Control Group Blog

We’ve been working with Walker Digital Gaming on their Perfect Pay and Elite Baccarat platforms since its inception, so it feels really good to have some outside validation as to its sheer awesomeness — Walker Digital just took the Gold medal for one of the most innovative casino games at the 2009 Gaming Technology Summit.

I think you have to go back 10 plus years to find a gaming platform (I’m thinking wide area progressives?) that has altered the landscape as much as the Walker Digital platform; To quote the press release:

With integrated RFID technology, a card-reading shoe and Walker’s Core Game Technology, the system provides an upgradeable, networked game platform that exactly tracks turnover, hand outcomes, wagers, payouts and player ratings in real time. It also eliminates losses due to dealer error, cheating and counterfeiting and increases game speed, precisely assessing player value and providing detailed reporting on game speed, bet mix, table occupancy, turnover, theoretical win and actual win.

To boot, the ‘Elite’ version of the game adds a whole bunch of new and exciting bets — knowing the game, the cards, and the chips allows the system to present wagers never before possible. Say hello to bigger wins and more exciting wagers for the players and better house advantage to the Casino on one of the most popular card games in the world.

Of course the Judges were ‘duly impressed’ who wouldn’t be?

“This product would resolve many of the problems casinos currently deal with regarding very high-end baccarat play,” said one. “It automates many of the functions of administering baccarat play, but does so in a manner that would not be intrusive to the serious high-end customer.”

Another judge noted the product would “work well in high-volume baccarat markets where the clientele prefers to handle the chips.” The features he liked best included the combination of accurate real-time bet recognition and optical card reader. “Together they allow for complete tracking of game play,” he said.

Congrats to the WDG team for pulling it off!

Adobe CS5 has been released and I can’t wait to install it. While I’ve noticed a lot of excitement around the web for Photoshop CS5, it’s been a rather divisive upgrade for the After Effects community. Many After Effects artists anticipate the upgrade to be lackluster or even disruptive to getting things done. Since After Effects CS5 is now 64bit and only 64bit, many are upset that their 32bit plugins won’t work anymore and need to be upgraded, and that the other major new feature, the rotobrush tool, won’t work for anything but the easiest shots, which are easy to begin with anyway, so what’s the point in paying for this new feature?

Personally, if the only upgrade to After Effects CS5 was 64bit, I’d be overjoyed. There’s nothing more maddening than being unable to render a frame in your timeline because of memory issues, be it in a RAM Preview, output to disk, or working interactively in the application. The dreaded error I’m talking about of course is “After Effects error: could not create image buffer”. This error has the potential to disappear with this release, given your workstation is souped up with RAM.

Indeed, I think many After Effects artists do not realize what a massive overhaul this is, and how much easier it’s going to be to work interactively and render with the application. Those 32 gigs of RAM you have in your workstation actually mean something beyond having a million tabs open in Firefox while you wait for your render to finish, which is crawling because After Effects CS4 is limited to 4GB of RAM, and is using swap space to avoid spitting out an image buffer error. Yes, that’s right, your renders will be much faster at higher resolutions, even if you’re not being given an error. I think once artists start using CS5 they’ll realize how much more sanity they have when working on HD, 2K and 4K projects. You folks that are delivering for non-standard ultrawide displays, such as for stadiums, buildings and museums will be stunned at what a difference 32GB of RAM will make compared to the 4GB you were limited to. It’s funny, I heard one guy say that 64bit support should have been a .5 upgrade, and I was like “Are you out of your mind?! They had to rewrite the entire application!” Finally, After Effects artists will no longer be snickered at by their fellow Nuke and Inferno compositors that have already been working in 64bit for sometime. 32bit was great when our resolutions were NTSC 640×480, but those days are long gone.

The lack of a 64bit wrapper for 32bit plugins is a mixed bag, but ultimately, I’m really glad 32bit plugins won’t work. With paradigm shifts like this, I think it’s all or nothing. The adoption rate from plugin developers would be less than a trickle in the Sahara if they weren’t forced to rewrite their plugins for true 64bit. This would have been a great opportunity for Adobe to introduce some standardization for plugin licensing, but it looks like they dropped the bag on that already. Anyone who’s had to build or maintain an After Effects render farm knows the jungle of mess licensing is with 3rd party plugins and I wish Adobe would at least encourage best practices while developers rewrite their plugins.

Unfortunately, due to the plugin issue, I do think migration from CS4 to CS5 will take longer than it already does, which is typically most of a product cycle. I for one, will keep After Effects CS4 around until I find a replacement for Stefan Minning’s plugin called Normality. Unfortunately, the developer will not be updating it to 64bit.

