Category: Peripherals

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Digital Video: Moving to Tapeless Workflows

Last year I wrote a post out of frustration called “Just say no to HDD and MiniDVD camcorders.” The industry seemed hell bent on moving away from the the MiniDV standard that we had all come to know and love and instead turn the world of video into the wild wild west. Every manufacturer started doing their own thing and moving away from standards that were tried and true. The rush was on to try to become the leader in High Def digital video. It was extremely frustrating at the time because unknowing consumers were becoming the “beta test bed” for these manufacturers who were throwing everything they could out there to see what would stick. The biggest frustration was getting a camera that recorded in a format that wasn’t easily edited.

I did nibble at the HD bait and I purchased a Sony HDV camera. This camera could record in both DV and HDV. It was still taped based and still had Firewire (i-Link). However, after my first experience of the long rendering time to get HDV down to DV for burning to a DVD, I said “what’s the point?” I might as well be shooting in DV.” So I sold my Sony on eBay and continued to shoot in DV on my older gear. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of technology and nothing would please me more than to move off of tape. However, the problem was that there were no real tapeless standards back then. So my answer was to continue to shoot in DV and use an external hard drive attached right to my camera to have the best of both worlds (standard DV for editing and tapeless for convenience). I absolutely LOVE the Focus Enhancements Firestore FS-4 DTE Drives. These drives let you record your DV or HDV footage right to a external hard drive attached to your camera’s Firewire port and then you can attach the drive right to your computer and copy the file(s) over. It’s MUCH FASTER than the time it would take to download form tape in real-time.

These drives rock! However, they’re add weight and a certain amount of bulkiness to your camera setup, especially if you’re using a little handheld camera. I’ve never understood why Sony or Canon didn’t just build a “removable” drive into their camcorders. Life would have been so much simpler.

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So let’s fast forward to today

The dust has settled a little. The industry seems to have settled on AVCHD as the format of choice in the consumer space (at least for now). My new camera is the Canon VIXIA HF10. This camcorder can record HD (1920×1080) video to either its built-in 16GB of flash memory or to an SD/SDHC card.

I tried it out for the first time during Photoshop World Vegas. This was the camcorder I used to shoot the Keynote video. I wasn’t concerned about shooting in HD. I was really interested in seeing how this camera would perform in post production. I was actually shocked at how well it “just worked.” I got back to my hotel room that day and just connected the HF10 to my MacBook Pro via the supplied USB cable. I transferred the footage over and just started editing it. Speaking of editing…

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The editing software has caught up

Another frustration I had last year was that none of my editing apps would edit the footage from these tapeless cameras. Now all of my apps have caught up. My editing app of choice is Adobe Premiere Pro. The New Premiere Pro CS4 now edits natively in AVCHD.

The CS3 version was leading the pack in the pro arena with native support for XDCAM EX, Panasonic’s P2 cameras and the hot new RED One. Now that Premiere Pro CS4 supports editing files from the latest tapeless formats, including RED, AVCHD, P2, XDCAM EX and HD, natively, without transcoding or rewrapping plus all of the legacy formats (DV, HDV, etc.), there is no better choice for tapeless workflows IMHO.

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Everyone is up in arms about the New MacBook – missing Firewire – KIA!

There have been many many heated posts over Apple’s decision to remove Firewire from the New MacBook. We’re talking about the consumer version, not the MacBook Pro which still includes a single FW 800 port. While I’m a fan of Firewire and would NOT want to lose it on any of my Macs, I can actually see why Apple removed it from the MacBook. If you look at where the industry is going in the consumer space, it’s moving AWAY from Firewire, not towards it. All of the new tapeless camcorders use USB, not Firewire. Firewire had been used in the consumer space mostly for working with video. So if the new consumer cameras don’t do Firewire, then why should the new consumer MacBook? Before you start with the hate-mail/comments, I get it (I’m on your side, I know, I know)! I know that Firewire has other IMPORTANT uses such as Target Disk Mode, fast Migration Assistant transfers, fast portable drives, working with audio gear, etc. and again these are the reasons why I would NOT want to lose my Firewire port on my MacBook Pro. However, if you’re NEW to the Mac (which according to Apple, 50% of the people buying Macs in Apple stores are), then you’re not going to miss these things, because you wouldn’t have known they were there in the first place. So I can see it from their perspective, which doesn’t mean I like it, it just means I understand it. Breathe! It will be OK. I remember when the first MacBook Pro didn’t come with Firewire 800! Pros screamed LOUDLY and the next thing you know, Firewire 800 made a come back on the next rev. So if enough people scream and more importantly don’t buy the new MacBook, then Apple may reconsider. It will be interesting to watch.

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The Bottom Line – Is the water safe?

