Devonia Media Blog

How to Repair Disk / User Permissions in MacOS Sequoia

183:936821080 (David French) — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 11:42:29 GMT

Repairing Disk Permissions (User Permissions) in MacOS Sequoia and Sonoma

Long-time OS X users will have been used to using Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions function to sort out a number of different Mac issues.

At some point this function was taken out of the Disk Utility UI.

I recently had a problem which seemed to be entirely down to a user permissions problem, and wasn't able to use Disk Utility to fix it. Neither could I find a command line option (although in the last couple of months a few users have posted this fix elsewhere online.) So I asked Apple Support, and they told me.

It's easy when you know how...

Copy and paste this into the Terminal:

sudo diskutil resetUserPermissions / `id -u`

Hit Enter and type your login password when prompted.

This immediately fixed a persistent problem I've had for a couple of years. Hope you find it useful!

What the hell is DSEASDK doing on my Mac? Is it malware?

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 22:40:28 GMT

DSEASDK on MacOS: Is it Malware?

For a long time my MacBook Pro has been flattening its battery surprisingly quickly, even when in Sleep mode. It had got to the stage that I'd leave it sleeping overnight and have to charge it in the morning before I could use it.

"Using Significant Energy" on the battery taskbar applet showed nothing untoward. However, one day I noticed a process I didn't recognise using up a lot of CPU cycles in Activity Monitor: DSEASDK.

It took a surprising amount of sleuthing to work out what DSEASDK was and why it was there. Apparently not many people have googled for an answer to this. So here's the answer.

What is DSEA SDK?

DSEA SDK, or DSEASDK as it appears in Activity Monitor on MacOS, is an SDK (not surprisingly) that in my case was supporting another process. The other process was shown as being part of a package called EPOS Connect. This puzzled me, as I don't do anything involving Electronic Point of Sale. So my first thought was that it could easily be malware.

DSEASDK was running automatically on my Mac on startup, and because of the way it's installed, it doesn't appear as a login item, and can't be disabled in the usual way. Killing the process would stop it briefly and then it would restart. This is exactly what you'd expect from malware. Again, finding out the true provenance of DSEASDK and EPOS Connect took some more digging.

What the hell is EPOS Connect and why is it installing crapware on my Mac?

Turns out it's nothing to do with Electronic Point of Sale. This link showed that EPOS Connect is - get this - "a desktop application that enables the user to update EPOS devices with the latest available firmware, configure the device to the preferred settings and connect EPOS devices seamlessly with the range of softphones.

"The IT administrator in a company may deploy firmware and specific setting to the users of EPOS Connect. This is achieved by EPOS Manager in combination with EPOS Connect."

Finding out you've got something running on your Mac which seems to be allowing an unknown remote administrator to deploy updates is a really great way to reinforce any suspicions that this is malware. But, it turns out...

The company behind EPOS Connect is EPOS Audio. They seemingly have nothing to do with EPOS. However, they're the parent company of Sennheiser, maker of headphones and other consumer and semi-pro audio equipment. I have some of their stuff - headphones and mics, mainly.

Why are EPOS Connect and DSEASDK installed on my Mac?

A few months ago I'd been having some issues with a pair of Sennheiser wireless headphones. It seemed worth checking they had the latest firmware. So I'd downloaded and run a legitimate firmware update tool via Sennheiser's official website.

Rather than install an app which updated the firmware, Sennheiser had installed the firmware update tool into /Library/Application Support , into two subfolders: DSEA and EPOS Connect .

The binaries in these subfolders had been set to run automatically on startup. Because they weren't running as normal apps, they wouldn't appear in the Dock, Task Bar, Force Quit Applications or any of the normal places you'd expect to see legitimate applications.

DSEASDK had been installed in such a way that even if you found the process and killed it, it'd restart automatically. In short, Sennheiser have designed their headphone firmware update tool to behave in exactly the same way you'd expect malware to behave, and to hell with the battery life of their customers.

Why they've chosen this approach in 2023, I have no idea, but let's just say it's a completely shitty way to treat your customers, as (a) it kills the battery life on your MacBook, even when it's sleeping, (b) they've made it very difficult to work out what's causing this, and (c) there's absolutely no need for a firmware update tool to auto-launch itself to run constantly in the background.

So Sennheiser, if you're reading this - screw you, assholes. Seriously, bite me. This is no way for a legitimate company to do business.

How do I uninstall DSEASDK and EPOS Connect from my Mac?

