Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s always easier to learn how to program when you have a specific project to work on, so I’ve set myself the challenge of creating an online invoicing web app, that I can use to generate invoices for the freelance work that I do, simply and quickly.  I know there are several different ones out there already, some are free and great, others are expensive and awful; but that’s not the point.

Let me describe my programming pattern.

1. I sketch out a hasty design, then jump straight into programming the core functionality.
2. Register  a domain name to inspire me to actually work on this project.
3. This gets boring pretty quickly, so I start to fuss with CSS and how it looks.
4. I get very frustrated with stupid CSS rules, so move back to working on the PHP code.
5. I think how cool it would be to use jQuery to animate a bunch of stuff, and use AJAX to do some background submitting of information to the database.
6. I realise how much I don’t know about JavaScript and jQuery.  I hack my through and end up with something that works 90% of the time.
7. I notice just how awful my code is and spend a day refactoring it to work better.
8. I realise that I’ve now not even completed the most simple functionality of my web app, and get discouraged and move onto something else.

I’m hoping that this time I can push through the frustrations and actually end up with a product that I’ll use.  No one else may use it, but that’s fine by me.  This isn’t about making money, it’s about using my spare time constructively and learning while I’m at it.  I’m absolutely loving learning and designing classes and functions, I find it almost therapeutic, quite different to the rest of the work I do during the day.  So on that note, I think I’ll go and play some more of the Diablo 3 Beta.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I selected a minutes worth and uploaded to Vimeo. Feel free to download the 720p H264 and use for your own good/evil schemes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Take these last few weeks for example.  We shoot primarily on Sony EX1 cameras, so almost all our footage is XDCAM EX 35Mbps VBR.  Regardless of what project I was working on, big or small, long or short, old or new, I was getting 5 to 6 crashes a day from Final Cut.  It typically happened when I was scrubbing through footage.  I deleted my preferences, I checked my RAID speeds (200MB/s read and write, which is more than enough!), I tired different RT settings, I even started to trawl through the console logs that FCP would generate to see what thread had crashed.  The thread the seemed to crash most commonly was AVAGetRendererInfo .  After much googling people had recommended that grabbing the com.apple.AppleVADriver bundle from a fresh install of Snow Leopard could fix the problem, that had supposedly been created with an update.  I did this, and lo and behold, my crashes stopped… for about 4 hours.  I think it was more likely the fact that I had restarted my computer more than anything else.

So I was left with a constantly crashing Final Cut Pro, and no idea on how to fix it.

Thread 226 Crashed:

0   com.apple.AppleVADriver        0x62f20f93 AVAGetRendererInfo + 129635

1   com.apple.AppleVADriver        0x62f35719 AVAGetRendererInfo + 213481

2   com.apple.AppleVADriver        0x62f05de5 AVAGetRendererInfo + 18613

3   com.apple.AppleVADriver        0x62f027e6 AVAGetRendererInfo + 4790

4   com.apple.AppleVADriver        0x62f08bb5 AVAGetRendererInfo + 30341

5   libSystem.B.dylib              0x94d7a85d _pthread_start + 345

6   libSystem.B.dylib              0x94d7a6e2 thread_start + 34

Exception Type:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGBUS)

Exception Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE at 0×0000000000000000

Crashed Thread:  226

Fast forward two weeks, and I’m assembling and editing over 35 hours of footage from a 10 day bike ride that we film each year.  And I’m crashing every 20 minutes.  I’m moving through the footage pretty quickly on the timeline, so even my 5 minute auto saves weren’t enough.  After bashing my head on the wall a few times, I finally remembered reading in one of the apple support discussions that the crashing thread in question was used to generate thumbnails.  So  I thought I would try then turning off thumbnails in my timeline (Sequence Settings -> Timeline Options).  This was at 11:02am.  By 5:32pm that afternoon, it hadn’t crashed a single time.  Not once!

Well actually, I did crash once, when I switched back to an earlier sequence that still had thumbnails enabled and started scrubbing, instant crash.  So hopefully my SEO skills are good enough that people who google Final Cut Pro AVAGetRendererInfo crash will be able to find this blog post, and that it might help in their situation.

This year was bigger than ever.  3000 people attended (2964 registrations to be precise), which meant that they went to 5 night rallies total.  We had the band playing synced to the music video, we had the whole opening ceremony synced to the video, we had 5 cameras for the rallies, three out during the day, including a GoPro camera mounted on the heads of Dodgeball players.  Did I mention we also shot a TV-esque show during the day?  It was full on.

We’ll be uploading all the content we produced in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out on the Youth Vision Vimeo Channel.

For the very last session I decided I wanted to head on down to the front of stage and take some photos.  I met Jarrod from Horsham who was one of the organisers of State Youth Games, who was taking photos next to me as well.  He looked over and asked (well, yelled, we were standing next to the subwoofer) what ISO I was on, to which I replied about 2000, since my shutter had to be high enough to keep the images crisp.  He promptly offered me the stabalised version of that lens, much to my delight!  So I shot for a while with the 24-105 F4 IS, until he came and offered me his 70-200 F2.8 IS!!!  That was pretty much the highlight of the weekend for me, playing with very nice lenses!  The 70-200 is now very high on my wish list.  Check out the photos below on Flickr.

I’d never used a follow focus before, but have been wishing for the one that comes along with the Captain Stubling rig from Red Rock Micro.  It was great fun.  Apart from the general fun of being able to pull focus gracefully and with a little more ease, it was great fun when Tim the director operated the camera and I pulled focus.  It looked so awesome that I uploaded a little snippet of the un-graded footage to Vimeo.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ll certainly post a full version of the video soon.

We are now looking to up the anti with our weddings, and we recently shot a ‘test’ wedding with the whole kit and kaboodle to try and take them to the next level.  7D, 70-200 IS F2.8, Steadicam, the works.  I shot all the 7D footage, my manager Steve shot all the steadicam stuff.  The day, the location, Melina and Andrew, the gear and the creativity all combined to make what I think is a pretty awesome looking video.  I may not be interested in making wedding videos, but making this was great fun.  Melina was super excited on the day, and they are a lovely couple.

I edited and graded this the next week to use on our promotional material, as well as a gift for Melina and Andrew. It did make me want to get the 70-200 IS F2.8L lens really bad though.  That is a really nice lens.

Make sure you watch it in HD, it’s worth the bandwidth.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Each year we do all the media for State Youth Games in Victoria.  This year is their 20th anniversary, so it’s gonna be big.  Already about 3000 people have registered.  I’ve just spent the day grading a music video, and this promo will be released very soon.  Be sure to watch it in HD.  It’s a lot of fun working on projects like this as it has so much creative freedom, and they’re just plain fun!