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.