Cheshire Omnimedia

I suspect that Lacie’s QC or design team has gone the way of the Dodo. I’ve been fighting my Protools setup constantly today.

The culprit? I believe it’s the enclosure to one of my quadra 500 gig drives. During heavy use (such as batch exporting) the drive will “disappear.” Power’s still on (the Lacie support people will always blame this first. As if the power supply is the root of everything that can go wrong with their drives.)

Now I’m backed up (See this tip) so I’m not sweating bullets, but you do lose a few hours of productivity if a drive goes down.

My chain, for anyone who runs into this in the future: Dell E1705 ->Digi002R -> 500gig Lacie Quadra -> (Via FW800) 500gig Lacie Quadra.

My $.02: Avoid Lacie like the plague. A studio I work for lost one three weeks ago and then another started limping the other day. Combined with today’s experience, do yourself a favor. Skip Lacie all together.

Today’s post has nothing at all to do with the music business. (Had to get that out the way, mea culpa)

I saw The Dark Knight last night for the second time. Everyone seems to be gushing about the film, but a few things occurred to me.

1) TDK is a better film then Batman Begins.

2) I enjoy Batman Begins more.

3) TDK is about 20 minutes too long.

To elaborate, as far as “art” is concerned, I think Nolan’s second outing with the bat-franchise is an improvment over the original. Not that the original is bad. To the contrary: I think that Nolan got as much mileage out of the story and characters as you can in a re-boot.

But why is it better artistically? All of the characters are developed further. The struggle of being Batman is brought to light in a way that hasn’t been done before. Ledger’s Joker is brilliant. The Harvey Dent character is great. Modern moral quandries are addressed without being too condescending (ie the cell phone eavesdropping.) The picture is sophisticated in a way that most blockbusters aren’t.

I just think I enjoy Batman Begins better.

I’d rather sit down after a long days work and put on BB. TDK is more of an event. Much the way the Lord of the Rings extended versions are. I’ll never put one of those on for shear kicks. I love them, but I wouldn’t. Starwars Episode 3: yes. The Return of the King: hell no.

The length is one of the major issues that I have with TDK. It’s about 20 minutes too long. Watching it the second time, I was hard pressed on what you could cut out of the film and yet still retain it’s greatness. Other then about 30 seconds of Bat-poddery the only other thing to do would have been to end the film at the capture of the Joker. Two Faces finale should have been saved for a third film. That’s perhaps the proverbial straw that broke the camels back.

Just a quick report: I’ve been away for the last few days because I’ve been on RAGBRAI. Will be back at it soon!

Today I was in the studio and came to the following conclusion: I love
Audioslave.

People are quick to criticize, and I understand where they’re coming
from. The band has two very tough acts to follow: Rage Against The
Machine and Soundgarden.

I would still argue that they set the modern rock benchmark for this
decade. Their second record, Revelations, had a ton of hits. All of
the singles deserved the airplay they recieved, too.

Just calling it like I see it.

If you’re reading the title and thinking What the hell does this have to do with audio? you’re right to be confused.

The other day I was recording a client and we got to the point of “well, I played a note, can’t you just make it longer?” Of course I can. But why should I?

Which brings me to my point:

If you want Brandon Lee in your film right now, you better be ready with wide pockets to cut a check to ILM as he’s sadly no longer, well, hireable. They have a whole slew of tricks to put the deceaseds’ likeness in celluloid.

But let’s say you have Hugh Grant in your film. Why not just film another take?

And that’s the crux of my idea today. We as engineers have crazy tools. It seems like magic to “mere mortals.” And it really is- we can change pitch, length, timing with some effort.

But if we don’t have to, why not just run another take?

. . . on your studio computer.

The Studio Moral of the Day goes like this:  You shouldn’t have your DAW connected to the web.  That goes for Macs as well as PCs.

Why Macs?  Because they’re essentially PCs in terms of interest to the hacking community.  I mean, sure they’re different under the hood.  But if you believe that your Mac is safe just because it’s a Mac.  Well. . . Keep on thinking that.  Your clients will come to me!!! (I keed, I keed!)

Taking that a step further, one of the best practices is to Dual Boot your computer if your studio comp is also your personal comp.  That essentially allows you to have an OS for play and an OS for work.  My laptop has a stripped down version of Windows XP for remote work.  Games, typing, browsing, iTunes, all that’s on the other OS.

Another thing that people forget about:  On your “work OS” if you’re dual booting, you should disable auto updating.  On that Apple side, seemingly innocent updates to Quicktime can bring your DAW to it’s knees.  Same thing on the PC: an update to Internet Explorer could do you in.