Once you understand what these malware-wannabee processes are doing and where they are, it's actually easy to get rid of them. It's the obfuscation part that makes it tricky.

Open Finder.
In the Go menu, select "Go to Folder..."
Enter /Library/Application Support/
When the folder opens, look for the DSEA subfolder. Delete it.
Also find the EPOS Connect subfolder. Delete that too.
While I was in there I also noticed a Sennheiser subfolder. I deleted that too, because who knows what other shitty antics they're getting up to.
Empty your trash.
Restart the machine.
Open Activity Monitor, and check that DSEASDK is no longer running.

Summary

If you're finding your MacBook Pro battery life is being hammered, and you're a Sennheiser customer, consider that you may have inadvertently installed a piece of complete crapware to update your Sennheiser firmware.

If you want to get rid of this crapware and restore your MacBook Pro to health, the instructions to delete it can be found above.

Replacement Battery for Wiral Lite cablecam

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 21:33:20 GMT

Wiral Lite replacement battery (in UK)

Update! Warning!

We were contacted by somebody who bought the battery described below, who tells us it caught fire very dramatically.

This may have been to do with using the original Wiral charger - we're not electrical engineers so we can't shed any more light other than to pass on the information. But if you are thinking of purchasing the product below, or have already done so, be warned.

Original article below...

We love the Wiral Lite cablecam - great for getting drone-like shots in forests, for example.

Unfortunately the original battery that came with ours started to puff up. This is bad news for LiPO batteries and meant disposing safely of the original battery and replacing it.

It seemed unfeasibly difficult to find a replacement battery. None of Wiral's stockists seemed to list them, and when we contacted Wiral it took them several weeks to tell us they couldn't help. Thanks, Wiral!

Fortunately we found a LiPO battery with the correct dimensions and a similar capacity rating, available with the same XT30 connector. Like the original Wiral Lite battery it's a 11.1V 3S LiPO, but it's rated at 1300mAh capacity instead of the original's claimed 1500mAh. I doubt in practice the capacities are much different.

Here's what you want to order if you need a replacement Wiral Lite battery in the UK. This battery is small enough to fit fine in the Wiral Lite's battery bay. Larger capacity batteries are available but whether they'll fit is somewhat borderline.

1300mAh 11.1V 3S 25C Sport LiPO Battery from Overlander Batteries

(link now removed - see warning above)

Don't forget to specify the XT30 connector.

The Overlander battery comes with a balanced charging port. We found the original Wiral battery charger which charges unbalanced through the XT30 connector worked fine; but I'd be reluctant to leave it charging on the unbalanced charger unsupervised.

How to use Blackmagic RAW (BRAW) in Apple’s Final Cut Pro X

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 23:52:18 GMT

How do I use BRAW in FCPX?

The good news is, you now can, no thanks to Apple. If you want to skip all the explanatory stuff and just go for the solution, the answer is near the bottom.

What is RAW?

Codecs

Video codecs are the way video and audio footage is encoded into a computer-readable format. There are lots of ways to do this, and the technology evolves over time.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach with codecs. For example, some codecs can produce great quality at the expense of vast, unwieldy file sizes (we’re looking at you ProRes 4444).

Some produce much smaller file sizes, but need a lot of processing for the computer to output the image. H.264 is an example of a codec which is fine for final output for something that might be viewed on the web, but isn’t brilliant to edit in - the amount of work involved in rendering multiple streams of H.264 will slow down the NLE.

With this in mind, back in 2007 Apple came up with the ProRes series of codecs, which maintain high quality video whilst being optimised for editing. Many manufacturers licensed ProRes to include in their cameras and recording devices. This type of standardisation is really valuable, as it means you can shoot, edit and output in the same codec without having to transcode.

It’s worth mentioning that MOV and MP4 are not codecs - they’re wrappers. They’re the structure in which the codec data is stored. So you can have a MOV wrapper around an ProRes codec, or an MP4 wrapper around an H.264-encoded video stream, for example.

Lossless vs Lossy Compression

One option with codecs is to store every frame of video pretty much as it came off the sensor. This ensures all quality is preserved, but generates enormous, unwieldy files. These files (or more commonly the frames or sequences within them) can be compressed.

Lossless compression involves applying a reversible mathematical process to data, such that it takes up less space but can be completely restored when needed. However, lossless compression can only shrink files so far.