While the Canon HF10 worked as advertised (it is my camcorder of choice for travel) and I now have a great editing app to support it, I’m still not quite ready to make an investment in swapping out my pro-sumer gear. I’m still happy with the results I’m getting from my DV based Sony VX2000. The VX2000 coupled with the Firestore drive gives me everything I need. If I were to move up to HD for my event video work, the problem would be that I would still be delivering the final video on DVD, since most people have not moved up to Blu-ray yet. If that’s the case, then I might as well stick to widescreen standard def. Once Blu-ray becomes more mainstream (players down to the $100 or less range). I’ll take another look and see what the market is like then.

Should you buy a tapeless camera? Well that depends on your needs. If you already have a video solution that’s working, I would caution you to pause and take a look at what you hope to gain? In the consumer space these new AVCHD cameras are pretty sweet. Manufacturers are bypassing hard drives altogether and using flash memory instead. No moving parts and because they don’t use tapes (or hard drives), they are getting to be quite small. That’s a big plus for travelers. Also now that the newer ones support removable cards like SD cards, they are much more feasible to take on a trip because you won’t be totally relying on the built-in memory, which could fill up before you got back home. I still say STAY AWAY FROM CAMERAS THAT RECORD DIRECTLY TO A DVD or BLU-RAY DISC! These cameras SUCK when it comes to needing to edit your footage. They were designed for the person who wants to shoot and playback the footage. If that’s all you want to do, then go for it. However, if you want the ability to edit in your computer, then avoid these models like the plague.Â

If you’re a video pro, then you’ll have more choices to make! Should you go RED, should you go P2 or should you go XDCAM? Will you be locked into some proprietary workflow? If you’re not using Premiere Pro (and you should be 🙂 ), will your software edit this footage natively? So my bottom line advice is the water is safer, but proceed with caution. You can also decide to just sit this one out. It will only continue to get better.

Check out this video from my DV guru, Dave Helmly on editing AVCHD footage in the New Premiere Pro CS4. He takes it from beginning to the end and even spits out a Blu-ray and other formats!
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[flv:http://media.libsyn.com/media/cspodcast/podcast-PR-AVCHD.mp4 628 353]

You can see more CS4 how-to videos on my Creative Suite Video Podcast or on Adobe TV.

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Use SD cards in your Compact Flash gear

Chances are that if you’re using an DSLR camera that uses Compact Flash cards, you’re pretty happy with the cards you’re using. However, there are times that it would be nice to be able use the SD card format in my Compact Flash (CF) gear. Don’t get me wrong, I can’t think of too many times (like never) that I would want to stick an SD card into my Nikon D300 or D700. However, there are times that someone will hand me an SD card with pictures on it and I only have either my Firewire 800 CF reader or my ExpressCard slot CF Reader with me. As a matter of fact that very thing just happened to me this past Sunday. I was at my users group meeting and there was a member there taking pictures and at the end of the meeting he handed me his SDHC SD card. I didn’t have my multi-format card reader with me. All I had was my FW800 CF Reader. Luckily I had a USB cable and we just connected his camera to my computer directly to transfer the pics.

 

The CFMulti

Actually the CFMulti by Synchrotech is designed and promoted to allow the use of EyeFi SD Wi-Fi cards in CF based cameras (like many of the popular DSLRs out there today). There’s no software to install. You simply insert your SD card in the bottom of this adapter and then put the adapter (SD card and all) in your Compact Flash based device. As I’ve written in the past, I’m not a fan of the EyeFi card. I think it’s cool technology, but just not very usable (at least for me.) So if all this thing did was support the EyeFi card in CF based cameras, then I could really care less.

The picture I painted above is really the situation that I use the CFMulti in. With the CFMulti I can now just carry my favorite, fastest card reader(s) and not have to worry about not being able to read the occasional SD cards.

The CFMulti is going for $28 on the Synchrotech website.

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Drobo Firewire 800 Review

 

My buddies have been raving about Drobo for over a year. For some reason I was just not getting it. Maybe it was the name or the tagline of “data robot” that was throwing me. Anytime someone mentioned Drobo, I would have a vision of a robotic arm that would move drives from slot to slot.

 

What is Drobo?

Well, I finally took a closer look. Drobo is not a robot! At least not in the mechanical sense. Drobo is a 4 bay hard drive array (RAID) that continuously monitors the health of the drives you install. Drobo automatically combines the drives you install into a single volume mounted on your desktop. The drives are also automatically mirrored/stripped for data protection. For example, if you put in two 750GB drives you will only have 696.8GB of available storage to you. This is because Drobo is using the other space (drive) to constantly protect/mirror/backup your data as it’s writing it. It’s also reserving a little bit of space so that you can hot swap out a drive if needed because you want to install a bigger one or if one is failing.

 

What sets Drobo apart?

I have used and written about other RAID systems. What sets Drobo apart from the rest is that it doesn’t require that the drives be the same size. You could for example start with a 750GB drive and 1TB drive. This won’t buy you any extra space if you’re only using two drives, but it will allow you to grow your available space by adding say a 3rd drive. The Drobo website has a fantastic “Drobolator” (space calculator) that will allow you to play out all your “what if” scenarios on how much space you will have depending on how many drives you install. The other thing that sets Drobo apart is the way it works with multiple drives. Drobo uses a technology called BeyondRAID. This allows it use both Mirroring and Striping. Drobo is also different in that it constantly monitors the health of your drives and doesn’t just tell you a drive has failed, but also tells you that a drive is going bad so that you can replace it BEFORE it dies. Even if you didn’t notice the warning (red light) and it died, you would still be protected as your data would be on the other drive(s) in the unit.

