Hearken Creative - the blog

According to the FCC, the 700mHz band of frequencies will be unavailable for use by low-powered wireless. Again, not an issue for HCS, but a big deal for quite a few industries: churches, theaters, film/T.V., and anyone else who uses that bandwidth currently for communications.

I am interested to see how this plays out when February 2009 rolls around…

It seems I am spending more time than ever before on marketing myself. Getting the website up and running, printing new postcards, making phone calls, networking — am I spending more time marketing than actually doing work right now? Well, in an economic downturn, that’s just what you are supposed to do, according to this wonderful article entitled “The Dumbells Cut Back…The Smart People Don’t”: The Upside of Recession from the Wellesley Hills Group:

Whether there will be or won’t be a recession, maintaining a healthy marketing program will only build on what you have already developed. And maintaining and growing what you have toiled long and hard over requires careful planning, decisive execution, and plain old guts. Now more than ever the money you spend now on marketing matters. Not because dark times loom, but because there is real opportunity out there right now.

So, I will spend the time and energy on making sure to put my best foot forward. To that end, we will be launching several new websites over the next month or so: http://www.oldpasadenafilms.com/, http://www.rosecityfilms.com/, and http://www.rosecitydesign.com/, among others, will highlight specific focus areas of our business: weddings, sound, film production and post-production, and graphic design.

And we’re continuing to service our current client base with some pretty exciting projects. I will post a few as soon as I get photos taken of these really recent design projects!

You could always build your own inexpensive drives, but for those of us with no time, buying external hard drives has been relatively expensive. Not anymore: a good quality 1tb drive from Other World Computing (sans Firewire 800) is only $229!

For video, these are probably best for backup only; I like the FireWire 800 connection for working on Final Cut Pro. But I go through 1tb backup drives like crazy. I might pick up a couple of these.

But are we only cooling our heels with cheaper hard drives until the “next big thing” comes? Leon Bailey blogs about a Samsung press release concerning its own line of solid state drives (SSDs) — drives that have no moving parts and look more like computer RAM — that states

that the company expects sales of SSDs “to increase 800 percent between now and 2010″. That would be a huge increase over any timeframe but, unless notebook sales are also going to grow eight-fold over the next 18 months, there will have to be a major decline in the sales of traditional 1.8 and 2.5in hard disks for Samsung’s projection to pan out.

So are the spinning-disc hard drive days numbered? I’m not sure about 2010, but I do know that, historically, any computer equipment in my office that was older than 3 years old was considered archaic (no longer: most of my Mac towers are 3 years old or older). But the allure of faster, solid-state storage will be strong: we won’t have to wait for drives to spin up or power down.

Unfortunately, it’s no guarantee that solid state drives are the answer. Fujitsu is playing down expectations for the new drives compared to current spinning-disc drives, saying

As most rotating hard drives often park and enter a low-power mode in low activity, the actual gain by using solid-state technology is never more than about five percent, according to Fujitsu estimates. Reliability is also an issue, as some flash drives are often limited to roughly 10,000 writes per storage cell before the area becomes unwriteable, leaving drives near the end of their lifespans without the ability to record data.

In a review of a new(er) solid state drive from Silicon Power, Olin Coles states

Value is a relative term, especially when you discuss bleeding edge technology. People ridicule the thought of making the high-dollar purchase of an SSD over a standard hard drive, but then they get into their Hummer’s and Porsche’s and drive to Starbucks for a five-dollar coffee. At the ends of every emerging technology are two sides: one which will buy the technology and one that will not.

Well, I would love to be in the high-dollar group, but I’m not. So I’ll keep my fingers crossed for the price to come down. Until then, I’ll go out and buy a few more OWC drives.

Digital TV begins in February 2009. A little-known side-effect of the switch from analog to digital television signals is the fact that VHF and UHF bandwidth that historically has been used for wireless microphones (in churches, theaters, and movie sets) is now being auctioned off for use by commercial companies, namely, television stations and wireless telephone providers. What does this mean for those of us who use wireless microphones everyday on movie sets? Shure Microphones says this:

Wireless microphones may continue to operate on all of these frequencies, just as they do now. However, wireless microphones that operate on frequencies above 698 MHz should not be used after February 19, 2009…

Users who experience interference from DTV will notice the same performance issues caused by other forms of interference, namely increased signal dropouts, decreased operating range, and undesired noises. Wireless microphones that are used indoors, with line-of-sight between transmitter and receiver, may operate normally depending on the strength of the interfering signal. Wireless microphone users who do experience interference (whether from a DTV station or another user) have the same option that has always been available: change the operating frequency of the wireless system. Frequency-agile systems can be retuned by the user; fixed-frequency systems, depending on their age, can be reworked by Shure’’s Service Department at moderate cost.

