versions of the MacBook Pro, both entry-level and high-end iMac desktops, and later a new Mac Pro workstation, the people said."

The Social Dilemma

Watched the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma” the other night and while I think all the criticisms in this essay are spot on, I still think it is very much worth watching. It will really give you a clear picture on how much your devices are actually manipulating you. My news blackout now is expanding to keeping devices at bay. Blogging is a bit different as this is a sit down workstation for “doing shit”. Not just that addictive mindless scrolling, searching or playing mobile games like what happened when one uses any portable device.

Engineers produce a fisheye lens that’s completely flat

K, this is nutso, future stuff here. Think of the possibilities.

“Now engineers at MIT and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell have designed a wide-angle lens that is completely flat. It is the first flat fisheye lens to produce crisp, 180-degree panoramic images. The design is a type of “metalens,” a wafer-thin material patterned with microscopic features that work together to manipulate light in a specific way.

In this case, the new fisheye lens consists of a single flat, millimeter-thin piece of glass covered on one side with tiny structures that precisely scatter incoming light to produce panoramic images, just as a conventional curved, multielement fisheye lens assembly would. The lens works in the infrared part of the spectrum, but the researchers say it could be modified to capture images using visible light as well.”

“In one demonstration, the new lens is tuned to operate in the mid-infrared region of the spectrum. The team used the imaging setup equipped with the metalens to snap pictures of a striped target. They then compared the quality of pictures taken at various angles across the scene, and found the new lens produced images of the stripes that were crisp and clear, even at the edges of the camera’s view, spanning nearly 180 degrees.

“It shows we can achieve perfect imaging performance across almost the whole 180-degree view, using our methods,” Gu says.”

Flamethrowers and Fire Extinguishers – a review of “The Social Dilemma”

Interesting essay about the Netflix show, The Social Dilemma that gets into some aspects about the current public discourse that is troubling. This paragraph really hit home to me.

“The Social Dilemma clearly wants to avoid taking sides. And in so doing demonstrates the ways in which Silicon Valley has taken sides. After all, to focus so heavily on polarization and the extremism of “both sides” just serves to create a false equivalency where none exists. But, the view that “the Trump administration has mismanaged the pandemic” and the view that “the pandemic is a hoax” – are not equivalent. The view that “climate change is real” and “climate change is a hoax” – are not equivalent. People organizing for racial justice and people organizing because they believe that Democrats are satanic cannibal pedophiles – are not equivalent. The view that “there is too much money in politics” and the view that “the Jews are pulling the strings” – are not equivalent. Of course, to say that these things “are not equivalent” is to make a political judgment, but by refusing to make such a judgment The Social Dilemma presents both sides as being equivalent. There are people online who are organizing for the cause of racial justice, and there are white-supremacists organizing online who are trying to start a race war—those causes may look the same to an algorithm, and they may look the same to the people who created those algorithms, but they are not the same.”

The Attention Economy

interesting short on something I have been spending a lot of time thinking about. We are just in a firehose of information and a major part of the modern economy is built on TAKING that attention from us and our goals.

“When information becomes abundant, attention becomes the scarce resource. “ - Herbert Simon

Another interesting point is that the whole point of the internet was to be decentralized. But now it’s in the hands of very few gate keepers. Facebook and Google do not have peoples best interests in mind.



Seriously, quit Instagram.

Good lord, seriously, just quit Facebook AND Instagram already.

“Facebook Inc. is again being sued for allegedly spying on Instagram users, this time through the unauthorized use of their mobile phone cameras.

The lawsuit springs from media reports in July that the photo-sharing app appeared to be accessing iPhone cameras even when they weren’t actively being used.

Facebook denied the reports and blamed a bug, which it said it was correcting, for triggering what it described as false notifications that Instagram was accessing iPhone cameras.

In the complaint filed Thursday in federal court in San Francisco, New Jersey Instagram user Brittany Conditi contends the app’s use of the camera is intentional and done for the purpose of collecting “lucrative and valuable data on its users that it would not otherwise have access to.”

Keep in mind this is after all this shit I posted about before when I quit these apps. They are cancer on our society. Stop contributing.

“At some point, I wanna write something up about me leaving instagram, but I just don’t have the focus or mental fortitude to dig up all the links on the evil crap Facebook is pulling. Suffice to say that they are stealing all your biometrics, actively promoting Trump in has tags over Biden and straight-up promoting Conservative views. That’s just for starters and all from the past month. Yeah, no shit. So they can eat a bag, I’m done. Need to just put something on there to explain it and point to the blog. Instagone. “

Live Dangerously

I don’t think I have had a “no Issue: update this year. Pen jumping, hand tool not working with space bar, pressure not working with size, UI glitching out….. Lets see what fresh hell this brings this morning.

