March 7, 2008
Waves APA32 Review
I have a Macbook Pro running Pro Tools LE/M 7.4 with the Waves Gold/Renaissance Bundle plugins as my main audio plugins. The systems performs well but I use a number of software plugins such BFD as my drum software and it seems to dispose of a fair bit of CPU on its own without running any of the Waves software for actual audio processing.
So, I recently bought a Waves APA32 and had a chance to plug it in my system tonight. To test how many instances I could run, I took a stereo mix and initiated 5 instances of the Waves C4 Net plugin (to address the APA32 instead of the host CPU) on the track itself, ran the track into an Aux with 5 instances there and repeated this until I had 16 instances of C4 running simultaneously. At that point, the unit was running at 98% CPU. My Macbook Pro was running at between 5 to 7% CPU.
From there, I took all the same instances of the plugin and switched them to run on the host rather than the APA32. With all the same 16 C4s running off the host, the CPU was at about 45%.
I was quite pleased with this, considering that the usable amount of CPU on my machine before it starts to give errors on playback is about 60%. Working the CPU any harder than that is very frustrating resulting in very frequent stops while doing playback in the timeline. So, effectively I feel like I've been able to more or less sub-let about 2/3 of the usable off my host CPU to the APA32. That should free my up ability to run roughly double the amount of audio plugins as I was able to before.
I'll include the screen caps of both scenarios of the Waves Netshell software and the Pro Tools System Usage meters so you can see for yourself.
P.S. This thing is machine room material only. It's as loud as everyone says it is.
Posted by Derek Leverington at 10:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
February 6, 2008
New Years Resolution: Get Your Internet Together
It's 2008 now...
That means it's getting to be about 10 years since a lot of companies put up their first websites. And the sad truth it, most haven't progressed that far from where they started.
Sorry-looking websites abound while seemingly everyone in the company agrees that the website is ugly and old and embarrassing and all that. But, it stays the same for this reason or that.
It's come to mind a lot lately how much resources and budget have to do with the success of initiatives. And no more is the gap often more apparent between a stated priority and actual priority than when it comes to the internet. Calling up an interactive design shop with $10 or $15K in your budget isn't going to get you far. It's not like everything has to be outrageously expensive, but you don't have to look far into the budget to see things that get a lot of more money than that. And I'll wager many of those things don't see the light of day from where your customers are standing. But your website is often the first component of your brand experience that prospective clients are exposed to.
So, if you are looking at budgets at this time of the year....
Be bold. Ask for an adequate amount of money and expect that there are aspects that you won't be able to anticipate. And if the money doesn't come, it's pretty good proof that no one cares that much. Companies throw money at things they want to fix. If there's no money, it's a pretty low priority, regardless of what anyone says about it.
So, it's 2008! Why not make this the year that the website doesn't suck anymore.
After all, why live life knowing that you have an ugly website?
Make that change!
Posted by Derek Leverington at 11:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
January 30, 2008
Great diagram to explain the life cycle of a blog post
This is a good diagram that explains some of the online activity that happens when blog content is generated.
This via Wired.
You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you've written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers.
The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits -- to You
Posted by Derek Leverington at 1:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
January 28, 2008
Kudos to MSN Video for Mac Accessibility
I'm done my fair share of razzing the good folks at MSN Sympatico over some of their apps either not being compatible on Mac or being released way after the Windows version.
So, I thought it's worth giving some credit where credit is due now that the MSN Video Beta is up and running. It works well on Firefox on my Intel MacBook Pro. It didn't seem to want to go on Safari, but if I was them I'd have looked after Firefox user first. It will be interesting to see if it does eventually run on Safari.
It's a bit surprising to see the use of Flash as the playback technology, given Microsoft's usual loyalty to use their own Windows Media platform as well as their rising star, Silverlight.
Regardless, the MSN video portal content is great, so it's nice to have access.
Posted by Derek Leverington at 12:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
January 22, 2008
Canadian Virtual Hospice Palliative Care Video
This is a video project I produced last year, but was just recently uploaded to YouTube.
Special thanks to Jessie Wallace, Ryan Latham, CJ Gibson, Colin Hubick, Roslyn Kozak and a great bunch of clients at the Canadian Virtual Hospice (the best Canadian palliative care site out there).
Posted by Derek Leverington at 9:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Facebook's havoc on my blog
I've thought on a few occasions I'd love to have more time to post things on my blog. Truth is, this is one of those things that you have to make time for but I realized that I definitely slowed down on posting after joining Facebook.
In some ways, there's very little overlap. I don't talk about my weekends on here or anything like that but there's only so much time in the day and I spend some some of it everyday on Facebook. So, the blog suffers...
We'll see how it goes but my only new years resolution is to try to post a little more often.
Posted by Derek Leverington at 12:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
January 21, 2008
Uploading Videos to YouTube
I was playing around with a number of different compression settings for uploading video to YouTube as I was disappointed with how the recompressed .flv files were looking. It worked okay but optimizing it was timeconsuming as each generation require compressing the video and then uploading the 100 MB file into YouTube and waiting for it to be compressed into a FLV before being able to preview its final output.
If you have access to it, I'd recommending using the new Apple iMovie software. It handles this kind of exporting and uploading to YouTube painlessing. I wouldn't use iMovie to edit anything professionally, but taking a finished anamorphic DV file into it totally simplified the hassle of getting widescreen content to playback with the correct aspect ratio correct in YouTube.
