The Chemex is really easy to use. Heat up water in the kettle, position a filter in the top of the vessel, add coffee grounds, and pour hot water over it (a little at first, to let it bloom, then as much as you want to make). Sweet Maria’s has an excellent guide on making coffee with a Chemex.

This is week two of our Chemex experience. So far the kitchen is cleaner, the brew is stronger, and the coffee-notify mailing list is more active. Sure, it takes a little longer to make a pot, but I feel like it makes us more mindful of what we’re doing. Apparently we’re not the only ones that have recently switched to the Chemex.

I suppose the next steps are to grind our own beans (by hand of course). We’ll see what we can do. Stay caffeinated my friends.

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Coffee is a big deal at CG. Most of our geeks pride themselves on being caffeinated and with the coffee machine down panic is on the rise.

The thing about this is that it’s not the actual coffeemaker that is broken, it’s the grinder built into the coffee machine that is having issues. We have a fancy machine that grinds coffee right before brewing it. When it’s working it’s pretty magical — nothing tastes quite like freshly brewed coffee made from freshly ground beans. It happens automatically and other than the noise from the grinder we don’t even know that it’s there.

When the machine is down it’s obvious. Some of us need coffee to work. We are dependent on that machine.

Thinking about the caffeine situation in the office made me wonder about other pieces of technology that we’re dependent on. Our email software runs in the cloud on Google’s computer. Our data traverses networks and is converted to light, microwaves, electricity and back again before it arrives at its destination. Do you know how an email sent from your phone is routed to its destination? What other things does technology do for us automatically that we don’t notice? Heck, I can’t even remember my wife’s phone number — my phone does it for me.

Someone sent me an article the other day entitled, “The Cloud Fails Again.” In the article, John Dvorak complains that a power outage left him unable to function because all of his data and services existed in the cloud and not in his own machine. He goes on to describe a “priesthood” of systems administrators that has existed since the early days of computing whose sole purpose is to “beat back the individualism” that desktop computers brought to all of us.

I was unaware that this cabal existed (if you are a member, please send me an invite) and I feel like the advances that technology has brought us in life, business and communication are really amazing. We live in a magical world. But even though the advances are great, they have made us completely dependent on technology. I think Dvorak’s article is a pretty good example for people who rely on technology and refuse to invest in their own infrastructure. In other words, we need to understand what we’re using so that we can evaluate the risks and benefits of using it.

Control Group’s mission is to help people and their organizations better understand and utilize their technology so they can be more efficient. That’s why Control Group is a great place to work — even when the coffee machine is down.

Our engineers were able to create a temporary workaround for the coffee situation. We’re also not exactly stranded in a coffee-free wasteland: Kaffe 1668 and The Blue Spoon are within walking distance. So, no worries, we’ll stay jittery.

Image via coffeeaddict/Flickr

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I was recently having a conversation with a friend and we both laughed when we thought back to the first five hundred megabyte hard drives that we had owned. Back then, the half-gigabyte drive was ridiculously expensive and physically huge. We both thought that it would be impossible to fill these drives up.

This of course was not the case. Now you’re lucky if an application can be installed in less than 500 MB, and as hard disk sizes grow, we find new ways to fill them up with applications, documents, and media. Digital files have become the most valued assets for most of our customers, so the organization, storage, and archiving of data is a serious concern.

I find that the best way to evaluate storage technologies solutions for our clients is to step back and take a look at the problems the client is looking to solve and the priorities dictated by their business needs. Usually, our clients’ storage needs require a combination of performance, reliability, disaster recovery, scalability, and manageability. Fortunately technology has stepped up to the challenge to handle the increased need for larger, faster, and more reliable storage.

Storage networking is a general term that encompasses many different technologies that provide excellent solutions to modern storage problems. A storage area network (SAN) is an architecture in which storage devices are connected in a high-speed, dedicated network and are presented to computers that are part of the same network. Using storage networking, we can accommodate our clients’ performance and reliability needs: by abstracting groups of hard drives as logical units (LUNs) we can stripe data across disks to increase speed and add redundancy by storing parity on the disks. This configuration will allow us to rebuild the LUN when a disk fails, without causing downtime or data loss.

Example SAN Configuration for Final Cut Pro Editing

A storage network abstracts the underlying hardware that provides storage services, providing some great advantages for disaster recovery. When we add tape libraries to a SAN we can make backups quickly and efficiently without slowing down the network or computers on it. We can also connect a SAN to another SAN that’s in a different building or even a different state. This allows us to easily replicate data to a secondary location so our clients can be up and running quickly if there is some kind of catastrophe in the data center.