 

Great design

I love the way Drobo is designed. No screws or software to install (although the Drobo dashboard app makes it much easier to format your drive). You just pop off the magnetic cover and slide your hard drives in. The original Drobo was USB 2.0 ONLY. Many of the reviews I saw complained that this made it too slow for use as your main drive. The new Drobo is a Firewire 800 model (also has USB 2) and that makes it fast enough for regular use! The indicator lights on the front tell you all that you need to know including health of the drives and amount of space used.

 

What’s my configuration

I put four 1TB drives in it for a total usable capacity of 2.7TBs. Drobo is not bootable. I have it as a data drive on my Mac OS X Server. So far after a week, no major issues. It does take a few seconds longer to spin up, but that’s to be expected on any RAID system. 

 

Archiving, Backing up and Data Drive

The original Drobo, which was USB 2.0 only, wasn’t really fast enough to be used as a main drive. At least that’s what most people said about it. Therefore, most people looked at Drobo as an archival solution only and not for active use. Now that the Drobo has Firewire 800 support, it is fast enough to be used for your main drive or online storage. However, keep in mind that the Drobo is NOT bootable (even if you got it to work, it’s not recommended). This is why I have Drobo attached to my Mac OS X Server as a data drive, but not as the boot drive. I still boot from the internal drive which runs the Server OS and then I have the Drobo shared on my network via Mac OS X Server. Speaking of Archiving, the question becomes how much "stuff" do you need to keep? I’ve watched my server storage needs grow each year. I quickly went from a 250GB, to a 500GB, to a 750GB, then to a 1TB and now to 2.7TB’s of storage. What’s taking up so much space? You guessed it: Digital Photos, Music and Videos. I recently had a conversation about this very topic with Scott Kelby and he even wrote a blog post about this important topic with some tips. As a photographer, let’s say I do a shoot and let’s say I end up with 500 captures. I’ll do my best to narrow that down as best I can, eliminating the bad ones, the ones that are very similar or the ones that I just don’t like. Now let’s say that I’m down to 300 shots. I’ll then post a web gallery for the client, model, friend, etc. to pick the ones they want. So now let’s say they’ve picked their favorite 10 or so and I’ve picked my favorite 10 or so. Those are the ones that get retouched. Those are the ones that are delivered as the "Final" shots. So what do I do with the other 280? You guessed it, I keep them! Not once has anyone ever come back to me and said, "hey, you know those shots you took 6 months ago that I really didn’t like, well I’d like a couple of those shots now." So I literally have thousands of photos on my Drobo that will likely never see the light of day. Now keep in mind I know that family photos should be cherished and photos from wedding shoots should probably be kept, but where do you draw the line? Should those photos that no one wants (you or the client) be deleted? Should they be moved offline to some cheaper storage? Should they be deleted after so many months or years because they will likely not be needed? Everyone is going to have a different take on this. One thing I don’t trust is storing photos on a CDR or DVD as they will eventually fail. Putting them on a hard drive that you don’t use regularly could be risky too. Drives have lubricant in them that will eventually dry up or seize up if not used regularly. Online storage can be expensive too. I’m intrigued by the use of Flash drives for archival use. They are increasing in capacity and coming down in price. For example, Micro Center sells a 4GB drive for $12, a 8GB drive for $20 and a 16GB drive for $40. They are small and therefore easily stored. You could even bill it into the cost of the shoot. For example, if you were doing a portrait shoot and you expected to end up with 300 12MB RAW files, those would fit on a 4GB flash drive. So you could bill an extra $12 to store these photos. Slap a label on it, put it in an envelope and staple it to the contract/model release. However, the question of longevity still comes to mind. What’s the shelf life of these flash drives?

 

The bottom line

If your storage needs continue to grow, then Drobo is something that you should look at. As you need more space, you just add/replace with bigger drives. the drives are even hot swappable. You have to also remember that even though your data is much safer in a Drobo than a single drive, this doesn’t protect you in the case of a fire, flood or theft. So you should still have a strategy for offsite storage. I’m currently backing up my Drobo to an external Firewire drive (actually I rotate between two) that I put in the Safe Deposit Box at the bank. Drobo is cross platform and works on both Macs and Windows PCs. An empty Drobo (no drives) goes for $499.99. You can then buy whatever SATA drives in whatever capacities you want. You have to start with at least two. Use it for data, use it for archiving or use it for backup. If you want to share a Drobo and you don’t already have a fileserver set up, you can buy an additional piece of hardware called DroboShare ($197.48). Note: Although DroboShare has a Gigabit Ethernet connection, DroboShare connects to Drobo (up to two Drobos) via the USB 2 port and NOT the Firewire 800 port. So I wonder if that creates a bottleneck in performance? See how Drobo works from the Video demonstrations here.