On the After Effects scripting side, not much has changed, other than some deprecations and a few nice features. You can now read/write layer labels (the colored square next to the layer), which will be useful for making persistent selections for script batch operations. The upgrades to Mocha is nice too, especially the ability to import Mocha shapes in After Effects, which is pretty huge. That combined with the rotobrush finally makes After Effects an excellent choice for roto and tracking. I pretty much avoid rotoscoping whenever I can, but I think the rotobrush tool will be pretty useful, especially for making mattes that don’t need fine detail, such as for localized color corrections. I’m curious if you can specifically shoot footage for the rotobrush, when a green screen isn’t available, but I’m not sure how it’s tracking and edge detection works.

I’m very excited to see Premiere’s enhanced performance. I’m a huge fan of dynamic link and I’m always encouraging people to use it instead of Final Cut when prepping footage for After Effects. Premiere really excels where After Effects doesn’t, and that’s real time video playback. Premiere has been further accelerated with CUDA enabled Nvidia cards and if you’ve never tried dynamic link, or imported a Premiere project into After Effects before, this is the release to do so.

Colin (who has written some excellent posts on our blog) brought up an interesting question in the comments of my NAB report regarding storage requirements for 3D workflows. I found my response growing to blog post proportions, so here it is….

3D (stereoscopic) video does not always double the capture data for a couple of reasons, most notably because there are different capture methods, different post-production methods for processing the data, and different ways to project the data, all which can affect the data requirements at different points in the production, post-production, or delivery process.

Data requirements will be double at worst because there are (sometimes) two stereo video tracks, but since the cameras are capturing very similar information, one of the accepted standards for delivery is 2D+Delta compression for the MPEG format. Using this compression the image data is processed with an algorithm that removes redundant pixel data from the two video tracks. The amount of data is equal to one image plus whatever is different in the other image (the Delta). Using this compression, 3D video is usually roughly 40% larger than a single stream of HD video.

Some cameras, like Pace’s Fusion camera (above) which James Cameron used for Avatar, do shoot with two cameras side-by side, thus creating stereo video tracks and double the data for post (plus metadata). In this workflow, the two tracks are used to focus differently on objects in 3D space, dynamically changing the space between the cameras, and effectively using different z-depth focus to achieve the effect. This actually is not a new methodology, but using software algorithms to help determine focal length and automating what previously was manual can bring faster and more repeatable results. Another company, 3ality, is also providing similar functionality with different toolsets, including hardware that retrofits into 2D workflows. Interestingly enough, one of the major differences between them as 3D forerunners is that Pace is only a rentable technology solution, and 3ality cameras can be purchased. Two different positions.

When post is complete, there are some tricks that can be employed to reduce data for delivery including the 2D+Delta for transmission. For viewing the 3D data, there are a few different methods all which require different hardware (projectors, screens and potentially different methods of decoding).  Instead of using two projectors, some 3D can be projected using interleaved frames at a higher frequency through a polarized filter, i.e. one frame for the left eye, followed by one for the right. This is employed by RealD 3D and has by far the widest adoption in US theaters. Further, some theaters are equipped with active glasses technology, meaning that the glasses themselves ‘shutter’ either mechanically or using an LCD shutter linked wirelessly to the projection system for timing. I have heard these glasses are bulkier and heavier but better for certain situations.

3D workflow is particularly interesting to Control Group as an opportunity to help our clients design lean, optimized pipelines. This will impact our data stores, but why double data if it can be avoided? I think this is an opportunity for integrators like us to help productions, as well as the post-house, in evaluating these technologies and coming up with an appropriate blend of supporting technologies and workflows. Our goal is to build workflows that suit the business model and subject matter, as well as figure out how data is managed, archived, and stored. This is not the time to spend unnecessarily, but it is time to consider when and how this will affect our clients, and help them begin readiness preparations. We want to help our clients avoid turning down work because they haven’t put thought into these issues.

In conclusion, there are a variety of methods that a broadcaster or strategic consultant can invoke – some new, some old – to solve the technical issues. I think a lot of real challenges lie in the production of 3D content, such as the creative process of capturing a scene and the framing of the shots to take advantage of the magic of 3D. These are new processes and they involve re-educating producers, directors, cinematographers, camera operators, actors, and production designers.

The technology? No problem.

About a week and a half ago, Myriad Group announced an updated version of the Dalvik VM for Android, appropriately called the Dalvik Turbo VM.  Running the Dalvik Turbo VM, Android devices can experience a 2x – 3x performance boost in their applications.

What does this mean for Android users?