Screenshot 2020-09-09 090018.jpg

The Simple Joy of “No Phones Allowed”

The effect was immediately noticeable upon entering the concert bowl. Aside from the time-travel-like strangeness of seeing a crowd devoid of blue screens, there was a palpable sense of engagement, as though—and it sounds so strange to say it—everyone came just so they could be there.

People were visibly enjoying the opening band, at least in part because that band no longer compete with the entire internet for the crowd’s attention. Even the crowd’s milling around and chatting between acts was so much more lively. People were either talking to their neighbors, or taking in the room. And everyone taking in the room was taking in the same room. It felt great. 

…Distracted concert crowds are a problem worth addressing, but it’s a small one, relatively speaking. I don’t think we’ve even begun to comprehend the full cost of our devices on our lives, particularly on our social structures, the development of our children, and our overall mental health. When the long-term studies start coming out, we’re going to be appalled.

I imagine that in another decade or two we’ll look at 2010s-era device use something like we do now with cigarette smoking. I was born in 1980, and I remember smoking sections on planes, which is unthinkable today. I wonder if today’s kids will one day vaguely remember the brief, bizarre time when people didn’t think twice about lighting up a screen in the middle of a darkened concert hall.

I can get behind this. I occasionally go through a phase where I leave my phone at home and there are a few things you notice. First thing I notice is that the cell phone has a cigarette like pull on me. When I used to smoke, the first thing I would do when I had a free second is reach for a smoke. Waiting for the band to clear the stage, smoke. Waiting for other to show up to rehearsal, smoke. Waiting for the bus, smoke. Same damn thing with a cell phone.

The second thing you notice is everyone glued to their damn phones EVERYWHERE. It’s like “They Live”. It’s really odd to see it and not be of it. This is a nice paragraph as well.

Every time someone in a group of people deploys a screen, the whole group is affected. Each disengaged person in a crowd is like a little black hole, a dead zone for social energy, radiating a noticeable field of apathy towards the rest of the room and what’s happening there.

We all know this feeling from being at a restaurant table when one person has “discreetly” ducked out into their screen. Even while everyone else is happily chatting face-to-face, everyone feels the hole.

The full strength of this black-hole effect on today’s social events can be hard to appreciate, because it has crept into our lives so gradually. But it sure was obvious in a venue at which everyone’s ripcord has been checked at the door. So much more attention stayed in the room, and it was palpable.

Think I may give the no cell phone outside the house thing again…..

Total Finder for Mac

Found this little plug in on the Modo forums and so far I am really loving it.  It brings back the full color bar for labels in the Finder window instead of just the little dots. Some other nice features I like is that windows are forced to open in the same tabbed group and you can have it put folders at the top of a list. Overall makes the Finder much easier to work with when you have a large number of files / projects going on. Called Total Finder.

Made with MIschief

The Foundry, makers of my fav 3d program Modo, just released a sketching program called Mischief and so far I am having a ton of fun with it. While I would not consider myself someone who draws stuff from scratch I do enjoy it and have been dabbling in Painter and different Photoshop techniques to do hand drawings for years.  So far this program is the simplest and most intuitive to use for me. Just the other day I tried showing Painter to someone who is a  accomplished painter and it's just too freaking complicated to easily use for anything.  With Mischief if you want a bigger brush, zoom out. Smaller brush?  Zoom in.  Kind of how it should work.  Plus, you can zoom in forever without any pixelation.  It is the most bizarre thing to do and really awesome. This is the first thing I did in it last night, once again I am not a drawing type of guy but it was easy to use and sketch in.  I could really use this when concepting or storyboarding.   Oh yeah, bonus, there is a free version and a $25 version.  You really can't say no.

Holy crap: HP Announces 36-Core Desktop Workstations

"The new Z840, Z640, and Z440 desktops are more quiet and power-efficient than their predecessors, but the big news was the support for 36 processing cores on the Z840 and Z640. Yes, we all asked if the number was a mistake. HP showed us the system monitor, which displayed a total of 72 threads (doubling the core number via hyper-threading)."

Wow, that with WD's new 10 TB drives would be quite the workstation.  Might need to upgrade my Wintel box soon ;)

Testing: Using Colorway.

Made a quick Demo of what is possible in The Foundry's new program Colorway. What is awesome about this is that I can provide this to a client and they can do all the color ups they want to explore and then send the file back to me for final output giving a lot more control to the end client. Lights and colors can all be easily tweaked. A pretty awesome product.  

Model was provided by the highly awesome Joe Myers at Sketchbook Inc. from a 3d scan.