Lossy compression is a bit of a dark art in video, and involves reformulating and removing data representing the visual image in such a way that you can shrink files very significantly, without making too much of a visual, perceptible difference to the end result. By doing so you can reduce file sizes by a factor of ten or more over the original, uncompressed data. MP3 revolutionised portable music by allowing WAV files to be compressed to a tenth of their original size without having a vast impact on the audio quality, although audiophiles who are happy to spend £800 on an ethernet cable would of course dispute this. H.264 worked similar magic with video, and more recently, computers became powerful enough to handle the stronger compression algorithms of H.265 to shrink everything even further whilst maintaining reasonable perceptual quality.

So when you see ProRes 422 LT, ProRes 422, ProRes 422 HQ and ProRes 4444, what you’re seeing is a range of codecs which gradually trade off file size for quality. ProRes 422 LT generates the smallest file sizes, with the biggest loss of quality. ProRes 4444 maintains excellent quality at the expense of enormous file sizes. Of course, ProRes 422 LT may be perfectly adequate for encoding basic-quality video such as generated by a GoPro, but if you use it to encode footage off a 6K High Dynamic Range sensor, then what you end up with may be perceptually quite a long way adrift from what you started with.

The RAW Advantage

As time has gone on, the demand for quality has increased. If you’re mastering for 4K or 8K TV output, or working in High Dynamic Range, where you need to capture a great deal more colour information than Standard Dynamic Range, the traditional codecs aren’t going to be your friends. You want to maximise quality, but you’ll also probably have the budget to pay for somewhat more sizeable storage and powerful editing machines to cope with this.

All the “traditional” codecs involve interpreting the data coming off the camera sensor at a basic level. In particular, sensor data needs to debayered before it can be viewed on an RGB screen; rather than have equal numbers of red, green and blue pixels, camera sensors invariably have a pair of green pixels for every red and blue pixel (the human eye is more sensitive to green light, so this makes for a better image). Debayering or de-mosaicing converts the data from these four sensor pixels into a single RGB data pixel, but this process is information-destructive and non-reversible.

At the same time, raw sensor data has a white balance baked into it by the codec, and other potentially useful chroma and luma data is lost in the encoding process. Many codecs use a lower bit depth than the sensor data, so they’re converting, say, 1024 levels of light for each of red, green and blue into 256 levels of light for each. This may not be visually noticeable, but once you come to tweak and fiddle with the image, you can’t get that lost colour data back. Chroma subsampling involves throwing away some chroma data to reduce the volume of data being processed, which is all well and good until you need that data at some point further down the line.

RAW codecs, in the strictest sense, preserve as much sensor data as they can, and leave the debayering and other processing until render time. This means you that when you want to process the image - altering exposure, colour balance, or revealing details in shadows - you can take full advantage of every bit of colour and luminosity data the sensor captured.

You’d think RAW codecs would use lossless compression, but in fact both ProRes RAW and BlackMagic RAW (BRAW) allow the user to trade off file size against fidelity. It’s fair to say however that the compression in this case is optimised towards retaining as much of the hidden information that you’re likely to need in post-processing as possible, rather than what’s needed for immediate visual rendering fidelity; for example, Blackmagic RAW does perform partial debayering during encoding, although ProRes RAW only debayers at render time. Both these codecs can use a target bit rate: that is to say, rather than allocate a fixed amount of data for each frame, they use adaptive bitrates to aim for a fixed visual standard of encoding quality, regardless of the complexity of the scene.

RAW codecs were originally developed by camera manufacturers, notably RED, but as users’ technical demands increased, Apple developed their own ProRes RAW format in 2018 in conjunction with monitor/recorder manufacturer Atomos, and Blackmagic released Blackmagic RAW (BRAW) in 2019.

Comparison of bit rates for different codecs, at 4K/50p. The manufacturers don't publish much useful data about bit rates, so we had to work backwards from various publicly published information. Consequently, E&OE.

Why You Don’t Want To Transcode Too Much

It used to be a lot of hassle dealing with lots of different codecs, but typically software such as Final Cut Pro deals with most of this behind the scenes. If you import an H.264 video into Final Cut Pro, for instance, FCP gives you the option of either keeping the H.264 file intact, or transcoding it to ProRes (“optimising” the file). Optimising will give you better playback performance, at the expense of creating more data. Additionally, an optimised ProRes file might take up a whole lot more storage space than the H.264 file it was transcoded from.

Because each codec has different ways of compressing data, when you transcode from one to the other, you’re almost inevitably going to be losing some picture data. This is not normally a problem, but if you have to transcode several times, you may experience noticeable degradation in the image quality, or compression artefacts.