Mark Ulano, a prominent award-winning production sound mixer, says it’s a “train wreck waiting to happen”:

Wireless microphones are so pervasive throughout society — in our work, but also in theaters, high schools, churches — and there’s been such a lack of responsibility on the part of government and its focus on allocation in terms of actual usage as opposed to auctioning bandwidth off as purely whoever is the highest bidder. Australia doesn’t do that. They look at how the market’s using bandwidth, and then they allocate based on need. We’re going to have a train wreck here because that has not happened. The motion-picture industry is very high-profile, but it’s infinitesimal as an economic entity compared to the telecom industry. So we’re in this conundrum. It’s like the rainbow. You’re not going to add more colors to the rainbow. It is a problem, and we’re waiting with bated breath to see how it turns out.

Fortunately, all of Hearken Creative’s wireless mics are outside of the spectrum that is being auctioned off. But the precedent is disturbing, and will disrupt many productions going on throughout the country when February 2009 rolls around.

What should government have done differently? What might happen next? Can the government auction off more bandwidth, essentially diminishing the open airwaves that can be used for legitimate, legal wireless use?

So I am now a part of the non-gasoline-guzzling generation: I’m riding the bike to work. It’s not that far; I both work and live in Pasadena (opposite ends, but still). The experience, though, is going to change how I view Pasadena: I love the ride, but I don’t love how bicycle riders are treated, and I’m not pleased with the limited number of bike routes in Pasadena.

But I also love seeing the city, observing passing things at a slower pace so that I can enjoy and internalize what I am seeing. This will definitely change how I interact with the city.

So, if you see a nerdy-looking guy riding around Pasadena with a red, white, and blue helmet on, be kind. I’ll try and do the same…

I think I’m a day away from letting my beta testers loose on the website. Can’t wait.

Many of my clients are in other countries, and I have strong opinions on how cultural differences should be displayed in design and film, so this quote seemed like a ray of sunshine. It is from Henry Steiner’s book entitled Cross Cultural Design:

…When designing across cultures…the goal is to achieve a harmonious juxtaposition; more of an interaction than a synthesis. The individual character of the elements should be retained, each maintaining its own identity while also commenting on and enriching the other…Combination, mixture, blending — these are useless concepts as they will result in a kind of mud. Street stalls in Hong Kong serve an understandably unique beverage called Yin-yang, a combination of tea and coffee. It tastes as you would imagine: the worst characteristics of both are enhanced. In the Tai-Chi (the yin-yang symbol) the elements don’t merge, they stand for positive/negative, male/female, light/dark, and they are complementary, yet discrete.

This speaks to one of my frustrations with modern graphic design: we take indiscriminately from this and that culture, or this and that school of thought, and throw it all together and expect it to be good design, or good art. But “blending” — as Steiner calls it — does not make good design. Juxtaposition and complementing make good design, whether it be across cultures or across styles.

This is something that I strive for with Hearken Creative’s projects.

As a hyphenated company (graphic design-post production-corporate video), it becomes difficult to know where to start. So, we’ll just jump in wherever I feel like jumping in, and data storage is of high concern to me right now.

So let’s take a run-of-the-mill video project — a simple corporate video. Five minutes running time, which might equal 2-4 hours of tape. I keep all my captures, because that video might/will be useful for future projects. Each hour of SD video capture to Quicktime DV is approximately 13 gigabytes, making captured video top out at 52 gigabytes. I figure I will add another 2 gigs of custom audio, stock audio, stock video (frames, stingers, backgrounds, transitions) before finishing the project. So, a 5-minute corporate video has now turned into 40-60 gigabytes of data. A single-sided DVD holds 4.5 gigabytes; I could spend days archiving a simple 5-minute corporate video (and a dozen DVD discs). What happens when I have a feature, with over 60 hours of capture? Let’s see, 60 x 13 gb = 780 gigabytes. And that’s just capture, nothing else.
For live projects, I can take a 1-terabyte drive for work, and a second 1-terabyte drive for backup. Easy. But when the project is over, where do I put the data? I can’t leave it on the drive, because 1) I need the drive for the next project, and 2) everyone tells me that hard drives are not a viable archiving solution.

Enter the Blu-ray Disc (BD). On a dual-layer disc, I could get up to 50 gigabytes on one disc! And they would last! The problem: only one external BD burner is available for Mac so far: the LaCie d2. I hate LaCie products — I have at least 5 dead LaCie hard drives in my office. And I”m not hearing good things about the customer support on this new one.

So, I’m holding my breath, waiting for more Blu-ray products to come to market so I can start archiving my projects. Until then, I just keep buying more 1-terabyte hard drives…