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NeatReceipts for Mac

 

Having become a fan of the Fujitsu ScanSnap for Mac, I’ve been interested in having a more portable solution. One that would be small enough to take on the road if need be. While Fujitsu does over a smaller model, it’s still costly at a list price of $295.

I was standing in Staples the other day looking at point and shoot digital cameras and the scanners were right behind me. I looked back and saw the NeatReceipts display. I was intoxicated by the small size of this scanner. Of course Staples was out of them and it was probably a good thing since there was a newer model available online anyway. When I got home I ordered the NeatReceipts for Mac version. Now make no mistake, this scanning solution is designed for DOCUMENTS, not photos. I already have a portable CanoScan scanner for photo scanning when I travel to see family. I wanted this scanner to serve as a portable filing solution.

When my NeatReceipts scanner arrived I unboxed it and installed the software from the CD. Of course there was a newer version available online and I downloaded that version and installed it. I then ran the simple calibration procedure and I was ready to scan. NeatReceipts for Mac won’t win any races for speed. I was spoiled rotten by the Fujitsu scanner which is the fastest scanner I’ve ever owned. The NeatReceipts scanner only scans one side at a time and takes several seconds to scan an 8.5″x11″ page. Although slower than I imagined, it is still very acceptable. Had I never used the Fujitsu ScanSnap I wouldn’t have given the speed a second thought. The bundled software is designed to be your electronic filing cabinet. Documents and receipts that you scan are neatly filed away in collections (which are in Libraries).

The NeatReceipts scanner scans everything to PDF on the Mac. So there is no need for any kind of interim format. Once the document is scanned it is automatically OCR’d which makes it searchable in Spotlight. You can also bypass scanning into the NeatReceipts library. Although the app must be running in order to use the scanner, you can press the PDF button on the scanner and scan right to folder of your choice. It just pops up a dialog box asking you to name and choose the location for your scan that you’re about to perform. However, even if you do scan into their library app you can drag and drop a scan (PDF) from it to anywhere else on your drive including right into an email.

 

Scanning receipts

It’s clear to me (even by the name) that NeatReceipts was designed to scan receipts for the busy traveler or business person. The interface is designed to scan a receipt and then automatically detect things from the receipt such as price, business name, type of credit card used to pay, etc. It does an OK job at auto detecting this info and then filling it in on the right. Even when it doesn’t guess right (leaving a field empty) you can drag and drop lines of type from the actual scan into the fields as needed. Since it OCR’d the receipt, this is live text. When I scanned a couple of receipts as a test it seemed to scan more area around the paper than was needed. Luckily there is a crop feature, but it is 2-3 clicks to get a scan cropped. I would like to see a better auto page edge detection in the upcoming version.

 

Scanning documents

I scanned a couple of 8.5″x11″ documents. One was a simple letter and the other was a photo copy of a flyer that had photos on it. When scanning both documents using the hardware button on the scanner, it produced grayscale images of both. Clearly the letter could have been scanned as a black and white document. By scanning it as a grayscale, the resulting PDF was 2.8MB in size. I scanned the same letter using the software which allows you to specify “Scan Black and White document” and the resulting PDF was only 976KB. So it seems that you’ll get the best results by picking the appropriate option in the software as opposed to using the hardware buttons. Also there doesn’t seem to be any command keys for choosing the various types of scans. You have to go up to the Scan menu and then choose the appropriate option based on your needs:

 

How is the Mac version?

Neat Receipts for Mac is an “Advance Release”. In other words, this version is not yet complete with everything they intend to include. For example, the Windows version includes software to automatically convert scanned business cards into text directly going into your PIM (personal information manager). The Mac version doesn’t have that yet. NEAT Receipts for Mac was developed in the Apple programming environment (Cocoa) to provide an easy to use, functional interface that looks and feels like the applications you use every day. Seasoned Mac users will feel right at home using the intuitive design and those who have recently switched from PC will get accustomed to the interface in no time. NEAT Receipts for Mac does not yet match the NEAT Receipts PC version feature-for-feature but it includes some new features available only on the Mac such as drag-and-drop functionality, Image Flow (their version of Cover Flow), Smart Collections and more. Therefore NeatReceipts for Mac ($179.95) is cheaper than the Windows version ($229.95). They are promising full feature parity in early 2009 as a free update.

 

The Bottom Line

If you’re looking for the smallest document scanner you can find that is USB powered, I think this is it! It’s easy to use and works cross platform on Mac and PC. While it’s not as fast as other scanners out there, it is smaller than everything else I’ve seen easily fitting into a laptop bag. It also costs less than the competition. NeatReceipts for Mac goes for $161.85.

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Quiet! I’m trying to sleep!

