Pro Flight Simulator - It's a scam!

If you enjoy the hobby/passion of flight simulation then you're most likely always on the lookout for add-on's and ways to make it more realistic.  And, whether or not there's something being developed that's better than Microsoft's Flight Simulator "X" or, FSX as it's users and fan-base commonly refer to it.

In my own perusal of the 'net looking for the "latest and greatest" in FSX enhancements I came across a "new" flight simulator that's been getting a lot of web-visibility called, "Pro Flight Simulator".  At first blush it seemed like something that would trounce the current flight-sim king, FSX, what with the glossy marketing campaign and short but well-produced video teaser.  But in fact it's a wolf in sheep's clothing:  Make no mistake, this is a very well-disguised and pre-packaged scam!!

I first became alerted to the possibility that this new flight-sim offering might be more hype than reality by three very significant things:

1.  I found that every "review" was nothing more than a boiler-plate of over-hyped positive commentary - and that nearly every review posted was nothing more than a copy-paste of this same initial review - a word for word duplicate.

2.  Every review I found also had several hot-links back to the primary website for "Pro Flight Simulator" and it became clear that the review sites were truly nothing more than affiliates who had jumped on-board to try and sell it.  In fact if you look at the internal pages for Pro Flight Simulator you'll find they're actively looking for affiliates to post their "review" and subsequently offer the product for sale.

3.  One of the supposed review sites actually had the title:  Pro Flight Simulator: Is it a scam?". And then of course it went on to say quite emphatically that it was not a scam and how absolutely wonderful the software is. Really?  How stupid do they assume the general public is, anyway.  You're trying to *sell* a product by initially defending whether or not it's a scam?  C'mon people.

Alas, Pro Flight Simulator is nothing more than the freeware package that's been around for years called, "Flight Gear", of which there are both Mac and PC versions. What this company has done is to simply bundle together all the code you would normally have to compile manually to make a complete installation and put it on a DVD with an installer.  Any average computer geek could do the same thing in about 10 minutes - again, totally for free.

And while Flight Gear does have some amazing features it's nowhere close to the technology built into FSX - or even X-Plane for that matter.  And the visuals in Pro Flight Simulator are... well, several generations behind FSX both in detail and available animations.

Pro Flight Simulator comes it two flavors:  Really cheesy old-school technology for $50 or, you can add more cheese with the world scenery package for a whopping total of $140 - not including shipping.

By contrast FSX Gold Edition costs less than $20 in most national software retailers and is the latest and greatest currently available.

Or you could get all the components of Flight Gear totally FREE and compile the components and have a fully functional - and fun - flight sim.

So, if you enjoy getting ripped off by very a smart, glossy marketing campaign then be my guest.  But if you're like me and actually want something that's worth the asking price then get FSX and enjoy!

Blue Sky EXR 6.5 Active 2-Way Monitor review

If you've been reading my pro-audio studio monitor reviews you'll note that I'm a big fan and proponent for the 2.1 monitoring setup.  One major reason - if not the *only* reason - is because you simply cannot get a truly accurate sonic representation of your audio from a typical stereo setup, period.  End of story.

But here's the caveat with that standard:  Not everyone has the physical space to allow for a 2.1 system (which requires a correctly placed and sized subwoofer) and/or, has the technical expertise to set it up properly.  And, the some of the best 2.1 systems also command a higher price-point than the traditional 2-unit stereo pairs.  Well guess what, those knowledgable guys at Blue Sky understand all that and have given the market what it's been asking for:  An uber-high quality, sonically accurate stereo monitor, with some previously unheard-of features in a desktop near-field.

Enter the Blue Sky EXR 6.5 2-way near-field monitor.  As with anything I test and review I always start off with a completely non-biased and open mind and my B.S. filter is on high alert for anything that turns out to be over-hyped manufacturer claims rather than real-world performance results.  The need to be completely un-biased was even more important with this review because every other Blue Sky unit I've tested has always come out on top, so I had to be sure that I wasn't mentally preparing myself for another 5-Star review.

However despite the glowing reviews I've given Blue Sky's offerings previously I was a bit timid about reviewing a traditional stereo pair, in fact I was almost prepared to be under-whelmed if anything.  So in point of fact I was already biased *against* the EXR's for producing any sonic experience that would impress me.  I should have known better.

In fact, I did have to re-train my ears a bit to fully test the EXR's because for years I've been using the Blue Sky Pro Desk 2.1 system as my primary monitoring solution, so my ears have definitely become accustomed to the balanced sonic footprint of having a floor sub-woofer.  With the sub removed from the equation I had to not only reposition the monitors to accommodate the lack of a sub but I also had to use pink and white-noise generators along with scopes to make sure I had put them into their proper position.  Once I did that and started playing my standard audio test files (a varied selection of music tracks, foley and vocal tracks) then I was really in for a treat.