That said, I can't wait until Adobe adopts H.264 playback into their Flash plugin.
Posted by Derek Leverington at 5:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
December 12, 2007
Canadian Programming on iTunes Music Store
Lots has been said about Canadian television and I don't have anything more to add that hasn't been said already, but one things is true:
Canadian television isn't any better just because I can pay to download it from iTunes.
This is especially annoying when my tax dollars go to fund the CBC in the first place. At least it's free to watch television (although who has rabbit ears anymore so it's not really free because you have to pay for cable to get CBC anyway).
As far as I'm concerned, any CBC content should be made available for free on the internet to Canadians. Same thinking as it used to be in rabbit ears days but the times have changed.
The messaging on the apple.ca home page sounds like some copywriter in New York iTunes who has never crossed the 49th wrote it:
"Your favourite TV shows. Now on iTunes."
Whatever... Do he think we all sit around here in toques watching Strange Brew and Degrassi??????
(At least he got the Canadian spelling of "favourite" right.)
Anyhow, I cancelled my cable awhile ago because there's no new episodes of 24 and Lost. If they get that on iTunes, I won't bother hooking it up again. I'm just as happy watching movies from zip.ca.
Apple: quit wasting your time on getting Canadian television on iTunes and get the iPhone launched in Canada already! And while you're at it, give us parity pricing for the U.S. dollar.
Jeez!!! I'm sick of feeling like a second class Apple citizen these days.
Posted by Derek Leverington at 12:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
September 14, 2007
Making change happen faster in Adland
It seems like a lot of blogs ramble on about things that the author thinks should happen or their opinion on what did happen.
This role of reporting or offering opinion is all well and good, but in some ways I think it's follows traditional journalism a little too closely. For those of us interested in being agents of change, what if we put a little more effort into writing in such a way to practically help the process of change actually happen.
Got your client to make the leap to skip TV in the ad budget and plunk it down on online? How about sharing that with the rest of the group.
I find that anecdotal stories are often more persuasive than a stack of research, especially if it's a story about a recognizable brand and the story ended well. And if the client is leaning towards it, it just might the nudge to get them to take the leap.
So, here' my short list of ideas:
1) Make plans when you are budgeting to allocate to online advertising well up front of developing the campaign media plan.
Halfway through the year or the campaign is not the time to come up with some brilliant strategy for the use of online. In fact, it may take you a couple of years to win the battle, but keep bringing it up. Change takes time.
The best conversation I ever had with a client in terms of results of getting more focus in online advertising went something like this in a budget meeting:
"I'm thinking this year I'd like to spend half our ad budget in online media. Whaddya think?"
And there's been no looking back since then. It's been a wonderful success all around.
2) When you're pitching that big online media plan in the planning meeting, have some strong creative concepts to go with it.
Let's be honest. Budgeting is a rational process but like any decision, it's also emotional. If you're pitching an idea, be excited about it! And have a really good idea so other people can get excited about it too!!
Everyone loves to work on new and interesting things as long as they don't feel like it's putting them in a risky position. You need to create enthusiam and be able to make it happen.
If you can't do those two things, you're not going to be able to move the yardsticks.
3) Allow yourself extra time to execute the new big idea.
If it's a big idea or novel, you probably haven't done it ten times already. So, allow yourself some extra time to make it happen. The last thing you want is be late on delivering the big idea you got everyone so excited about. It's nice if it's a positive experience all around.
4) Make a big deal out the results once they come in.
We're trying to change old patterns of doing things. It needs to be crystal clear to all involved that this new way of doing things works so that it ultimately becomes the way that things are done.
You can tell a lot about an organization's priorities by where the resources are allocated. Go and fight for you piece of it. Once you do that, you can make all your best laid plans come to be.
Posted by Derek Leverington at 1:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
August 10, 2007
What Atheism and Web 2.0 Have in Common
I heard a quote a while ago and it went something like this:
No one is an atheist for intellectual reasons; they are an atheist for moral reasons.
It was one of those statements that stopped me in my tracks. It’s really an unverifiable statement but I think it just may touch on a profound truth about human nature. Human nature affects all of us, including our pursuits. I believe with anything that we are passionate about, be it a religious or any other human pursuit, it’s worth a few moments of introspection to understand why we are so passionate about it.
Let’s be honest with ourselves. I believe that many of us Gen-X types espouse the whole notion of Web 2.0 for philosophical and moral reasons. I suspect that many of the people reading this are very passionate (dare I say) evangelists of Web 2.0.
Why do we care so much? What does this really represent to us? Why do we argue for it with the same type of vigour as we would a social or political issue? Why do we cherish it as much as we would a favourite piece of music or artwork? Why do we seek to be personally identified with it? Why do we believe in its positive power to change how we relate to one another?
It is only for the chance to be a mover and a shaker in our organization?
Is it the chance to make a lot of money as some Web 2.0 guru?
Is it the chance to contribute in some large or small way to it?
I’d suggest there’s more to it that that.
I was going to try answer that question on my own behalf here but I’m not going to. I think it would thwart a reader’s own depth of introspection.
Who knows? Maybe I’m alone here but I don’t think I am.
And if I’m not, ask yourself this question… why do you believe in Web 2.0?
Posted by Derek Leverington at 11:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