With any Android device, it’s pretty apparent that they are performing below what one would expect from their hardware specs.  This is because Android was designed to run on a wide range of devices, including devices with limited resources and processing power.

If your phone were to be updated with the new Dalvik Turbo VM, you wouldn’t experience nearly as much lag, applications would open faster and perform better, and you would actually see improved battery life (all things that as an Android user I would LOVE to see.)

How does it work?

The Dalvik VM is a virtual machine that runs in the background on all Android devices.  It acts like a middleman between the applications and the OS itself.  One of the things that makes Android so attractive to developers is that it’s apps are written in Java, the Dalvik VM then takes the Java code and converts it on the fly into code that Android can use.  The Dalvik Turbo VM is an enhanced version of the original VM that makes the conversion process a whole lot speedier.  The new Turbo VM is said to be 100% compatible with Google’s stock VM so any existing apps would be able to see the benefits from this as well.

A demo of the Dalvik Turbo VM vs Dalvik VM on a pair of Android Dev Phone 2′s.

How can I get it?!

Sadly that’s not such an easy thing to answer.  While Myriad hasn’t given an official answer, it is believed that the devices that would most benefit from the new Dalvik Turbo VM (T-Mobile G1 and MyTouch 3G) won’t be seeing it and it will only be included on new retail devices (which we should see before the end of the year.)  That said, many of the Android faithful (myself included) are hoping to see the new VM show up in the popular Cyanogenmod Android ROM amongst others in the near future.

If you’d like to see some more info on the Dalvik Turbo VM, check these links for some impressions and other demo videos:

Myriad Group Announcement

Myriad Group Youtube Channel

Engadget Hands-on at MWC

First off, Buzz has some serious potential. Google gained an incredible amount of ground on Facebook and Twitter with this launch, and I do sense a shark-jumping moment for Facebook. Once the Google App ecosystem takes off, and social games and e-commerce get integrated, there will be a huge erosion in Facebook market share.  People want one thing, one place to go, and Gmail is already mandatory.

1. Lets start off easy here: Mobile. Google, you own the platform, how hard would it be to launch with an Android app? In the time it took to do the marketing piece on the mobile site, Google could have developed a full-fledged app. Instead I have an “above ground only” slow-loading mobile web page. HTML5 isn’t quite here yet – and Android 1.6 is not supported.
2. Two way integration! Getting Tweets in Buzz is great, but I still have to go out to Twitter or TweetDeck to post. If I had the option to choose which networks my updates appeared on from within Buzz (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc), I would never have to leave Gmail… except for…
3. Where is Facebook? They have a strong API and a straightforward authentication service. Connect to Facebook and never make me go there again. Aggregate and publish (see above).
4. Buzz for Biz. I know it’s coming for Google Apps, but get it going already! How about full integration with LinkedIn – a CRM app would be a really interesting mash-up, as well as bringing all my connections into my address book. No more stale email addresses or phone numbers.
5. OK, I saved crazy for last. Google Profile. I am the strongest believer in an open information society – if everyone knows everything about everyone, then we are all equal. I understand that’s a little overboard, but why should I hide my information when it will only make the web more relevant to me, and get us to our ultimate destination quicker.  But with Buzz, your Google Profile went from obscurity to super relevant. So, quick inventory: Google has information about my friends, my browsing/search history (not to mention DNS info), my purchase history, my communications, the news I’m reading, and my documents. Now they want to know my age, sex, where I grew up? Are you crazy? Google is holding ALL the cards now. They keep repeating “don’t be evil” but you know what they say about absolute power… (did I mention my location?)

If history is any indicator of the future, Google will evolve and add features and services. They have done so consistently since inception, and people will choose convenience above all else, including quality and privacy. And I guess I’m one of them. See you on Buzz.

And if you disagree, see you in the comments!

As summer starts to wind down and the air conditioning is on less and less, your company’s computing equipment is likely resuming its role as the largest consumer of electricity in the office. And while there’s not much that can be done to change that, there are a variety of ways to reduce your energy use without compromising your company’s IT needs.

The Server Room

Annually, the single greatest consumer of electricity in your office is likely the server room. Between the power hungry server hardware, the UPS with its constant AC-to-DC conversion and the air conditioning running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365.25 days a year, all of that electricity use quickly adds up.

Hands-down, the easiest ways to save energy in your server room is to make sure your server room’s HVAC is doing its job as efficiently as possible. That means keeping the door closed at all times (and of course making sure there’s a door in the first place!) (many offices forget this part), keeping the HVAC system well-maintained, and cooling as small of a space as possible.