Tis the season for power outages! Last year I invested in a whole-house natural gas backup generator. I work from home (and am spoiled rotten by power consuming technology) and therefore, I can’t stand prolonged power outages. Remember the blackout of 2003? Buying the generator was like buying insurance. Once you have it, you never seem to need it (and I’m ok with that). The power has not been off for more than 5 minutes since I had it installed. Figures right? Well that all changed a couple of nights ago. The power went off at 4:30 AM Saturday morning! How do I know the exact time you ask? Well when the utility power goes off, my generator kicks on within 10-15 seconds and powers the whole house. It’s located on the opposite end from by bedrooms so I never hear it. Normally I would have slept right through such a faint motor sound. However, I have APC UPS (uninterruptible power supplies) throughout my house to provide backup battery power for my gear for those few seconds that it takes the generator to fire up. It was on this night that I found out what it’s like to have 10 APC UPS systems go off at once!

APC Battery backups "BEEP" when there is a loss of power. The idea is is that this will alert you so that you can go to your computer, save your files, exit your apps and do a normal shutdown until main power is restored. In my case that should only be 10-15 seconds right? Well not quite. I found out the hard way that UPS systems are very sensitive to the actual quality of the power being supplied to them and it seems that generator power is not quite good enough when the APC units are on their default setting of "high senstivity". So my UPS systems continued to stay on an BEEP even though there was "power." Needless to say I wasn’t able to sleep through it. At this point I wanted to yank these things out of the wall, throw them in a pile and light a match! Even my larger ones that did not stay on continuously beeped every 10-20 seconds to let me know that line conditions were not ideal.

I remember after the initial installation and testing of my generator (the UPS’s were beeping then too) that my generator installer told me that I would need to change the settings on my UPS systems to make them less "sensitive." In fact I did just that on my larger units and didn’t know of any way to do this for my smaller units. However, it didn’t stop the beeping! Since I was awake anyway, I grabbed my laptop and Googled "turn off the APC beep" and the results lead me to various discussion threads (some really old) about how it could be done with the supplied APC Power Chute software. That’s where the fun began!

 

Windows to the rescue?

As most of you know, I’m a Mac guy. I have nothing against Windows or Windows users, I just prefer the Mac and have used the Mac OS since 1984. So let’s not get into that debate here. However, I also run Windows XP on my MacBook Pro via Boot Camp and Parallels. Why am I bringing up Windows? Well as it turns out, APC makes the Power Chute software for both Mac and Windows. However, the two versions differ as much as night and day. The Mac version is very basic and simply allows the Mac to communicate with the APC units and if there is a power outage the Mac will automatically do a shut down.

Here’s the interface to the Mac version of Power Chute:

Guess what? You don’t even need their software for this. Apple has built that functionality into the Mac OS via the Energy Saver System Prefs:

So if you’re a Mac user, don’t even bother installing the APC software. Just plug in the supplied USB cable into your APC and into your Mac and you can control it from the Energy Saver prefs.

As you can see from the above screen grab there is no other controls over the unit itself (nope, nothing under Options either). After doing a little digging, I found that the Windows version offers WAY MORE! So I rebooted my Mac into Windows XP (Parallels works too without rebooting, but I wasn’t sure if it would see the APC at the time. Later I tested it and it does.) using Boot Camp and popped in my APC CD that came with my latest unit. It had Power Chute 2.0 for Windows XP and I was floored by the available options:

There were two settings that I needed to change. The first one was under Notifications. I don’t want my APC units beeping EVER! If there is a power outage here, it won’t be for more than a few seconds because my generator will kick on. So therefore, I don’t need to hear any beeps ever! Especially at night. There was even the option to turn off the beeps in the evening and still have them on during the day. However, I don’t want them at all:

The next and most important setting was the magical "Sensitivity" setting. This allows the APC to be a little less sensitive and recognize generator power as being good enough to power my equipment.

I took my laptop around to each APC unit and set these settings for each one. I was back in bed by 6AM for another few hours of sleep. Of course this was on a Saturday when I didn’t have to wake up early! Arggghhhhhhhh!

 

Shame on you APC

I’m happy that I was able to solve my problem without a single call to APC. If my generator installer had never mentioned a "Sensitivity" setting I would have never known to look for one. I was initially going after disabling the beep sound when I found the Sensitivity section. So it all worked out. However, not all Mac users have Windows installed on their Macs. Since APC bills their units as for both Mac and Windows, I would expect the same level of control over the hardware on either platform. APC you need to provide these same options in the Power Chute for Mac version.

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Follow up Review of the ScanSnap S510M

As you may remember I was pretty excited to order the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M after reading a review from one of my colleagues and talking with another colleague that used one. At the time I didn’t actually have mine yet and I promised a follow up review, so here it is:

 

The Good

The ScanSnap S510M is an amazing piece of hardware. I’ve never seen a scanner that scans so FAST! Not only does it scan fast, it scans both sides of a page as fast as it scans one side. It’s also more compact than I imagined and since I got mine they’ve even come out with a more compact model (ScanSnap 300M) that would be suitable for travel. I’ve been able to scan even small receipts without having to use the document carrier. It’s just awesome! OK, so that’s the good part!