As an example, let’s say you shoot using a mirrorless camera using a proprietary codec; you then transcode into ProRes for editing. Then when you output, it’s for YouTube so you transcode into H.264. (YouTube will ingest ProRes happily, but the file size will be much larger to upload.) Not only are you risking losing visible image quality and colour data which was present in the original camera file, but you’re also dealing with more storage space than you really needed to.

Consequently there’s a lot to be said for shooting and editing in the same format, even if the final delivery format is different.

Why is dealing with RAW so complicated?

There are two issues you’ll come across when dealing with RAW. One is compatibility when recording, and the other is compatibility when editing. Both aren’t technical hurdles; rather, they’re a result of commercial organisations who choose not to play nicely together, to the inconvenience of their paying customers.

RED have the RAW recording market in somewhat of a stranglehold, thanks to their patents. If you want to put RAW recording capabilities into a camera, you’re at the mercy of RED letting you, unless your engineers and legal department can develop some sort of technical loophole which gets you around this. If you’ve wondered why some high-end cameras only allow RAW recording using an external recorder, here’s your answer.

RED don’t care so much about external recorders, so they’re happier to license RAW recording technologies to companies such as Atomos, who don’t make cameras. But RED’s lack of flexibility in allowing other manufacturers to include RAW recording in cameras has really not done the whole market any favours. Take for example the DJI Ronin 4D, which was announced with ProRes RAW support, which was subsequently dropped, along with the price to compensate, upon release. (A firmware glitch meant French users could indeed use ProRes RAW for a time, which shows it was a commercial rather than technical hurdle which led to this.)

The second issue you’ll encounter is Blackmagic RAW vs ProRes RAW. Both companies are keen to establish their technology as the market leader. Both companies have their own NLE (Da Vinci Resolve, and Final Cut Pro X.) So, guess what? Blackmagic don’t support ProRes RAW in Da Vinci Resolve, and Apple don’t support Blackmagic RAW in Final Cut Pro.

In a further twist of irony, Blackmagic’s cameras will happily record in ProRes, even the higher quality variants, and Resolve will cheerfully edit ProRes footage. Just not ProRes RAW, because Blackmagic want you to use Blackmagic RAW instead.

Blackmagic’s RAW format is available to other camera manufacturers to use themselves for internal RAW recording, but none have yet taken up the option. This said, Blackmagic do have a lot of penetration at the low- to mid-range video camera market, and if you want an inexpensive camera with the potential to deliver great visual results, Blackmagic is likely to be high on your shopping list.

ProRes RAW is also available to other manufacturers, but products using it are niche; the only mainstream hardware which encodes ProRes RAW comes from their launch partner Atomos. So you can record in ProRes RAW from any camera, providing it outputs the correct unprocessed signal over SDI and you don’t mind using an external recorder, along with its additional weight, power supply etc.

Adobe don’t have their own RAW format to push, so Adobe and Blackmagic are happy for Premiere Pro to support BRAW. So if you’re the masochistic type who enjoys working with unnecessarily expensive, slow, clunky software with a poor user interface, then you can always use PPro.

So for anybody who wants to shoot RAW with a mid-range camera - which includes anybody working with HDR workflows, or working at 4K or higher resolutions - you’re pretty much looking at shooting with Blackmagic and editing with Resolve or Premiere. This suits Blackmagic down to the ground, but doesn’t help the many professional production companies and editors who use Final Cut Pro X, and don’t have the time or inclination to use a more traditional, less agile NLE such as Resolve or Premiere Pro.

Blackmagic RAW in Final Cut Pro X

So if you’re one a pretty large community of professionals who end up wanting to shoot in Blackmagic RAW and edit in Final Cut Pro, you have two options.

One is to transcode from Blackmagic RAW to ProRes. (Not ProRes RAW; it’s a recording format, and as such it’s expecting sensor data as an input, not a file.) Color Finale Transcoder and EditReady will allow you to do this, as well as dealing with other niche formats that FCPX doesn’t handle. But there’s a catch. Because you’re then editing the transcoded footage, not the RAW footage, you’ve just lost a lot of your flexibility in grading and post-production, not to mention using about double the storage space because you now have a BRAW and a ProRes version of each file.

The second option is a tool from a small Australian production house, LateNite Films, called BRAW Toolbox. Chris Hocking and his small team have managed to come up with creative ways around Apple’s very haphazard support for third-party integrations, allowing you to import BRAW into FCPX, without transcoding.

