teemu – Page 10 – Teemu's blog

February 28, 2011November 3, 2015

There’s Something Good in Everything

Quite a few of my blog entries have been written as warnings or workaround instructiongs for various bugs I have wanted to be made Googleable or as notes to myself.

Well, now I just want to say some positive things. Aperture 3, despite of some bugs and troubles, is *very* good in many things. First of all, it hadles adjustments on the Canon RAW images really smoothly, showing the full size preview all the time when tuning the adjustment sliders. Second, organizing photos is really a pleasure, compared to any other photo software I have used before.

Also, there’s something good in winter too, despite the cold and too much snow in wrong places — the winter light. Here’s one photo I took from the top of Kasavuori, Espoo, in -20C. Equipment: Canon EOS 400D + EF-S 18-55. RAW post processing with Aperture 3.

February 3, 2011

On storing photos

I wrote a dozen of shell scripts.

This enabled me to verify that importing photos from iPhoto to Aperture worked fine. Aperture even managed to store them as “referenced”, so I got back my directory structure with proper directory names. Phew…

Now I have directories “master” and “modified”, and “current”, which stores links to files in “modified” or “masters”, depending if a modified version exists. Now PS3 does not seem to like symbolic links via Mediatomb. Hard luck. I couldn’t care less. I will view my photos in the living room on my Mac Mini.

It seems that one could spend all waking hours on these things for the rest of one’s life and still everything would NOT WORK.

January 28, 2011November 3, 2015

A rotten apple leads to another one..

I am getting tired of these “well tested” and “polished” Apple “pro” applications so this is a short story.

Aperture 3 cannot play MPEG-1 videos (at least the ones shot with a less than two years old Sony camera), even though they play with Quicktime, Finder, etc. This is a bug on its own and has been reported to Apple.

However, I decided to convert those to MPEG-4 / H.264 / AVC / whatever-nobody-can-figure-out-thing-that-plays-most-places-today. Studying the various video files I have collected over the years, I made another “interesting” discovery..

Since I started to use iPhoto, I download photos and videos from my cameras to iPhoto, fix the photos, then export a backup to filesystem. Now I noticed that what iPhoto does is that the videos are exported as JPEGs but renamed to .AVI or whatever was the original video file type!! All 200+ videos on my filesystem backup were < 1 MB JPEGs! WHAT AN AMAZING APPLE(tm) FEATURE (*)! (*) (I filed a bug report on this also, and today Apple engineers responded to me that "it works as intended": I have to export the video as "original". I disagree. If I export an event with hundreds of photos and videos, the videos should be exported properly as the photos. I don't want to manually clickety-click each video and select the different export mode.) This once again confirms that "the assumption is the mother of all f*ckups". I can't assume anything with Apple software any more. From now on, all master files go to plain file system first and get SHA256 checksums before being seen by iPhoto or Aperture.