 

The Bad

I must say that while the hardware rocks, I was a little disappointed in the software implementation. This scanner includes a FULL version of Acrobat 8 Professional. Wow! I was thinking that they would take advantage of this powerful app and sadly they don’t. There is no tie between the scanner driver and Acrobat at all. The scanner driver simply creates a PDF using the built-in Mac OS X Quartz driver. While I’m OK with that, what I was hoping for was an automated way to have Acrobat then OCR the scanned PDF which would make it searchable. What I want is to be able to walk up to the scanner, stick a document on it, scan it and then walk away. If I later need that document, I want to be able to search on some words that were in the document. Out of the box it won’t do that. Instead, it scans the document, gives it a basic name and either dumps it into a folder as a scanned PDF or opens it in Acrobat and then you’d have to do all the work manually. Sure I can probably setup an Acrobat Batch Sequence, Mac OS X Automator thingy and a watched folder, but I just expected this kind automated solution out of the box.

 

 

UPDATE: Thanks to blog reader “Vivek” for pointing out that the ScanSnap S510M does actually include a special version of Abbyy Fine Reader for Mac. This app does exactly the one thing I was missing in that it OCRs the PDFs immediately after they are scanned by the ScanSnap (if you set it to do so). It still begs the question of why do they include Acrobat 8 Professional and not tie into it though, especially since Acrobat 8 Professional can OCR directly? 

 

The Bottom Line

Although the ScanSnap doesn’t do what I want out of the box (see the update above), it is possible to setup with the supplied software. It’s incredibly fast and worth the money! It would be nice if they offered an option for this model to buy just the hardware for those users (like me) who already own Acrobat, but they don’t (yet). Once I have time to sit down and setup my automated workflow, I’ll be one step closer to my paperless office (hey, I can dream can’t I?).  So I’m happy with my purchase!

The Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M (The M is for the Mac version) goes for $430.23 ($510 list) and includes a full version of Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional. It scans in color or B&W and does two sided scanning of stacks of paper. It automatically converts the scans to PDFs and it’s blazing fast!

 

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Guardian Maximus for up to the minute protection

OK, you've heard me harp on the need to have backups. However, in some cases having an up to date backup could still mean losing hours of work. That's where a RAID-1 [MIRROR] comes in. OWC carries the NewerTechnology Guardian Maximus line of RAIDs. With a RAID-1 you have TWO identical hard drives in a case that are writing the data simultaneously to each drive. The idea is that if one drive fails, you would still have everything up to that second on the other drive.  

I tested the 1TB Guardian Maximus

This drive has USB2, Firewire 800 and Firewire 400 connections on the back and comes with all 3 cables. I connected the drive up via Firewire 800 out of the box and it mounted on the desktop. It was already formatted for Mac OS. I copied a couple of gig to it from my server and speed was acceptable. When it comes to speed you have to remember that the data is being written to both 1TB drives at once. The drive (enclosure) is relatively quiet. There are LED indicators for the drive activity of both drives. If one of the drives fails the indicator for that drive will go red. Once you replace the failed drive, the Guardian Maximus will automatically "rebuild" which means that it will mirror the data onto the replacement drive. The only downside to this that I can see is that there is no other indicator that the drive has failed that I'm aware of. In other words if you didn't notice the red light on the front of the enclosure you could be at risk. It would be nice to have software (like the Drobo) that monitors the status of the drives and automatically alerts you if one of the drives goes bad.  

This is not a substitute for backing up

OWC includes award winning backup utilities like Prosoft's Data Backup 3 for the Mac and NovaBACKUP for the PC. They also include Intech Hard Disk SpeedTools for the Mac. The reason that a RAID doesn't substitute for a backup is that it's writing and erasing data on both drives as you use your computer. Therefore if you accidentally delete a file the file will be deleted on both drives immediately. Also if you got some corruption or a virus, then your files will be corrupted or infected on both drives in the RAID. Instead use a RAID as your main drive or as a backup drive or both. This way you'll still have your backups if you need to recover a file or two AND if one of your drives crashed you could theoretically keep right on going.   OWC sells these starting at $259.99 for a 250GB solution (2 250GB drives). They also sell the enclosure so you could build your own using your own drives. The enclosure goes for $149.99.

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Belkin Mini Surge Protector – almost perfect!

Although Belkin doesn’t specifically label this Mini surge protector as "Travel", they do go out their way to talk about how "hotel rooms and airport terminals never seem to have enough power outlets to charge all the devices today’s traveler brings along." So that leads me to believe that they intended their "Mini Surge Protector with USB Charger" to be used by Road Warriors. I have been looking for a compact surge protector/slash power strip to keep in my computer bag for travel. We’ve all been in those hotel rooms where you’ve had to decide between having a lamp, a clock or power for your phone or laptop, due to the lack of available outlets (I also love it when the only outlet is behind the bed). This mini surge protector has an added bonus of two USB powered ports on it to charge up my USB devices (such as iPods, GPS units, phones, etc.) When I traveled to Spain, I bought a universal adapter that also had a single USB port on it, but I was disappointed in that the USB port didn’t provide enough juice to charge the iPhone.