To import your BRAW clips, you go through the BRAW Toolbox, as FCPX won’t recognise them natively. You can pre-process all the parameters you might want to: exposure, gamma, colour temperature, LUTs etc. Processing is very quick, because you’re not generating new video data, you’re simply updating the metadata the playback engine is using to render the RAW video.

Once processed, the BRAW clips can be dragged straight into FCPX. As far as Final Cut is concerned, it’s just playing out clips like any other. But behind the scenes, BRAW Toolbox is doing something quite clever. Final Cut thinks it’s playing out a simple colour generator for each clip, but BRAW Toolbox uses an Effect on each of these clips to hijack the playout and insert its own playout of the BRAW file, using the Blackmagic official libraries, totally seamlessly.

In use you wouldn’t particularly notice anything different from editing any other FCPX media, although you now have full access at any time to the BRAW Toolbox processing tools. All parameters can be changed dynamically, and even keyframed. Taking exposure as an example, if exposure changes mid-shot, you might be used to using the Colour Board to change shadows, midtones and highlights (aka lift, gamma, gain). With BRAW Toolbox, you can directly change (and keyframe) the exposure interpretation of the original sensor data, giving you access to every last bit of colour data the sensor captured to maintain the quality of your processed image.

So Chris and his small team have managed to achieve something that the world’s largest computer company apparently isn’t sufficiently motivated to do; allow you to edit RAW footage from the market leader in mid-range RAW cameras, using what’s supposed to be a state-of-the-art NLE.

Of course, in an ideal world, Apple and Blackmagic would get together round a table and license each others’ technologies, rather than make their customers’ lives harder by being anticompetitive. Don’t hold your breath.

On a more positive note, Chris Hocking also develops the excellent CommandPost for Final Cut Pro X, which adds in all those features that you wish Apple would, such as tight integration with a wide range of control surfaces. We can only hope Apple hires Chris to be the FCPX Product Manager, as he seems to be doing far more to keep FCPX relevant than Apple's development team.

Watch Chris explain how to use BRAW Toolbox for FCPX thanks to @RichardTaylorTV on YouTube.

Which is the best AI for Automated Transcription?

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 23:45:59 GMT

Now Updated!

Additional translation engines added after requests.

Introduction

It's often useful or plain good practice to include closed captions or subtitles with video content. It makes your content accessible not only to people who may have hearing difficulties, but also to those who are viewing without audio enabled - in public, on the train, in an open-plan office.

Tools to transcribe text yourself, or where humans manually transcribe your text for you as a service, have been around for years. However, Machine Learning or AI, whichever you choose to call it, is reaching the stage where it may be a viable alternative to manual human transcription.

By the way, I'm not going to get into an argument about the terminology. Whether you want to call it AI, Machine Learning, cloud services or whatever, we're talking about a computer that can interpret speech into text. Realistically we're not talking about true artificial intelligence here - the service won't be mulling over the deep meaning of your content. Calling it AI is as much about branding as anything else.

With several hours worth of video content from a seminar needing transcribing, in order to achieve fast turnaround I wanted to know which of the many services out there would give the most accurate results.

Specifically, rather than feed the AI beautifully enunciated clear text, I wanted to see how it faired with real-world, noisy, flawed audio, which is exactly when you'd normally reach for the human transcribers.

Benefits of AI for Automated Transcription

AI or Machine Learning-based transcription tools have the benefit of being quicker than human-based transcription. If you submit an hour's worth of spoken audio, a human transcription service may take a day or more to turn around the transcription. An AI-based service may be able to transcribe the same content in near-realtime, or even faster than realtime.

AI transcription may also be more cost-effective than human-based transcription. Humans get paid by the hour; the service that employs them may charge you per hour of transcription, or per word. AI can work 24x7 without breaks, unionisation or holidays, and it doesn't have a mortgage to pay, so most AI-based transcription services are cheaper than their human counterparts.

On the other hand, AI is not currently as accurate as a skilled human transcriber, particularly in cases where several voices interact, or there's a lot of background noise, or the vocabulary is technical or specific. AI can't currently summarise or reduce redundancy in content to fit reading speeds, etc.

But given what AI is potentially capable of achieving, I wanted to set up a test to find out the best the AI could do, given a challenging real-life audio recording.

Method

I signed up for free demo accounts on the following services:

Simon Says
Cockatoo
SpeechText.ai
trint
Otter.ai
Sonix
Rev
Speak AI
Beey
MacWhisper Pro
Descript
SpeedScriber
I also let Premiere Pro have a crack at it

I tried Lumberjack Builder but found it incomprehensible and gave up. Note that Descript and SpeedScriber both require an app to be installed on your Mac; with the others I used the web interfaces, which are of course cross-platform.

