So, I can't believe it, but it has been exactly one year since I had open heart surgery! WOW!

Overall am doing pretty great. Have so much more energy, and am still walking every day. Now trying to figure out if I should keep taking the subway (which is great exercise, all those stairs and the walk, or park at work, which this company actually covers, so it would be cheaper). Thing is, the extra steps in the subway are what I think is helping me lose weight, so I will continue for now, even if I do sweat so much I need an extra shirt and towel to go to work with!

Body is still getting in shape. My left hip is hurting, and when I walk fast, trying to beat my average pace my legs often cramp up. Chest does get sore too, though not as bad, and is more just the scar being sore than being too sore (at least right now, well see how I am in a few weeks of these hours).

Still trending down in weight, though slowly. When I don't have the extra steps, which gets me up towards 10,000 steps, plus all the stairs I am slowing down, but with the extra exercise I do really trend down faster, so it almost worth the extra time and money. Hmmm.

Couldn't be more thankful for the surgery! It really has changed my life! Now I just need to turn my body around as it isn't used to being able to exercise this much and is sore, and sweats too much (boy I hope that gets at least somewhat better).

New job, 12 hours a day 5-6 days a week, and no internet access, so...

The awesome conversion utility Handbrake has gone to .99. Download it now.

And remember to pick up VLC as well. And install them in the same directory :P

Philip Bloom has an excellent article on the pros and cons of 4K and raw workflows.

Yes they are gorgeous and great, but are usually overkill and add a lot to the post process! Of course us post people already know that, but they are so often used when they are complete overkill!

Planet 5D has a ton of RAW footage from the Canon EOS 5D Mark 3! Nice!

Cinema5D has news on this new feature for RAW with the Canon EOS 5D Mark 3 and Magic Lantern.

Planet 5D has more on the 3x zoom added to Magic Lantern for the Canon EOS 5D Mark 3.

Planet 5D has some on the Magic Lantern Team RAW video conversion utility for Mac.

Planet 5D has some comparisons of H.264 vs a Hacked GH2 and the Canon EOS 5D Mark 3 RAW with Magic Lantern.

Cinema 5D has more on the Relentless, the $1800 camera stabilizer for smaller cameras.

I have been using the excellent AirParrot program to stream from my computer to my Apple TV. Mostly because there is no App for Showtime Anywhere on the Roku, iPad or Apple TV that will stream to the Apple TV or Roku. AirParrot allows us with older Macs to activate AirPlay streaming, and does a pretty good job of it, allow you to stream your screen or an individual app or window (the most useful for ShowTime anywhere, if you pop out just the video, so you just see the top bar of the browser window and the video) and it streams sound as well. This is great, and I will likely still keep the program around, just uninstalled (so I can re-install when I need it).

The reason I am keeping it uninstalled is it has been causing some issues with my sound on my MacPro. Specifically I was losing the 3 physical hardware settings in my Sound control panel. And I run my sound out through a Digital Out to an Emotiva DAC, but have lately had no sound options. Sometimes running Diskwarrior seemed to help, but as of today nothing was bringing them back, so I removed Airparrot and it's installed plug ins (they have a removal tool that I could not find on their web site, though it talks about it, but when I tweeted them they quickly gave me the link http://t.co/bFYfDNoaFN, though I used the awesome Find Any File [and it is $7.99 in the app store] while holding down option to really find anything, and was able to remove the program and it's installed file ) and after a restart my sound settings were all back. And hopefully they will stay that way!

Filmmaker IQ has posted this video with the workflow to the EOD 5D Mark 3 and the Magic Lantern RAW recording.

Filmmaker IQ has posted this video with the workflow to the EOD 5D Mark 3 and the Magic Lantern RAW recording.

NVIDIA released a new CUDA driver 5.0.59, though it did not show up in the control panel and needs to be manually downloaded from their web site. Unlike the web driver it seems to work with my system!

Yesterday I saw that NVIDIA had released a new web driver , 313.01.01, and was hoping it would help my Geforce GTX 670, but instead it caused a cascade of failures and kept me down for a whole day!

Installation went fine. bit on restart the computer would not come up. Eventually I had to put my old Geforce GTX 275 back into my Mac so I could use option and boot into my edrive or the emergency partition (both of which I had to use). First off even with the GTX 275 the computer would not boot at all, not in single user mode or even safe mode (well I honestly stopped Safe Mode after about 2 hours, it was still moving, but going so slow I didn't think it would boot.

And even emergency mode was trouble, because my external OWC 3TB backup drive, no longer mounted, so I couldn't do a restore from my Time Machine partition! And I didn't want to try and re-install the system over the old system, just in case, so I had to go to Best buy and get a new Hard Drive.