It’s seems that that iPhone uses a little more juice than most standard USB ports provide. For example, my old Treo 650 would still get enough juice from my MacBook Pro while it was sleeping. Not so with the iPhone. I’m very happy to report that the Belkin unit DOES provide enough power through the USB port to also charge the iPhone. That means one less adapter I have to carry around.

I could never figure out why Apple didn’t design a USB port into the power adapter of its portables. Seems like a natural fit since most MacBook owners I know also either have iPods or iPhones (or both).

 

It’s almost perfect

It’s a little on the large side. However, that doesn’t bother me because after all there has to be room for the surge suppressing circuitry as well as the two USB ports too. What does bother me is that the AC prongs don’t retract or fold down. To Belkin’s credit they did design the prongs so that they rotate. This allows the strip to be horizontal or vertical depending on how your wall outlet is configured. The protruding prong thing is not the end of the world, but it’s one more thing to have to deal with in an already crowded bag. If I were a ratings kinda guy, this would be one of those things that would keep me from giving it a full 5 stars. I give it 4.5 stars. Hopefully the next version will be designed to fix this small little issue.

 

Also since this is one of those little items you might forget and leave behind in your room, don’t forget to put a label on it.

 

Amazon has it for $16.99.

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Are you backed up?

Like many of you, I used to take backing up for granted. That was until an unfortunate Norton Utilities mishap screwed up my hard drive beyond recovery. That was years ago and needless to say, I’ve been backing up ever since.

 

What if your main hard drive died right now?

What would you lose? That was the question I used to ask myself to remind me to do backups. I do backups daily now and feel pretty secure. I have multiple backups and some offsite backups too. Before we get into my backup methods, let me tell you about an interesting thing that happened just the other day:

I have a Power Mac G5 that I use on occasion. Needless to say, I don’t use it everyday. Sometimes I go days without touching it. This is the Mac that I do most of my scanning on and I needed to scan something, so I woke it from its screen saver only to see a warning message that Time Machine (Apple’s automated backup technology) hadn’t successfully completed a backup in 10 days! I then noticed that my external hard drive was no longer mounted on the desktop (which is why Time Machine hadn’t backed up). After a lot of unplugging and re-plugging and restarting, I determined that the drive had actually CRASHED! I could feel the drive making a thumping sound when I powered it back up.

This was a backup drive, so no problem right? Just buy a new backup drive and move on. Well, kinda. You see, this was an external Maxtor drive that I had been using for "Archiving" before I even started using it for Time Machine.

We all have files that we probably won’t need again, but like to hang onto just in case. That’s what was on that drive in addition to the Time Machine backups. I’m not too worried about it because I can’t remember the last time I needed any of those files. As a matter of fact, I can’t even remember what files were on that drive. People ask me all the time: "Can I use my Time Machine Backup Drive for other files?" Technically the answer is yes. Time Machine stores its backups in folders as disk images. So there is nothing stopping you from using the rest of the drive for other things. However, it’s just not smart to do. If you put other files on the drive, those files are not being backed up! I knew this and took that chance. Well guess what? It died!

 

What’s the point?

The point I’m trying to make here, is that Archiving and Backing Up are TWO DIFFERENT things. If your archives are important to you, then you should back them up too! The bottom line is that you can’t keep every project that you’ve ever done on your main drive. It will eventually run out of room. So if those projects are important to you to hang on to, then archive them onto other drives, BUT also back those drives up too. In my case I’m not feeling any great loss here. However, it was an important reminder to me that ALL important files need to be backed up. Hard Drives are mechanical devices that will eventually FAIL!

 

What about archiving to CDs and DVDs?

Admittedly I do have some files archived on to DVDs that are in a safe deposit box. Mostly these are wedding photos from friends and family weddings who I’ve long since given them their copies or prints. I don’t ever expect to need these shots again, however I just didn’t feel comfortable trashing them completely. I’m not a fan of archiving to optical media because they can become unreadable over time due to a variety of factors. Nothing changes here though. If you’re going to use optical media for archiving, then back it up too! I made multiple copies of those DVDs just in case.

 

How do I backup?

I thought you would never ask! Each of the computers in my house is backed up via Time Machine to either an external hard drive or my Time Capsule. I have a file server (running Mac OS X Server) that has my most critical documents on it (photos, movies, financial stuff, etc.). It’s backed up each night using SuperDuper which clones to an external Firewire hard drive. I rotate the external hard drive backups of the server to a safe deposit box at the bank so that If my house burns down I can still recover from my offsite backup. One of my most important files is my Quicken data file. So it’s backed up in several places. After each use it automatically backs up to the server AND to my .Mac account. So at any given time I have no less than 5 current copies of that file in different locations (one on the iMac that it resides on, one on the server, one on the server’s backup, one on the iMac’s Time Machine backup and one on .Mac). I can not ever afford to lose this file!