I uploaded a 40 second video clip. I deliberately chose a clip where several voices could be heard (not at the same time), with some speakers on-mic and some picked up by a background mic. Before uploading I manually tweaked the audio to obtain the best quality that I could, given the recording - I normalised the levels, cut out some background noise, removed pops and applied some compression.

I wanted to give the AI platforms a good test; the audio I submitted is typical of the type of events I film, where not everybody remembers to speak into the mic all the time, or the audience contributes without waiting for a roving mic, so you rely on on-camera mics or other mic sources to hear some of the speakers.

Some of the AI platforms warn you in advance that if audio isn't clear, single-voice, properly recorded with no background noise, the platform can only do the best it can. Some such as Rev then offer to use their human-based transcription services to process the audio instead. The point of my test was to give these platforms a challenging task, so I overruled their objections and continued.

As a reminder, I'm not interested in functionality for these tests - just accuracy. All the platforms tested have a range of features including outputting timecoded transcriptions, and some can cope with language translation and will happily identify & manage multiple speakers, online editing etc. Prices also vary, but I was only interested in performance.

Results

Original Text - transcribed by me

[camera mic] "Hiya, I'm [name redacted for privacy], and I joined the communications, erm, team here two weeks ago. My role is to help communicate what's happening in this transformation."

[camera mic] "Morning, I'm [unusual unintelligible name] and I'm the Head of Psychological Professions at Community Mental Health, so I'm representing all the psychological professional groups throughout, erm, the community and specialist services. Morning everyone, [unintelligible]."

[camera mic] "Hello, I'm [name redacted for privacy], I know a lot of people in the room and there's some new faces, uh, my role is the psychology lead on the transformation team."

[handheld mic, good quality] "Lovely, thank you very much everybody. And may I just ask the, erm, service leads and managers to stand up."

Conclusion

I gave these AIs a deliberately tough challenge, and most of them couldn't cope, coming up with completely unusable transcripts. I'm not particularly blaming the AIs here - I deliberately chose speech I thought they'd struggle with, to see if any could step up to the mark.

And a handful did manage pretty well. In particular I found Sonix, Rev, Speak AI, MacWhisper Pro and Descript all came up with fairly usable transcriptions. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses and I was in the process of submitting more text for them to transcribe before I made a purchasing decision.

But then I slung another 30 minutes of difficult, technical, jargon-riddled, acronym-rich, accented, off-mic voice into MacWhisper Pro and I was blown off my feet. It uses the OpenAI Whisper engine to do the translations on your local machine. You just drag and drop a video into its window and it does its thing, outputting a text file or timecoded SRT. It was phenomenally accurate. Not quite 100%, but the amount of manual editing I needed to do was absolutely minimal. It coped with ridiculously complicated acronyms, slang, laughter, and somehow it even knew when to capitalise words or phrases.

It also transcribes around 3x faster than realtime on my Mac Studio. It doesn't try to categorise different voices, but for simple closed captions it's astonishingly good. It means there's no reason not to routinely provide closed captions to every client for every project. And the pricing model means it'll pay for itself in minutes, and keep earning for years.

At the risk of offending literally everybody who has their own pet translation engine whose honour they defend to the death, I will however also give a special mention to Rev, whose web interface makes it very easy to pay more and go for human translation when things get too much for the AI.

So AI might have a tiny way to go before it entirely replaces human transcription - but if you want a quick turnaround or have price-sensitive projects, for a ridiculously low price of €9, go and download MacWhisper Pro right now. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Apple Studio Display - Mini Review

183:936821080 (David French) — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 18:58:13 GMT

Apple Studio Display - Mini Review

So you've ordered your amazing M1 Mac Studio. Great! Now you need a monitor.

But you'd be daft to go with a 4K monitor when you're used to the beautiful 5K Retina screen from your old 27" iMac.

You quickly realise you have 3 options:

LG Ultrafine 5K
Get used to a lower-resolution monitor than you already have, probably with worse colour
Buy an Apple Studio Display

Then you double-check the price of the Apple Studio Display and nearly fall off your chair. Seriously, Apple! How much?

Good Stuff

It's one of very few 5K Retina screens.
The colour gamut is good with accurate reproduction, as far as I can tell.
The style matches your Mac Studio, more or less.
It has Thunderbolt connectivity and acts as a Thunderbolt / USB-C hub.
It powers / charges the connected device, so you don't have to charge your MacBook separately.
It has 600 nits of brightness, which is decent for a monitor (but not so good by TV standards).