The EXR's really came to life in a significant way.  First off, the highs are typical Blue Sky fare:  Crisp & accurate without being harsh or abusive to the ear.  Imaging was also noticeably open and organic, something that was punctuated by the active and tuned porting in the cabinets.  And the lows were full-bodied, punchy and carried LFE moments easily without distortion.  However because this is a stereo pair and not a 2.1, the EXR's can't be pushed to the same decibel level as say the Pro Desk just for the simple reason that they can't move the same amount of air as a subwoofer can, so you have to be cautious with tracks that have lots of LFE or heavy bass mixes such as heavy-metal rock or even some soundtracks such as "Transformers" which carry tons of lower-than 60hz info in the mix, as you can easily introduce distortion with too much "bass".

But one of the amazing things about the EXR's isn't just their physical output, it's that they are TUNABLE.  That's right, these jewels actually contain DIP switches and to control tweeter output, a gain control and get this,  "Baffle Compensation" settings on the rear panel.  That's right, the porting on this unit can actually be actively controlled with the Baffle Compensation controls allowing for a highly tunable cabinet matched to room acoustics.  (This requires using an acoustic analyzer, but if you've got the hardware and knowledge this unit will do it!!)  I've only seen this high-end feature on monitors costing more than DOUBLE the price of the EXR's, so Blue Sky is giving you not only class-leading sound, but amazing control over that sound.

But it would be almost pointless to do a review of this type without some basis of comparison, and I was very fortunate to have been able to stack up the EXR's against the following competitors who are in the same relative price-point.

Below is the list as tested and notes of how they sounded in a head-to-head A-B test against the EXR's:

-  DynAudio BM6A MkII:  Anemic; lacked mid-range fullness and punch.  Did not image nearly as well.  Highs can be very harsh and too bright.  Overall output seemed too low as if the on-board power was not enough.

-  Tannoy Precision 8D:  Odd sounding overall.  Lots of low-end punch but dicey highs and lacked natural imaging.  Almost sounded as if they needed to be broken in first.  Floor noise to high for this price-point monitor.

-  JBL  R4326:  Overall good sonic reproduction.  Low-end extension not as deep or as controlled as EXR's; distorts easier than EXR's.  Imaging OK but the "sweet spot" is much narrower than EXR's requiring the user not move their head to much from side to side to keep imaging sounding proper.  Noticeably louder floor noise but not as bad as the Tannoy.

-  Genelec 8040A:  Very crispy highs that can translate into harsh when pushed; very flat and soft mid-range; too much low-end punchiness.  Sounds unbalanced and requires EQ controls to balance out the highs and lows.  Good for mixing heavy music tracks, poor with vocals and piano.

-  Behringer B3031A "Truth":  Very narrow sweet spot otherwise a decent sounding rig.  Low-end extension not as deep or as controllable as EXR's.  Fair mid-range but slightly anemic.  Does not have a good reputation for longevity.

-  Mackie HR624 MkII:  Unnaturally flat and lacking detail especially in highs. Lot's of mid-range but lows are unbalanced, imaging fair to poor compared to EXR's.

-  M-Audio DSM1:  High degree of floor noise, translates into noisy tweeters and distorted lows.  Imaging is poor across the board and mid-range suffers.  Worst of the bunch by far.

-  ADAM A8X:  The closest sounding competitor to the EXR's. Very open, natural tweeters, excellent imaging, controlled lows.  EXR's have more low-end balance and slightly better imaging especially for vocals, piano and instruments.  ADAM's seem to handle LFE equally as well as EXR's however EXR's seem to have deeper low-end extension.  In all a very, very tight competitor.

The only other model that I wanted add to this list but wasn't available - and is also at a higher price-point than the EXR's - is the Focal Solo6 Be 6.5.

 Highly Recommended






The list of tested monitors above represents what most pro-audio users and techs consider to be the "best of the best" in that price-point of speaker, which is from $650 to sub-$1000 per unit.  And it might be surprising to see how poorly some of the other models actually performed against the Blue Sky EXR's.  But if you read my other reviews of Blue Sky models you'll quickly learn that the guys at Blue Sky are something of modern-day wizards when it comes to accurate sonic reproduction

If the guys at SkyWalker Sound trust Blue Sky to create an entire system for their high-end, commercial monitoring solution, don't you think *you* should do the same?

