Jedi Master

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/buy/items/ci/58361

Not bigger than Apple, but there are plenty of companies much bigger than RED (and Nikon+RED).

It'll be interesting to see if the new patent holds up in court. There will be several companies with deep pockets fighting to invalidate it.

It'll all be moot in a few years anyway when RED's patent expires.

Here's an interesting article related to the Nikon Z9. Nikon is developing a derivative of the Z9 for use by astronauts on the moon. https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/1/24087610/nikon-nasa-hulc-handheld-universal-lunar-camera-artemis-moon-mission

What's a VST?

The FX30 is on sale today at B&H for $50... Alas, it's a mistake in the ad copy and when you go to the site, it's actually $1798.

I think it's mainly tradition and what people are used to. Kind of like asking why more people like red than blue or why some people prefer LP sound.

All UNIX, and UNIX-derived, systems hide files with names starting with "." from directory searches. You can see these using ls on the the command line with "ls -a" (or "ls -al" if you want more detail).

Beyond Compare is what most people where I work use. There's a Mac version available.

Interesting. I wasn't aware of Resolve's logs--I'll have to check it out. In my case, the errors I was seeing didn't involve Resolve because I was copying files using Windows Explorer, not Resolve. The two types of error I saw, file mis-compares, and missing files, did not show up in any Windows log (as viewed in Event Viewer). Many Windows applications create temporary files with prefixes and/or suffixes added to the eventual permanent file name when doing certain operations on files, so perhaps Macs do something similar and that file you saw beginning with ._ was a temporary file that was later removed.

OG?

I didn't think FORTRAN was too bad back when I used it. The alternative (at the time) was BASIC, which was quite popular, but I never cared much for it. Yes, punch cards were a real pain! The basement of the computer center had about a dozen IBM card punch machines, and they were always in use during the day, so lots of people, including me, did our work at odd hours to avoid the rush. The biggest fear we had was dropping a card deck and having to put all the cards back in order. The first design I worked on after university was a custom bit-sliced CPU. It was microcoded and I wrote the microcode assembler in FORTRAN on a Data General Eclipse minicomputer. FORTRAN is still pretty popular among the scientific crowd, who use it for things like modeling dynamic systems.

I learned FORTRAN in high school. It was the first high-level language I learned. At university, the first CS class that every CS major had to take was a FORTRAN programming class. I was an EE major, but I took it anyway as I could see that's where the industry was headed. The work was done on a CDC 6400 mainframe using punched cards. The second CS course, which I also took, used Pascal, which was a big improvement over FORTRAN, although even some of the CS majors just couldn't get their heads around the concept of pointers (they seemed natural to me). After that, everything was in C, which is the language that I use to this day when working on microcontroller projects (as a hobby). My professional work mostly revolves around working with hardware description languages, primarily SystemVerilog, and the various tools used for simulation and verification.

This has got me curious enough to dig deeper. I'll try with several other computers running various operating systems, different cables, etc. Hopefully I can identify the root cause of the miscompares.

Not in my neck of the woods. When the pandemic was at its peak, county authorities ordered Elon Musk to shut down the Tesla factory in Fremont, CA. He refused at first, claiming Tesla was an "essential business" (essential businesses were exempt from the order). Public outrage and pressure from the authorities finally got him to relent. This incident is believed by many to be the reason Musk decided to move the company headquarters to Texas.

AI will not remain static. It'll continually get better and better to the point where it will stop generating "dubious code" and generate code just as good, or better than what a human can generate.

Yes, very bizarre. I've never seen anything like it in recent memory and am puzzled where the issue is happening--on the SSD itself, in the transfer process across a USB cable, on the motherboard in the USB hardware, transferring data from the USB controller into memory, a bug in the OS that's corrupting memory involved in the file transfer, or a bug in the program I use for the binary comparisons. I did a test yesterday that adds to the confusion. I took my newest T7, reformatted it, and copied all of my digital photos (about 1TB worth) to it. I then ran a bit-by-bit binary comparison and saw several bit compare errors and several missing files in several directories. I ran the same compare two more times and saw the same kinds of errors, but they were in different files! Yes, files that didn't compare previously were now comparing correctly, and files that compared correctly previously were now not comparing correctly. It's always good to compute checksums for important files to verify their integrity. They're not quite as good as bit-by-bit comparisons, because two totally different files have a tiny, but non-zero, chance of hashing to the same checksum. I think I'll try calculating MD5 hashes on all of my digital photo files from their usual location (a 10TB WD hard disk) and do the same for the copies on the T7 SSD and see if the MD5 hashes are always the same. I'll run this in a loop and log the results.

