Here are the 3 new Directions Credit Union commercials for the 2013 marketing term that I edited for Lesniewicz Associates.  I happen to be in one of them.  :)

I edited these in Final Cut Pro X and color graded using Magic Bullet Looks 2.  The cameras used were the Canon 5D MKII and a GoPro Hero 2.  The GoPro was used for the front view.

Editing with the GoPro Hero 2 was actually a breeze.  I’m going to guess that it uses 4:2:0, but it could be better than that.  matching the color profiles I created for both cameras was simple.  I hardly had to tweak anything.  Each commercial took about an hour or so to edit.  When my clients come to me with storyboards and their footage organized, I’m very quick and have a high quality outcome.

These will be airing in the Toledo Ohio market, so if you are from that area, please be on the look out for these commercials.  :)

Here are the scores and times I have compiled.  If you have more ideas on what I should test, please comment below.

The first benchmark result is from Novabench.  With the old Xeon 5150′s I got about a 600.  I dont have the save file and forgot to take a screen shot so I do not have an exact number, but I know it was no higher than a 620.  With my dual quads, I now have a 768.

The next benchmark I performed was Maxon Cinebench.  I do not know what the scores were before, as it was months ago that I had tested with this, but for reference compared to what others had got, here are my results.  For my CPU’s I got 4.91pts and for the OpenGL test I got 19.9fps.  Im not sure how good these scores are, but, if you look at the screen grabs you can see where I compare, and if you look at the CPU’s Im comparing to, I think my machine is not doing to bad.

I did test renders with Final Cut Pro X and have to say that one of the final projects that I completed about 3 weeks ago had taken almost an hour to render with the Xeon 5150′s, with my new Xeon’s, it rendered in almost 30 minutes.  I do not have hard proof for this, but I do notice a huge improvement.  Even with just editing video with lots of effects and color corrections, the interface is always smooth.  Did I mention I paid $10 for these?  Yeah, huge bargain!

After Effects seems to run better as well as so does photoshop.  My next upgrade is going to be storage and video cards.  If my power supply in this thing will hold up, I plan to go with two Geforce 560 Ti’s or the 660 Ti’s and get 2 SSD drives and 2 4TB hard disk drives.  I’ll for sure run another benchmark or two once I get to that point.

Another upgrade I will be doing is rather large and costly, but its not exactly just for this machine.  Im planning on getting a fibre channel card, either the 2Gbps card or the 4Gbps card.  I would prefer the 4Gbps card, but they are costly.  Then I plan to get a few Xserve servers and an Apple Xserve Raid setup.  Ill be using this for both storage and also for video content creation.  I would like to get up to 10 Xserve servers and use them for Final Cut Pro rendering.  I could also set them up for Maya and I think the Adobe suite, and you can bet on me doing a few benchmarks on them once I get there.  Hopefully this year if my freelance goes well.

Anyways, thats all I got for this update.

Well, today was a good day for my Mac Pro 1,1.

Last week I purchased two Xeon E5320′s.  They are clocked in at 1.86GHz and have a Front Side Bus of 1066MHz and are quad core chips, so I now have 8 cores.  Well, today they came in and I applied a pin mod to overclock them to 2.33GHz.  The Front Side Bus also runs at 1333MHz

So far, I have noticed a HUGE amount of speed compared to my quad 2.66GHz Xeon’s that were in my Mac Pro 1,1.  I don’t do too much with single threaded apps, so having the extra core count vs the GHz speed is not an issue.  Im going to be trying out some tests shortly and will get back to the differences.

For now though, here are some screen shots and also some pictures I took of the mod.

Here are two pics I took of the CPU’s.  This first one is the old Xeon 5150 Dual 2.66GHz chip.

And here is the new Xeon with the pin mod applied, I applied the mod to both chips.  All it is, is a very small piece of electrical tape covering the 6th pin pad.  From what I understand, this mod will work on all LGA771 Xeon’s. 

I finally got around to adding an updated resume page, I will also have the pdf version for download in the near future.

This is part 2 to my Mac Pro 1,1 or Mac “Hackintosh” Pro.  So I was messing around with the boot loader, trying to optimize it and tweak some settings, well, doing so I screwed something up.  I could not get my MP to boot.  So, I reset the PRAM, which is something you would normally do on a Mac when you are having some issues, problem is, resetting the PRAM screwed up my Boot loaders hard drive.  The sudo bless command was erased and then OSX 10.8 would not boot at all, due to my machine having a 32bit efi and chameleon not being able to emulate the 64bit efi.

I fixed it, but it took me a few hours to do so.  Since I did not have a disk of OSX 10.7, I had to use my 10.6 disk, install it to a blank hard drive, redo the sudo bless command, and then reboot.  Thing is, since im using PC video cards, I had to take them out, reinstall the old crappy geforce 7300, and then do all that crap.  Then before turning the system on again, I had to reinstall the pc cards and so on and so on.  All in all, I learned that you can not zap the PRAM.  Thankfully Im back up and running with out issues.

So anyways, I recently customized the boot loaders theme.  Tweaked the icons it uses and the background.  I also made the apple logo that shows up during the boot loading screen from Apples normal logo to a tweaked version from the 80′s.  Its pretty cool.

On the boot selector screen the icons show up under this wood like logo.  Im not 100% sure if I’m keeping this one just yet.  I can put any image I want there, so, thats cool.