Best Apple Compressor Settings for DVD Widescreen Downconversions

Ever since the first affordable handheld HD camcorder hit the market almost 6 years ago there has been a great deal of misinformation and outright myths about the realities of how to make a great-looking DVD from HD content.

Some people assumed that it simply wasn't possible to do and instead the HD camcorders should be put into mini-DV widescreen mode to shoot the original content, which would make for really good looking DVD's since it would all be in standard-definition anyway.  This also started the myth that since DVD's are SD that a movie shot in SD would simply transfer directly to a DVD, no problem.  Anyone who knows about the DVD/MPEG2 specification knows this is completely false, but to the uninitiated it seemed totally logical.

Before I delve into these "best" settings for use in Apple's Compressor let's first look at the realities of making a proper final encode for a DVD:

First, there are 2 basic DVD capacities, single-layer and dual-layer, at approximately 4GB and 8GB respectively.  A finished movie of any format being exported straight from an editor as a "self contained" movie, even in an SD format will be tens and most often hundreds of gigabytes in size.  Obviously too big to fit into even a dual-layer DVD.  In fact, not even a dual-layer Blu-Ray can take that much data since BR tops out at 50GB!  So what's a movie-maker to do?  You have to "compress" or squeeze your final movie file down to DVD-spec size.

Second, the process of creating a DVD is called, "authoring", and DVD Studio Pro and other pro authoring programs use a split-file architecture whereby the video and audio assets are completely separate files and become linked during the authoring process.  That means when making your final encode from your finished movie you'll always end up with two file types:  ".m2v" which will be the video component and ".ac3" or AAC for the audio half.  (There are other audio formats that will work for DVD authoring but AAC is the best choice because it takes up far less space without noticeable quality degradation.)

While DVD Studio Pro does have the ability to transcode your final movie files into DVD-compatible formats it absolutely is not optimized for the task and has very limited options for doing so.  Basically you DO NOT want to let DVD Studio Pro making your final encodes, you want to manually control the process using Compressor, period.

Another myth is that DVD's can playback at 60p or, 60 frames-per-second in progressive mode.  Unfortunately NTSC DVD's only have 2 playback frame-rates, either 23.98 (24p) or 29.97 (30p) either interlaced or progressive (progressive having much better per-frame quality and looks drastically better on newer HDTV sets).

While Compressor can give you commercial-grade results from your final encodes it is also very slow at doing it's job (creating a Virtual Cluster would greatly speed-up this process and will be discussed in another posting in the future).  So, I'm going to supply you with (2) versions of Compressor settings:  One that is the "Best of the Best" and give you stunning results - but will be painfully long in completing. The second I'll call "2nd Best", the results will be better than if you let DVDSP4 handle the encode - maybe even better than Apple's default "Best" droplet setting in Compressor but will take significantly less time to encode.

And by the way, the best thing to do when you're doing encoding tests is to export a 10 to 30-second sequence from your Final Cut timeline - hopefully one with a lot of motion or scene changes - and put it into Compressor with these various settings, and see what the end result looks like.  Then you'll know which one you want to use.  So onto these settings: (Note - these screenshots have been zoomed up because the default text size in Compressor is too damned small for normal humans to see clearly.  NOTE TO APPLE:  Give us UI FONT SIZE CONTROLS in all the FCS apps!)

First up:  Video Format which is found under the "Encoder" tab at the very top.  Notice the file format is MPEG-2 and the extension is m2v, that's the file you'll see when imported into DVDSP4.  (please disregard the "geometry" pop-up you see - that unfortunately was there when I made the screen-shot)

In each selection you'll notice the "star" button on the right; click it to highlight it which allows you to choose the options to the left.  Video format should be either NTSC or PAL (Yes, DVDSP4 can make either an NTSC or PAL disc image).  Manually select the frame-rate that matches what your timeline settings were in FCP.  If you shot at a frame-rate higher than 24p the select 29.97; aspect ratio should be set to 16:9 and let field dominance be "auto".

The next tab is under the upper Encoder tab is, "Quality":

Do NOT set a bitrate higher than what you see here, mainly because older DVD players would not be able to keep up with a max bitrate of 8Mbps.  Blu-Ray and newer DVD players can handle whatever you throw at them, but play it safe anyway.  Make Motion estimation "Best" here.

Forget about the GOP and Extras tab as they have nothing to do with quality settings and are for advanced use anyway.