My main computer is my MacBook Pro. Since it’s a laptop and I travel with it, I’m not always on my home network to do Time Machine back ups to my Time Capsule. Therefore I travel with an OWC Mercury On-the-Go 500GB external hard drive. Before each trip I do a Time Machine backup to the Time Capsule AND a SuperDuper! backup to the OWC drive which provides me with a bootable clone. This way if my MacBook Pro died right before a presentation I could simply boot another computer from my drive and keep right on going.

 

Time Machine is Great, why do I still use SuperDuper! then?

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard’s Time Machine is great! Accidentally trashed a file two days ago? No problem, fire up Time Machine and within about a minute or two you’ve got your file back. However, if the whole drive crashes, you can’t boot from your Time Machine backup. You’ll have to put in the new drive and do a complete restore from scratch. This could take hours! If I crash on the go, I need to be back up and running within minutes. That’s why I carry an external bootable backup with me!

 

More travel tips

If your job involves doing presentations on the go, then you have even more to worry about if something dies. If you have to deliver a slide presentation, convert your slides to Adobe PDF and put the PDF file on a thumb drive. You won’t have all the fancy animations, but you’ll be able to present from any computer in the building running a copy of the Free Adobe Reader. If you’re demoing other software, put a copy of your demo files, the necessary fonts, the installer for the software and the serial number on a thumb drive. This way, all you would need is a colleague’s computer to continue the show. Don’t forget about online store either. You could use something like your .Mac iDisk or Adobe’s Acrobat Share (a FREE service) to store backups of your critical files so that they can be pulled down from any computer with an internet connection.

 

I hope that you never become victim of a hard drive crash! Just remember: "there are two kinds of computer users: those who have lost data and those who are about to." The more we go digital, the more you stand to lose (cherished photos, purchased music, movies, etc.) Backup! Also be sure to check out Scott Kelby’s blog on his use of the Drobo for backups.

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Underwater Fantasea

I wanted to take a more serious look at underwater photography, so I did! I LOVE WATER! I also love photography and I’ve always wanted to mix the two. After much research I decided to go with the Fantasea Underwater Housing for my older Nikon D70 DSLR camera. Sure I’ve got newer better cameras like my D300, but none that I was willing risk taking underwater for the first time (even with the included flood insurance). If I lost my D70 it wouldn’t be the end of the world, but if I lost my D300 I’d cry real tears.

 

The first thing I found out…

Like everything else, you can spend a little or you can spend a LOT! If you’ve never priced underwater housings before, you’ll quickly find that in most cases, they cost more than the cameras themselves. Even the older housing for the now discontinued Nikon D70 still fetches a hefty price of over $1,300. That’s more than the D70 costs when it was NEW! I could have gone cheaper with the point and shoot route and I even seriously considered the Canon G9 with an underwater housing. I could have gotten both the camera and housing for less than the price of the one for the D70, but I really wanted an DSLR if I was going to be serious about this. The Fantasea housing lets you control just about every feature on the camera while it’s in the housing. So there wasn’t anything that I needed to control or adjust that I couldn’t do while it was enclosed. They also have excellent controls for the SB800 too. The standard housing accommodates my original Nikkor 18-70mm lens.

 

The next thing I found out…

Like most everything else in photography, lighting is the key! That’s one of the things that also attracted me to the Fantasea housing. It came with an optional (included in my kit) off camera housing for the Nikon SB800 speedlight. I figured that I’m getting pretty good with the SB800 and it would be a good fit for this adventure.

How does it work?

I did a couple of dry (actually wet) runs in my pool before bringing in my model. I quickly learned that I was going to need to buy a couple more accessories before the big day. The one thing I needed was a weight belt to allow me to more easily stay down underwater. So I made a quick trip to my local scuba shop and $300 later, I was out with two weight belts (one for me, one for the model), a snorkel and a waterproof (bright) LED spotlight.

Everything worked as expected except the connection to the SB800. For some reason, even though I could see it firing, it seemed to be off sync. In other words, the SB800 was either firing slightly before or after the shutter causing my shots to be underexposed. I poured over the settings again and again before doing a Goole search to find that someone else was having the exact same issue. He never posted a resolution for his problem. I emailed Fantasea and they offered a few tips, none of which worked. I’ve determined that it has something to do with the sync cable they supply. If I attach the SB800 directly to my D70, it works as expected. So I know it’s not the camera, the flash or the settings. This was disappointing, but I didn’t let that stop me.

I have a lot of natural light coming into my pool area. I also setup a Westcott Spiderlite TD5 and pointed it into the water (weighted down of course). Also remember the LED spotlight I bought? I used that as a continuous light. The results were good, but not perfect. I plan to continue to work on the SB800 sync issue and possibly even add a slave flash accessory to the housing to get two lights going.

Shay underwater

 

Now that I have this housing, I’ll also be able to use it in conditions such as rain, waterfalls, etc. that I would never have attempted before.