Only the compare revealed the copying errors. I too was shocked when I saw them and when I used Window's Event Viewer to look at the error logs, there was nothing there to indicate any device errors. The first time this happened, I wiped the T7 by reformatting it and tried the copying again, and got the same results, although the copy errors were in different files and the missing files were different. I tried this several more times with two other T7 drives and got similar results. The files being copied were about a TB of RAW files from my Canon still cameras along with associated .PSD files. In all cases, the drives were connected to my PC using USB C to a native USB C port on the PC. I tried four different USB cables to rule out a bad cable and it didn't make a difference. I tried the same tests with several T9 drives and never saw any binary copy errors or missing files. At this point, I have zero confidence in the T7.

I have quite a few of both, and the T9 is more robust than the T7. Whenever I copy files to an external SSD, I do a rigorous bit-by-bit compare of the copied files with the originals. On numerous occasions, I've found cases were there were bit errors in the copies, and even cases were entire files were not copied to the SSD. I have never had this issue with T9 drives, only T7 drives. I have seen this on several T7 drives, so it's not an isolated occurrence. It happens regardless of whether I format the drives as ExFAT or NTFS. This is with Windows 10 and 11. I don't know if MacOS would have a similar issue. YMMV.

I have an A6500, so not the A6700, but the A6500 has a reputation for overheating too. I've never had a problem with overheating myself, even during our hot California summers. Big caveat, however: My "takes" are rarely longer than 1-2 minutes, so the camera has time to cool down between takes.

It was an interesting year for me. During the late-spring, early summer I got interested in film photography again and dug my medium format (Mamiya RB67 and Hasselblad 500CM) and large format (Arca Swiss 4x5) gear out of the attic and took several trips to photograph the American West in B&W (T-Max 100). I no longer have an enlarger, so I scanned all of the negatives on an Epson flatbed scanner. That was a big learning curve, as getting good scans is not a trivial process, and it took me months to get results I was satisfied with. With respect to video, I upgraded my A6500 to a Canon C300 Mk3 with a few cine prime lenses. Also upgraded my tripod to a Sachtler Flowtech 75. I didn't upgrade any computer equipment this year as last year's setup is still more than adequate for working in Photoshop/Premiere/Resolve. My last video-related project of the year was re-doing all of the cabling in my home theater. It had developed into a mass of spaghetti as I added and replaced components over the years. Now all of the redundant cables are gone and the remaining ones are properly dressed and labeled.

One of the reasons I prefer travelogue-style work is because I don't relate well to people in person. I attribute this to my Asperger's. I'm kind of like a milder version of Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory. I work all day with nerdy engineers like myself and most of the casual conversation is about technical subjects, not about anything related to art. I've always been a big advocate of using the right tools for the job. I'd rather work with a tool than fight with it, even if the right tools cost more--to me, it's worth it in the long run.

In my case, it's only in service of my own enjoyment.

No, it's one of these: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1629147-REG/meike_mk_ff35t21_pl_full_frame_35mm_t2_1.html Sorry to disappoint anyone who might have thought I wouldn't settle for anything less than a ARRI Signature Prime or a Cooke S4/i. 🤑 Yes, we brought a tripod as well. My wife held on to the tripod while on the cable car. I decided to upgrade my tripod when I got the C300 and got a Sachtler Flowtech 75 CF tripod. It's lighter than my previous tripod and much easier to set up and use as the leg locks are at the top. There were several factors that led me to buy the C300 over the C70: Bigger and non-built-in monitor, availability of a native PL mount, CFexpress card support. I didn't find it difficult to shlep the C300 and tripod around the city. I carried the C300 by its top handle in my left hand and the tripod by it's handle in my right. My wife and I are strong hikers, so the hilly terrain of the city wasn't that big of a challenge. The cable car ride was the only physically demanding part of the day, and that was only because I was hand-holding the camera at arm's length to get a better view (and avoid getting the head of the passenger in front of me in the frame).