When buying buying new server hardware, Control Group can help you make the most efficient choices possible… this means anything from buying the right server for the right job (that eight-core print server might be overkill), to outfitting your new server with green-friendly hard drives which consume less power than standard drives. Control Group is an EPEAT Partner Reseller— EPEAT provides a “green” rating system for IT equipment based on a comprehensive criteria list.

The most efficient server room though, is no server room at all! As more and more businesses move aspects of their business to “the cloud,” they require less hardware onsite. Less hardware means lower electricity bills, which means money saved.

The Workstations

First off, if you still have any big bulky CRT monitors in your office, their time has most certainly come. They are big, ugly power hogs, and have no right to exist in 2009. No, not even on the intern’s computer in the janitorial closet. An LCD monitor will pay for itself in power consumption costs alone in under two years. When purchasing an LCD, consider looking into those which have LED-powered backlit displays. Not only do they consume even less power than LCDs using older CCFL technology, but they’re brighter, contain fewer harmful elements in their manufacturing process, and last longer to boot!

Pro-Tip: After you’ve replaced your CRT monitors, what do you do with them? Control Group works with Per Scholas, which is a local organization that recycles and re-uses computer equipment and works with New York City schools to provide students with their own computers as well as training.

Another great example of a small change that can make a big difference would be to make it office policy to power down computers at the end of the day (or at least the end of the week). For even more energy savings, consider flipping the switch on that power strip your computer is plugged into on top of powering down.

And for those employees who say that shutting down hurts their productivity, tell them to use Windows’ “hibernate” feature rather than the “shut down.” That will allow them to pick up right where they left off, with all of their AutoCAD windows and dozens of email drafts right where they left them.

The Office

One way Control Group saves energy around the office is that we have a “no personal printers” policy. We have three printers in the office: a black and white laser printer, and a color laser printer and a large format plotter to help us better support our architecture clients.

Not only does this centralized printing solution help save energy by avoiding having dozens of printers plugged in and on standby 24 hours a day, but it saves money on supplies—no more $18 ink cartridges—and saves us time from having to troubleshoot problematic printers (there’s a reason desktop printers are so cheap… they’re cheaply made and break constantly).

Perhaps most importantly, this printing setup also saves a lot of paper. Duplex printing (two-sided) is enabled on our laser printers and we have a dedicated “scrap paper” tray that we keep loaded with scrap paper, for those times when you need to print something but it doesn’t matter how it looks.

We may not be paperless yet, but we’re well on our way.

Finally, with all of the energy that your office is saving, consider moving over to wind power. Here in New York, ConEd offers a very competitive Wind Power for Business package. It’s 100% renewable energy and it’s easy to switch over.

While wind power may be 10-15% more expensive than coal, depending on how much you’ve managed to cut your overall power consumption, it’s entirely possible your company is still spending less on electricity than before even while using wind power. And on top of that, you can tell your customers you’re ahead of your competitors in reducing your company’s impact on the environment.

Early sketch of 174 Grand Street, by Loadingdock5

In the summer of 2008, we worked with Sam Bargetz of Loadingdock5 Architecture to redesign a client’s office. Our work required a creative approach to every aspect of the technology integration to achieve the sleek, modern appearance that the office design called for. Sam and his team were great to work with and we’ve kept in touch.

This year we were excited to learn that Loadingdock5 is attempting to build NYC’s first new building which fulfills the strict German “Passive House” standard. Passive Houses are airtight buildings that use heat from common household appliances and even your human body (!) for warmth. Every effort is made to conserve thermal energy, state-of-the-art heat exchangers are used to provide lots of fresh air.

We’ve been passing notes back and forth to Sam about the technology and are excited to follow his blog updates on the project.

Outside My Hotel in Malaysia – Do Not Feed The Monkeys!

I know the last time I posted here I said I’d be following up with another technical post, but instead I thought I’d share an experience I just had as I took a last minute trip for a client.

Normally if I take a trip it’s no big deal. I can write a blog post from where ever I go. My email is online, this blog is online, if I need to access something in my office I can just use our VPN to get connected. To use any of these I’d just need to have an Internet connection. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case when last week I went to a fairly remote part of Malaysia.

A few coworkers and I were trying to make last minute adjustments to a product that one of our clients is launching. At first I wondered why even send us out there when we can get remote access or talk someone through it on the phone. When I arrived onsite I realized why this wasn’t an option — getting connected is near impossible there. We could head to a coffee shop and get some free WiFi, but with over twenty hops to servers in the United States and a twelve hour time difference, getting anything done was difficult.

The lack of connectivity was challenging. One of my responsibilities was interfacing with the local IT department and writing some scripts to integrate the client’s system with existing systems and processes. I quickly realized how much I depend on online references and documentation. When you can barely get connected to look up the answer to a question about syntax you really have to use your head. Not to mention, each software build for the project is about 300 megabytes and getting this from our office in New York was difficult and time consuming.