Bad Stuff

Aaargh! The price! That's nearly as much as your 27" iMac cost!
The screen lighting isn't totally even. Mine vignettes in the corners. For the money I want even lighting.
The audio isn't great. It has very prominent bass, so if you're a fan of Bose you'll love it, but if you want neutral audio, you're out of luck. You'll still need a pair of decent monitors.
You're paying for a mobile phone processor to run the thing. Why, Apple, why? Maybe in the future they'll start making this do something more impressive than letting the camera track you. Until then, it's burning electricity for very little benefit.
It has active cooling, so isn't silent. A monitor with a fan? :O

Conclusion

If you want a monitor to match your Mac Studio that isn't a step down from your old 27" iMac screen, you don't have a huge amount of choice. But Apple are going to really squeeze as much money as they can for the privilege.

Despite the cost, don't expect a perfect screen, or decent audio.

If Apple took the panel out of this and stuck it in a dumb case without the webcam, mobile phone processor, memory and cooling, it could be a pretty decent monitor, at a lower price point. But meanwhile, you're stuck with this.

ShiftCam SnapGrip - 2 minute review

183:936821080 (David French) — Sun, 23 Oct 2022 19:03:40 GMT

ShiftCam SnapGrip - 2 minute review

We snagged this great little device at the Photography & Video Show. We were so impressed, we filmed a quick review.

Marshall CV-605 PTZ Camera & VS-PTC-IP controller

183:936821080 (David French) — Sat, 22 Oct 2022 19:06:46 GMT

Review & sample footage of Marshall CV-605 PTZ Camera & VS-PTC-IP controller

We wanted to see some sample footage of the Marshall CV-605 PTZ camera, but couldn't find any.

Luckily, Marshall were kind enough to send us one to try out.

Panasonic GH5 vs Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K (BMPCC4K)

183:936821080 (David French) — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 19:14:30 GMT

Panasonic GH5 vs Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K (BMPCC4K) - which is best for filmmakers?

We've been using the Panasonic GH5 since they first came out. No doubt about it, for the money they're great cameras in many respects.

But I wouldn't buy another one, apart from for one specific purpose. Why? Because of the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K.

Both devices use similar sensors (possibly even the same sensor, from what I've read), both are a broadly similar form factor, and they're priced towards a similar market.

I'm here to tell you that the BMPCC4K is a better camera for videographers, in just about every way.

Panasonic GH5 - what we like & dislike

First, the GH5. It's a nice, solidly-built little camera, and the footage that comes out of it gives good results without much fiddling - nice, vibrant colours and sharp images.

But it's very much a compromise. This is a mirrorless stills camera which happens to be quite good at video. In the traditional Japanese style, it's festooned with buttons and switches.

Two rotary selectors on the top give access to 16 different options. There are three finger/thumbwheels, which you might want to map to gain, aperture and shutter speed - but you have to remember which one is which, and for video you don't want to accidentally change your shutter speed.

There are no fewer than 11 small pushbuttons scattered haphazardly, a 3-way rotary focus mode selector, a joystick and a touchscreen. Some of these are too easy to catch with a finger unexpectedly. I'm all for having hardware buttons to access key features, but there's little rhyme or reason to the layout and default uses, which means invariably you're peering at the buttons trying to work out which one does what.

Then you get into the menu system. My god. It can take weeks to track down a simple setting. 90% of the settings are irrelevant for filmmakers. Several times I've enabled things on the OSD and it's taken a whole lot of effort to work out how to turn them off again.

Remember how feature phones were prior to the launch of the iPhone? Endless, cryptic configuration screens and submenus, most of which you never needed, but which completely obscured the stuff you were looking for? This is the exact design philosophy for the GH5 - pack in as much as possible, making the device virtually unusable in the process.

That said, there are a few useful bits and pieces. In particular, the automatic focus pulling has been really useful on a few occasions, if you can remember how to find it in the menus.

The Panasonic's small 75mm touchscreen is too small for everything it tries to display; trying to tap an on-screen option with normal size fingers is hit and miss, so you end up using the joystick, which works well for some things and poorly for others.

Panasonic GH5: cluttered and clumsy

Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K - likes and dislikes

In many ways, the BMPCC4K is the polar opposite to the GH5 in terms of usability. I counted 13 buttons, but unlike the GH5, they're layed out in a natural, clean way such that everything's immediately to hand. In particular, ISO, shutter speed and white balance are on the top just where you can reach them easily but won't select them accidentally.