DId you know that the new Seagate Barracuda drives in fact don't say Barracuda anywhere on the box? It just stays Desktop, though the drive still says Barracuda! WTF?!?!?!??!

So I got that drive home and re-installed a fresh install of OS X on it, and then had it take my old user and settings from the old drive, which after about 5 hours worked just fine (though I had to move the drive internally as it wasn't working from my external USB housing for some reason).

After everything was in place (including my slow finder) i reinstalled my GTX 670 and the machine rebooted just fine, and even stranger now has the NVIDIA control panel installed, but not the new driver.

I could immediately see the menu bar item for the new control panel.



And when I opened the control panel it informed me that yes that driver is incompatible with my system! YES NO KIDDING! So what systems is it for?


I just wished it realized the Web Driver was not compatible before it installed it before, as it took down my whole system! And I had to buy a new hard drive to get it up and running again!

TonyMacX86 has posted his latest guide to building a CustoMac. Still wish they would do a multi processor XEON one, but that is just me.

DIY Photography on why Magic Lantern RAW for the Canon EOS 5D Mark 3 is the best thing to happen to Canon!

This story is all over the web, but Petapixel had it right away. A new alpha of Magic Lantern has managed to get 1920x850 RAW video at 24P out of the camera, and it looks much better than the H.264 compressed video and it sounds like it may be better than the Black Magic Camera. As you can see from this Planet5D post on the subject, and you can see their post on the subject as well.

And you can really get into this with the EOS HD post on it.

I am sure that Canon doesn't want this, as they want you to buy their cine EOS cameras to get RAW capabilities, but it is awesome that Magic Lantern has been able to pull this off!

David Torno at the ProVideo Coalition has posted the 6th lesson in his After Effects ExtendScript Training.

Indie Production House.

Actually had these guys follow me on twitter (there Twitter feed is @indiePH and mine is as always @jonahlee), is how I found them, but this looks to be a cool site for helping Actors in Los Angeles learn about acting, and find classes, headshots, demo reals, etc. Obviously the classes, photography and stuff are paid, but they have some great videos and other things to check out. Worth looking at if you are getting started in acting in Los Angeles.

CGMeetup has a series of videos on creating a cartoon character face in Adobe Photoshop.

Crossphere at AEScripts has created the $199.99 Toy Bricks 3D Physical Motion collision simulator for After Effects.



Looks very cool. A bit too much for me to get and play with, but does seem very fun.

Zach Locatt has released the Create Picotal Null script at AE Scripts. It lets you quickly create a null at key layer points and parent layers to that null. It is $5.99 or name your own price.



Here is the control panel.

Again, looks very useful, I just wish there was a way to have all my scripts in the cloud and be able to use them wherever I log in, as I work in too many other bays, and hate to get used to things that make my life easy when I can't use them elsewhere!

No film school is covering this.

Seems inevitable since they edit their own stuff, and FCP 7 is dead and and I would not want to edit a feature on the FCP X timeline.

Creative cow has the press release, but you can check out the new xMac at Sonnet's site. Using thunderbolt to expand a Mac Mini is a brilliant idea now that not only is there not an X-server anymore, but the MacPro has not been upgraded in ages, and though we have Tim Cooke's promise of a new MacPro, this may be the best Mac Server solution going right now, as you can expand it with many PCI cards, and make a real server, with an inexpensive Mac Mini.

CGMeetup has posted a video and on the VFXLAB Showreel for 2013.

this reel is made by the instructors of VFXLAB that they have worked on part of movies and some of CG shots from VFXLAB on Vimeo.

Very cool stuff.

Very cool, how to do a makeshift bullet time with a ceiling fan over at DIY Photography! Only works for very small objects, but a very cool idea.

Alexis Van Hurkman has a article on two questions about video scopes. Worth Checking out.

Just ignore Rain Wilson being a moron, but this is so impressive. Being able to relight and image with another similar photo in photoshop, and even cooler being able to steal a look from an image or movie and process your video with it. They say it is very processor intensive and I believe it, but still very impressive!

So I have been giving a lot of RSS readers a try and love that Fever syncs with the iPhone version of Reeder for the iPad, but I am pretty sure Fever won't be my replacement choice. And it isn't that it is a good solution. It works like advertised, and I like that it is self hosted, but that is also the problem. At least for me.

I use BlueHost for my web server and like it very much, but Fever seems to run really really slowly on it! I am talking an hour to update all my feeds, which takes minutes at most for other programs.