Next up is Frame Controls tab up top which has just a single area of options (unlike Encoder which has 4 sub-tabs):

Again, you must manually hit the "star" button on the right to actually turn-on frame controls.  Set all the fields as noted above, make sure you use "Adaptive Details" and for the best all-around image clarity use no-more than a setting of "6" for anti-alias and "12" for details level.  More than that and you'll start seeing moire and macro-blocking from details being over-sharpened.  Rate conversion should be set to "best".

And that's it for the Video portion.  Audio is even simpler:

Set the File format to Dolby Digital (AC3/AAC) and make your settings exactly as above.  Do NOT make your data-rate any higher than 224 kbps as it will not make your audio sound any better it will just take up more space.  (We're only dealing with a stereo audio track here, not 5.1 or 7.1)

In the preprocessing tab uncheck everything; the only time you'll need to use things like a DC filter or low-pass is for very specialized audio which 98% of indie editors do not deal with, so don't bother.

But, remember I said that the "best of the best" might too painful to wait for it to finish it's job?  Take a look at these settings below  - which is video-based only.  Audio encoding takes very little time and reducing the quality there wouldn't be worthwhile.  These settings below will take much less time to encode but will not be nearly as gorgeous as what was listed above.

You'll notice that the bitrate has been lowered and, all the Frame Controls have been lowered to "Better" instead of "Best", and "Adaptive Details" has been unchecked as well as adding any anti-alias or details filtering.

Again, using 10 to 30-second test file encodes will tell you which of these settings best fits your needs.

Now this is far from being an exhaustive listing of what Compressor is actually capable of, in fact there are several other deeper controls that can alter image color, sharpness and a host of other attributes to your finals, but for overall image-quality for HD to SD-widescreen downconversion for DVD, this is what you need.

Apple discontinues 24 & 30" inch displays, leaves only glossy 27" inch

At first blush it would seem all Apple has done is remove monitors from their offerings that may or may not be their highest sellers in their monitor lineup.  Certainly the 27" inch iMac is one of their biggest sellers amongst both the general consumer and amateur visual creative people so it stands to reason that a stand-alone 27" inch monitor would also sell well.

As I've said many times both publicly and privately, no visual-creative professional worth their salt would want - or need - a glossy screen throwing back reflections at them and creating annoying and often times impossible-to-remove glare which occludes the very details we're trying to look at during our work.  Anyone who's been forced to move their head around or, reposition a glossy-screened monitor to try and avoid this issue knows of the headaches this "pretty" type of screen creates.  And by the way, sometimes the headaches are literal, caused by eyestrain in dealing with these glaring reflections.

So thanks, Apple, for once again proving that "Beauty is more important than functionality.", and that if the device doesn't look like an iPhone, you won't make it.

If you're a creative pro then don't waste your money on Apple's "I wanna-be an iPhone when I grow up" monitor and get a Dell or Samsung instead.

Avid Media Composer 5 suite vs. Final Cut Studio: A Suite Comparison - Part One

Ever since posting the "coming  soon" notice for reviews of all the current NLE's (including the PC-only Edius 5) I've had countless questions about the age-old question of Avid vs. FCP "which is better" being asked incessantly.  Typically the "which is better" debate is totally pointless because it always comes down to both personal preferences and what the budget/production needs are.  However, this time things are a little bit different and not what most are expecting.

There are two ways to make this head to head comparison:

1. Comparing just the actual editor itself, Media Composer to Final Cut Pro and;

2. Comparing the entire suite offerings.

It will be a few weeks before I have time to drill down into the actual editing comparisons between these two however Avid has made sweeping changes both to interface handling, opening up the architecture to third-party offerings such as external monitoring with AJA or Matrox devices and making the software overhead more efficient (faster rendering). But I already have enough info to make a *suite* comparison, and it's still in the FCS favor.  Why?

First, Avid's DVD authoring program is nothing more than a re-branded Sonic DVD-it Pro HD offering; it's the exact same interface and features with the Avid name attached to it - and it's a PC-only program.  Yes, it does handle Blu-Ray but considering "real" BR authoring isn't ever going to be available on a Mac (according to the latest rants from Steve Jobs, who has said "no native Blu-Ray ever on a Mac..." in a recent interview scooped by Apple Insider) BR is a non-starter anyway.

Considering the plethora of DVD-based work for the indie market and that Avid does not offer a native Mac OS X DVD authoring option well... that's just damned silly.  Not to mention that Sonic DVD-it Pro HD is a pro-sumer application and does NOT have all the high-end features - especially for replication-standard mastering - that DVDSP4 has.  To wit, I know many Avid editors who cut on Media Composer and then export their MPEG-2 and AC3 files to then author in DVDSP4 simply because it's such a well-rounded application.

