- Nick Gold

If you followed the rumors that circulated around Apple’s mythical post-Newton tablet computing device for almost a decade, there was something surreal and sublime about the moment when Steve Jobs finally unveiled it on stage. But now that everything’s out in the open, what is most interesting is how few people understand just how profound, indeed radical, the iPad is.

I’d like to talk a bit about why the tablet—err, iPad—impresses me so much, and why you need to give Apple the benefit of the doubt on this one. This is something much bigger than it might seem on the surface, and is in fact a hint at the future of computing in general. To see where we may be headed, however, it would serve us well to take a look at where we’ve been.

- Nick Gold

As I began to write up the next segment of the Storage Primer, discussing external Direct-Attached Storage (DAS) options for the Mac Pro, I realized that I was starting to talk a lot about RAID solutions on the market, without having discussed in more general terms what exactly “RAID” means, and why it’s important. While I have talked about RAID 0 striped volumes and RAID 1 mirrored volumes in past installments, there is quite a bit more to RAID than that, and it really calls for its own article. Please read on to get a more thorough understanding of RAID storage technology!

Keep in mind that some of my explanations here veer toward using layman’s terms, rather than complex technical language, and that is every bit the intent. For more in-depth information, a simple Google search using the term “RAID” will net you more results than you could ever hope to review. With that said, let’s review the various RAID levels, as well as software-based versus hardware-based RAIDs.

Chesapeake Systems has seen an exciting 2008. On top of this being our most successful year ever, we have also made major investments in our infrastructure and staffing.

If you visit our office, you will notice that our greeting area has been enhanced by complimentary hot and cold beverages for guests, including glasses and mugs that are free for the taking. Slightly less obvious is the addition of our “tech lounge,” a slick area where our technicians meet, brainstorm, prep systems, conduct R&D on new technologies, do paperwork, and yes, sometimes relax.

We’ve also finalized the location of our check-in and check-out areas for hardware repairs, so that is finally streamlined (and out of my office! -Nick)

The end of 2008 is upon us, and we thought it would be a good time to take a look at what did and did not happen in the world of professional Apple products during the course of the year. We’ll also review interesting decisions and announcements Apple has made during the year, and explore what we have to look forward to in 2009.

Apple’s professional desktop computer system, the Mac Pro, was updated in January of 2008, and has remained available at the same specification since then. Not much to report on! As an 8-core 64-bit system clocking in at 2.8GHz through 3.2GHz, it still represents a powerful system. However, many users would like to see more powerful graphics card hardware become available. We will see what Apple reveals in 2009.

Apple has released the Pro Applications Update 2008-4. As always, we recommend you act very conservatively when applying this update. Refrain from doing it during an ongoing project or busy period. If possible, roll it out onto one workstation for “testing” to see if anything unexpected occurs.

However, Apple is advertising a lot of bug fixes and optimizations across most of the applications in Final Cut Studio, as well as Shake, etc. Apple usually doesn’t offer too many specifics, but one would hope that these fixes tighten things up a bit across the board.

One potentially BIG new feature is now present in Color, which is the ability for Color to natively handle REDCODE footage shot with the RED ONE digital cinema camera! Previously, REDCODE would have to be transcoded to a codec Color could deal with natively, such as ProRes. Now that REDCODE works natively, quality should be enhanced due to the reduction of a transcode operation, and a workflow bottleneck has been eliminated. David Butler of Butler Film tells me that his early testing reveals the functionality to be working as expected, and very exciting for those working with RED ONE footage inside of Apple’s Color.

- Nick Gold

Chesapeake Systems, Butler Film, AJA Video and Apple Computer would like to thank all attendees who were able to make it to the Red Camera event we held at the AFI Silver Theater in October. Turnout was great, and attendees were able to glean many facts pertaining to the Red One’s production and post-production workflow. David Butler was able to show off on the big screen a good amount of Red footage (downconverted by the AJA Kona 3 to HD for playout purposes), including particularly compelling comparison shots of 35mm film scans and Red One “Redcode” footage of nearly identical shots.

In the days following the event, AJA released a more official whitepaper regarding the workflow options for Red One footage when being used in conjunction with the Kona 3 hardware. That document is available here:

AJA Kona 3/Red Camera Workflow Whitepaper

A special thanks to Julie Hill and Josh Boehr of AFI, and also Tina Kalakay for putting so much effort into making the evening a great success.

- Nick Gold

After having discussed both internal storage options and third-party external Direct-Attached Storage options for Apple’s portable products, it’s time to turn our attention to the desktop Mac Pros. We begin our examination of professional desktop storage by looking at the inside of the Mac Pro tower, and what kind of storage is possible without having to add external hardware of any sort. A number of areas discussed here, namely software-based RAID 0 striped volumes and RAID 1 mirrored volumes, build off of lessons learned in Part 2 of the Storage Primer.

- Michael Sellers

The nexus where my personal and professional worlds come together is a place I like to call Macintosh HD. I have used the same Macbook since May 16th 2006, the day they were released. On this machine live countless quotes, proposals, hardware and software manuals, emails, keynote presentations, Excel spreadsheets, Chesapeake newsletter articles, utilities and tools, meeting notes, diagrams of customers infrastructure, etc. My point is, almost all of the work I have preformed in the last two and a half years of my life is stored on my beloved Macbook. But that is only the start of the used space on my hard drive. I have over 6000 songs (a thousand of them I have purchased from iTunes at about 99 cents a pop, the rest are from countless hours ripping music from my CD collection.) I have every picture of my son I have taken of him since the day he was born and the last pictures I ever took of my grandparents. I have my journal, I have the great American novel I am working on, I have a copy of the email my wife sent me ten years ago telling me she would go out on our first date. I have recipes and I have concert tickets for later this month. The value of the data on my machine can’t be measured in dollars. If it could I know there would be a lot of zeroes in it.

Two weeks ago I restarted my machine after a software update and it was at that moment my hard drive decided to fail.