Behind these, 3 custom buttons can be used as you wish; I configure mine to enable / disable zebras, focus peaking and a LUT. By contrast, trying to find these 3 features in the GH5's menus takes me several minutes each time. I could map them to buttons on the GH5, but the buttons are all over the place, and mostly needed for dedicated functions in any case.

The far larger 125mm touchscreen is clear, bright and uncluttered. Rather than following the GH5's approach of making the display look like a 12 year old's Myspace page, Blackmagic appear to have actually employed the services of a user interface designer. All key information is clear and easily accessible, and the menus give you exactly what you need within a couple of screen presses.

The default output from the BMPCC4K seems slightly softer than the GH5, and the blues are markedly different in hue, but nonetheless the pictures are beautiful, even if you don't fiddle with any colour apart from setting the correct white balance. Blackmagic give you log shooting for free with the camera's Film dynamic range, as opposed to Panasonic charging extra for a V-Log license on the GH5.

Compared to the metal GH5, the plastic BMPCC4K body feels less premium and it would benefit from a bit more heft. It also has far poorer battery life. However, it does come with an AC adapter, whereas to power the GH5 externally you'll need to use dummy batteries, which are a truly mediocre way to power a camera.

One final thing. The BMPCC4K does something weird with its exposure, even when not recording in RAW. Be aware that something that's recording as white according to the zebras will NOT render as white on the output file - it'll render as light grey, depending on the ISO setting. My theory is that the zebras are pretty much redundant, whereas the histogram is showing not what the viewfinder is rendering, but what the sensor saturation is doing, and how the image is recording. No other camera does this, and other BMPCC4K users have found the same as I have. It's hardly the end of the world, but it's a typical Blackmagic quirk.

Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K: designed for the filmmaker

Dealbreakers

The GH5 comes with In-Body Image Stabilisation. It works well. The BMPCC4K doesn't. If this is important to you, well, there you go.

We use gimbals (mostly DJI Ronin-S) a lot in filming. The GH5 balances well on the Ronin-S, and the focus wheel works straight out the box, as does external record triggering. However, with an external monitor/recorder, the GH5 annoyingly will output only external clean feed when the monitor is plugged in (no on-screen display) - so you lose your menus and aperture display! This is infuriating, particularly as it wasn't an issue with earlier combinations of the GH5 and Ronin firmware.

Recently we've starting getting more use out of the BMPCC4K on the Ronin-S. It's harder to balance, but you can still get great results.

Finally, the BMPCC4K records directly to ProRes or Blackmagic RAW. Why the Panasonic doesn't is beyond me, as it means every bit of footage that it produces has to be transcoded for editing.

Conclusion

The Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K is a device designed and built by filmmakers, for filmmakers. It's a camera you'll look forward to using, day in, day out, and it'll work with you to create amazing results. It's a classic.

The GH5 is designed and built by engineers, for engineers. It's capable of great visual results, but you'll have to work hard to use all the advanced functionality it packs in, and at times it'll feel like the camera's deliberately fighting you at every stage.

That said, I still like having a GH5 to hand, purely because of the IBIS and gimbal mounting convenience, which are both missing from the BMPCC4K. However, when using the GH5 with a gimbal, I'll always be using an external recorder/monitor alongside it, for ProRes recording and so I can actually see what I'm shooting.

Controlling Blackmagic ATEM Fairlight audio mixing using Behringer X32

183:936821080 (David French) — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 19:16:47 GMT

Controlling Blackmagic ATEM Fairlight audio mixing using Behringer X32 (or Midas M32)

We use the ATEM TV Studio Pro 4K for live vision mixing, particularly with livestreams. The ATEMs have a built-in Fairlight audio mixing capability. However, you get no native control surface with the TVS4K, only an on-screen mixer via a laptop.

On-screen mixing controls are at best a big compromise, so Blackmagic allow external control surfaces to be used through the ATEM control software. We wondered if the Behringer X32 audio desks we use for livestreaming could be used to control the ATEM's Fairlight audio whilst still live-mixing analogue audio sources to feed the ATEM.

Nobody else seemed to have tried this, but the answer is, yes, you can. So we made a video tutorial.

If you're a Behringer X32 user wanting to control the Fairlight audio mixer on your Blackmagic ATEM vision mixer, here's how to do it.

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Controlling Blackmagic ATEM Fairlight audio mixing using Behringer X32

Controlling Blackmagic ATEM Fairlight audio mixing using Behringer X32 (or Midas M32)

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