Speaking of exporting, Avid ships with the latest version of Sorenson Squeeze, which did not fair well in my head-to-head comparisons of Mac-based encoders (you can see that review posted here). For quality (not speed) it was last on the list with Compressor and Episode Desktop beating each other for tie-breaker.  Yes Sorenson is much faster than Compressor but it's quality of MPEG2 and H.264 encodes do not match Compressor's quality, period.  And these days MPEG2 and H.264 are just about the only 2 types of encodes being made; you're either going to make a DVD or post up to the web, rarely anything else.

And then there's price:  The MC5 suite is more than double the cost of FCS "3" at $2495 retail.  That's hundreds more than even Adobe Production Premium CS5.  Worse of it all, for all that money you're NOT getting a native Mac OS X end-to-end solution - no DVD authoring!  Really?

As I say, I've yet to make a direct comparo between Media Composer vs Final Cut Pro strictly as a stand-alone editor but if you're thinking that MC5 might be a viable Mac OS X replacement for the entire FCS suite the answer is a solid "no".

More coming soon...
 

Clip Wrap 2.1 for Mac Review: Fast Video Transcoding Wizardry for Mac OS X

With the advent of DSLR video and the newer consumer-grade cameras that use high-bitrate versions of the AVCHD codec the process of actually getting easy-to-view or better still, easy-to-edit footage from these new sources has been a bit of a pain in Mac-land of late.  Especially with cameras such as the new Panasonic TM700 (I've reviewed this camera recently) which shoots a native 1080/60p format FCP currently can't talk to that format *at all*.  That means you'd need something to transcode the footage into a file format FCP can recognize and drop to the timeline.

Enter ClipWrap.  What it does is very similar to what P2Log Pro would do for P2 users, it re-encodes the native camera files into a Quicktime wrapper that allows you to drag-n-drop to the FCP timeline.  However ClipWrap does not work with MXF-style data, only .m2t and .mts files created by HDV and AVCHD cameras.

ClipWrap has two basic modes of transcoding your footage:

1.  It simply re-wraps the camera masters into a Quicktime wrapper that allows FCP to recognize the clips to either be input into the Log & Transfer process or immediately dropped to the timeline.  Which one will depend on exactly what format you shot in-camera and whether or not it's a natively supported FCP format.  This simple re-wrap is blazingly fast and is much faster than real-time, up to 10x faster than real-time depending on your machine's speed and HDD available space.

2.  Or, ClipWrap can also transcode the camera masters into either ProRes, DVCPRO-HD or Avid DNxHD codecs to then be dropped into FCP, Premiere Pro, Avid or any other pro-NLE that can handle these formats.  Unfortunately the time it takes to transcode is very similar to how long it would take FCP's Log & Transfer to make the transcoding, and high-bitrate AVCHD files such as from the aforementioned TM700's 1080/60p format the process can take up to 6x longer than real-time.  And that's not a limitation of ClipWrap, that's all about the processing power available to the computer since the transcoding process is very much like final rendering in FCP:  It's very, very CPU/RAM/HDD dependent.

The real benefit of ClipWrap however is that it's a very small application and it's own overhead is extremely small, far less than having FCP running in the background during Log & Transfer allowing more computer-crunching assets to be allocated to the task hence, ClipWrap is definitely faster than using Log & Transfer for transcoding into ProRes, for example.

The user interface is also very simple and easy to understand; you simply point to the media you're going to have ClipWrap work on or, drag-n-drop those files directly into the UI, pick whether or not you're going to just re-wrap or transcode into another format, hit the "convert" button and watch as it crunches through your list of clips.  It's that easy.

For Mac-based editors ClipWrap is a godsend right now.  Many AVCHD cameras do not have native support in FCP requiring transcoding prior to editing and in some rare cases as with the TM700 there simply isn't any other application - that I'm aware of - that can even *handle* the transcoding process for it's footage!  That means depending on which camera you choose you may not even be able to look at the footage outside of the camera unless you've got ClipWrap to first take care of transcoding it.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Just as when HDV first made it's debut into the pro-NLE market and it's associated headaches with not having direct compatibility with FCP so too is the domain of all the AVCHD-format cameras today.  At some point FCP will follow suit (we all hope) with Premiere Pro and Avid and make AVCHD a drag-n-drop native format for editing, but until then ClipWrap is your best friend for getting your hard-won footage into FCP to create your masterpiece.

Basically, if you shoot any AVCHD-format camera and you cut on FCP then you'd better have a copy of ClipWrap to make your editing life easier.

Now that I have a copy of Avid Media Composer v.5 I'll be testing output from ClipWrap using DNxHD into Avid timelines, so stay tuned!