The idea of ubiquitous Internet connectivity is something that we take for granted. As connection speeds get faster and more reliable we lose efficiencies that we once had. I learned that the Internet is really an extension of my knowledge and a valuable tool that I need to do my job. Being cut off from it was an interesting and overall positive experience. Solving every problem by thinking and working it through was difficult and took more time, but genuinely figuring things out for myself was very rewarding.

Towards the end of my time there we found a cell phone store that sold GSM modems and prepaid 3G SIM cards that allowed us to get connectivity. While this does make the job a lot easier, I’m glad I had the experience of being mostly cut off from the rest of the net — something that will surely happen less often as the world becomes better connected.

In the beginning, there was just one web browser… and it was good. Mainly because there wasn’t another web browser to be “the bad one”.

Written for NeXTStep by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, WorldWideWeb was the first of many browsers to offer up their view of how web pages should be rendered for the end user. Although the world wide web is based on open standards that are interoperable by anyone, the browser community became a near monoculture during the mid to late 90s thanks to Microsoft’s inclusion of Internet Explorer with Windows. Even Mac OS X users were ensnared by Internet Explorer as it was not only the first browser for the then-new OS, but one of the very first 3rd-party applications as well.

Then, in 2003, Firefox (then called Phoenix) showed up on the scene. Although other web browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Opera Software’s Opera had established user bases, it was Firefox that captured the hearts of the alpha geeks by way of its altruistic goal to create a good open source web browser. No longer was browser functionality beholden to the whims of its parent corporation. Now the end user was king.

Initially this freedom brought a flurry of innovation in browser design. Things like tabbed windows, download managers, and an interface add-on architecture were created or borrowed to make Firefox a more useful browser. Companies such as Apple saw value in the open source browser effort and joined or started open source projects of their own. Soon the idea of a modern browser became so powerful that even Microsoft updated Internet Explorer to include these improvements.

As the browser grew up, the Internet continued to diversify in use, and discovered along the way that one browser layout does not fit all. Although interface hacks gave Firefox specialized capabilities, people started to wonder whether or not it would make more sense to design a browser for a specific purpose from the interface up. Now came the rise of the specialized browser.

Google Chrome

Flock is probably the most well known of the specialized browser breed, which is to say that you’ve probably never heard of it unless you’re a geek or one of their unwitting testbed friends. Available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, Flock is built around interacting with social networking sites, webmail, blogs, and more. Friend lists for sites like Facebook are readily available in a browser sidebar. Posting a link on your blog is as easy as bringing up special text edit panel without leaving the site you’re on. Overall the goal is to abstract services from their respective websites to make them more tool-like.

Some specialized browsers are reductions rather than additions. Google turned a lot of heads when they released Chrome, a web browser with a uniquely minimal interface. While the “get the browser out of the way” interface was warmly embraced by alpha geeks, the hoovering of personal web activity by Google through Chrome was not.

Enter Iron. Since Chrome is run by Google as an open source project, enterprising programmers took the Chrome source code and removed all the components that transmitted personal data to the Google mothership. The browser retains the look and functionality of Chrome while respecting the user’s privacy.

The Ghostzilla Browser

Other specialized browsers serve more subversive purposes. Based on the Gecko rendering engine, the now discontinued Ghostzilla allowed sneaky office users a chance to peek at the Internet without raising the suspicions of their over-the-shoulder glancing managers. Rather than display content in a traditional browser window, Ghostzilla masked its purpose by running inside the window space of a traditional Office app such as Microsoft Word. Web pages were rendered in black and white and images were not loaded unless moused over. The entire browser space itself disappeared when the mouse was moved away, making covering your tracks as simple as a gesture.

The specialization of web browsers shows that the world wide web is evolving in a way that is healthy and intended. Although he could have used closed, secretive code to instruct web browsers on how to display web pages, Sir Tim Berners-Lee chose to employ an open human-readable language called HTML. This even playing field has fostered a level of communication that is unprecedented in human history. Let the good times download.

Thanks, Elizabeth, for this office-wide memo on current coffee status levels at CG HQ:

Coffee Status = Yellow
2lbs in office – 10lbs next week. Please brew responsibly.

• Green = Surplus
• Yellow = Limited Coffee Grounds
• Orange = Last Pot
• Red = No coffee

And thanks, Dave, for this graph illustrating Amount of Coffee in Office and its relationship to Office Panic Level.

Amount of Coffee in Office and its relationship to Office Panic Level