Even the largest SANs will eventually get filled up with data. What happens when it’s time to increase capacity? With traditional storage, the system is shut down, new equipment is installed, and the data is migrated. This typically involves downtime and runs the risk of data loss if something goes wrong. With a SAN expansion is no problem. Since the storage services are abstracted from the storage hardware it’s easy to add capacity or replace older equipment, in many cases involving no downtime.

A SAN also provides centralized management for storage: administrators can look in one place to see the status of all storage in a data center.  This allows businesses to evaluate storage health and utilization, which can prevent problems and help plan for future growth.

As data becomes a more and more important part of business strategy, it becomes critical for businesses to have larger, faster, and more reliable storage services to keep things operating smoothly. Storage networking is a core component of these strategies. I’ll continue posting about our thoughts and experiences with SAN solutions, and try to shed some light on the storage ecosystem as new technologies emerge.

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First, a quick discussion of semantics:

When you ingest a media file into Final Cut Server, it creates an asset. This asset is actually a collection of files, including the original media file, or primary representation. If the file being uploaded is a graphics or video file, Final Cut Server creates additional representations: a poster frame and a thumbnail. These are used to represent the asset’s media within Final Cut Server. If the file being uploaded is a video asset, a clip proxy representation is also generated, used for viewing the file within Final Cut Server.  This representation is created by transcoding the primary representation file to a lower-resolution codec.

Asset Representations in Final Cut Server

So a video asset is actually a container that’s made up of a bunch of files. This is pretty cool, and it’s mostly transparent to the end-user in Final Cut Server. However, while these representations are customizable (codecs, quality, etc), they all generated on ingest. Final Cut Server doesn’t currently support a way to create a new representation of an asset on-the-fly and have that representation become part of the asset container.

I’m struggling with this limitation as I explore Final Cut Server/Episode Engine integration. It would be ideal if I could setup Episode integration via a Final Cut Server copy response to an Episode watch folder, and have the resulting transcoded file copied back into Final Cut Server and made a representation of the original asset. Right now there’s no way to do this, so instead we are only able to re-ingest the new transcoded file as a new asset. And there is no relationship between this new asset and the original asset from which it was created.

Frustrating, but we’re thinking about ways around this. More to come as our tests and thinking solidifies. More info on Episode Engine/Final Cut Server integration in this pdf from Telestream’s website.

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Final Cut Server client

Apple markets Final Cut Server as a tool primarily for Final Cut Pro users. Apple’s focus is on enabling users to manage their FCP projects and related files, providing them with automations to save time, and giving production teams a centralized system for collaboration. Beyond Apple’s sales pitch, we think Final Cut Server has real potential to play a central role in a production and distribution platform made up of a framework of connected systems.

Here’s an example of a typical broadcast infrastructure:

• Storage area network (SAN) for storage
• Media asset management system (MAM) for organizing and versioning
• Editor/artist workstations
• Producer workstations
• A transcode system for delivery

Now here’s an example of how those pieces might fit together in a broadcast workflow:

1. Content from tape or tapeless media is ingested through the MAM. Metadata is added at ingest – both technical metadata (shot, tape, take, etc) and possibly contextual metadata (actor, object brands, locations).
2. Data is saved to the SAN, where it is cut and crafted by editors and artists. As the content comes together, project files and new assets are saved to the SAN by editors and artists, and reviewed by producers.
3. As content is completed, it is transcoded for delivery to television, tape, and the web. Web distribution might include delivery in a custom player, and/or Hulu, YouTube, Vimeo.
4. Once content is in the wild, content owners need analytics tools to understand who is watching what and where.

Beyond its out-of-the box capabilities, Final Cut Server can be customized to play a key role in workflows like these. While it doesn’t include an API, developers can leverage custom responses in Final Cut Server to read and write XML and run external scripts. On its developer website, Apple provides an example of Final Cut Server integration with an external Rails application that enables the viewing and commenting of movie clips in a web browser. An example like this serves as a useful starting place when exploring building the middleware to connect Final Cut Server to other applications or platforms in a workflow.

Episode Engine Admin

For example, Final Cut Server leverages Compressor for all of its out-of-the-box transcoding. However many existing infrastructures exist using established transcoding systems, such as Telestream’s Episode Engine. By combining metadata subscriptions and watch folders in Final Cut Server with custom responses that leverage external scripts, Episode can easily be integrated as the transcode delivery component for a Final Cut Server workflow. Similarly, the ability to read and write XML to assets in Final Cut Server makes possible the development of web applications that interact with assets, and can even store information in their own disparate databases, populating Final Cut Server when appropriate.

What excites us about this are the many Final Cut Server integration possibilities that are not currently being talked about. And since Control Group marries Apple video integration expertise with a team of developers under the same roof, we’re excited to continue to innovate in this area. Give us a shout if you’d like to open up a dialog on how Final Cut Server might fit into your broadcast or production workflow.

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