My B20 Life

Windows Vista for Professional Audio, Video, and Imaging

gblahaerath — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 05:21:00 GMT

Introduction

I recently got involved in making an internal video for the team I’m a part of it. Because I’m a big fan of Microsoft’s new operating system, Vista, and because there is little information about professional creative tools and compatibility, I decided to try to do the entire project in Vista. The project turned out to be more complicated than I thought, and as a result it became a good review of the current state (as of Apr. 6th, 2007) of professional audio, video and imaging on the platform. What I discovered is that the experience had both good points and bad points and I’ll try to summarize them here.

update: Cakewalk is validating audio hardware here: http://www.cakewalk.com/vista/ the list is growing fast. Yaaay!

The Project

The project was to create an update report for the quarter. We just built a small studio into the Platform Adoption Center at the first of the year and we were looking for ways to increases awareness of the new studio and subsequently utilization. Rather than do something simple, say like an email which tends to get ignored, we decided to try to do something interesting and fun on video. Of course, we didn't really anticipate the scope of the project when we started, but in the end I ended up exercising a wide variety of applications on Vista.

The length of the project worked out to be almost 30 minutes. The video comprised 7 puppet segments shot against green screen, 1 graphics intensive music video, an opening sequence and a credit roll. For the video I also arranged and recorded my co-workers singing "The Platform Way", which consisted of original lyrics sung to the music of the Sesame Street Theme. I also wrote and recorded one electronica piece for the music video. I'm not saying that we achieved some cinematic master piece, in fact it was pretty amateur looking, but the result is widely considered to be amusing and a notch above the usual fare one might see.

I wish I could post the resulting work for everyone to see, but it's really just a Microsoft internal communication. The presented content was actually pretty boring, just the production is of any real interest.

Hardware and Software

Along the way I used a wide suite of hardware and software tools on Vista (for the most part) to reach the final work. Here's the list:

Windows Vista Ultimate Edition	Operating System	Link
Cakewalk Sonar 6.21 Producer Edition	Digital Audio Workstation Software	Link
Sony Vegas 7.0 Vegas+DVD	Non-Linear Video Editor	Link
Adobe Creative Suite CS2	Imaging and Illustration Application	Link
Serious Magic Ultra 2	Green-screen Compositing Application	Link
Intel Core 2 Quad Core 2.66Ghz	CPU with 4 Processing Cores	Link
BadAxe2 Intel Motherboard with 2 Gigs RAM, 500 G Raid 0 drives.	A Gamer/Performance MB	Link
NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT Display card	Graphics Adapter	Link
Wacom Graphire 4 Tablet	Absolute Positioning Input Device	Link
NewTek VT [4]	Real-time Video Switcher and DDR	Link
Epiphan DVI2USB	DVI Capture Hardware	Link
Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU) Pre8	Firewire Based Audio Interface	Link
Mackie Onyx 1220 with Firewire Option	Analog Mixer With Digital Capture	Link

I'm going describe how each of these items worked for me in the sections that follow.

Cakewalk Sonar 6.21 Producer Edition

Sonar, I'm happy to say, runs quite fine on Vista with its downloadable Vista update. It doesn't actually use the cool features in Vista like desktop search, but it does run just as well as it did on XP. It runs fine in limited user mode, only requiring elevation for one time activation. It also keeps user settings separate from other users, but I'm happy to say it doesn't force all your projects into My Documents. Instead it continues to support the same centralized audio storage drive layout as it always has.

There was one minor UI issue on when I ran Sonar on a 2048x1920 resolution monitor. Because the standard and even the large text in the interface is still too small to read, Vista added a feature to choose any size DPI for your screen fonts. This causes trouble in many apps, often confusing them about how far a mouse goes when twisting a virtual knob or slider. To be honest, it’s a hard test scenario to discover unless you using high end graphics cards and CRT displays. For Sonar, this prevented sliders and knobs from being positioned properly. For the rest of the project I returned to a more ordinary resolution of 1600x1200 and a normal font DPI.

Some folks have reported that Sonar runs better on Vista, but effectively I didn't see any difference. On the plus side, I played all 22 takes of a recording at the same time and it didn't drop any samples. That might be more a function of the 4 cores and raid drives than Vista though. It’s safe to say there doesn’t appear to be any performance drawbacks to running your DAW on Vista.

I also used Sonar's ability to frame sync video to the audio without trouble. It was great for scoring, aligning audio tracks with video, cleaning up the audio, and adding sound effects.

Sony Vegas 7.0 Vegas+DVD

Sony Vegas hasn't been patched for Vista yet and some features don't function. The media manager, for example, relies on MSDE (SQL 2000 Lite) and MSDE no longer runs in Vista. Losing the Vegas media manager is not very debilitating, and in fact, the new features in the Vista file browser make it preferable to the media manager.

The trimmer panel no longer functioned. I was still able to trim in the track view, but the trimmer has tools for slicing up footage in an efficient manner. As a workaround, I pulled my b-roll footage into a new Vegas project, cut it up in there, and then used Edit / Copy and then Edit / Past to move the clips between the b-roll project and the other projects in the production. Not as easy as using the trimmer, but better than having to drag around 20 minutes of B-roll in the same place as a 4 minute segment.

Another function that didn't work was capture. In XP Vegas can capture HD Mpeg2 streams and standard DV streams without trouble. In Vista, I couldn't load the XP-only JVC GR-HD1 drivers so MPEG2 was out of the question, and for some reason the standard DV capture would just terminate as soon as it started in Vegas. In the end I had to resort to the VT[4] to do my b-roll tape capture. The studio capture was already done direct to disk using the VT[4], so it wasn't much of a hassle. I did test Vista's Movie Maker. It captures DV just fine but you can't control what codec is used and it's a pretty limited tool as well. So, there are options in Vista but you might want to keep an XP box around if you need to rip video from your tapes.

Sony Vegas’s performance and stability under Vista was just great. For the music video I did a 10 layer composite at one point with motion and optical blur and I thought that if anything threw a wrench, this would. It trundled along (pretty fast because of the quad cores) and I was good to go. This is what you would hope for from your old XP NLE and it remained true in the shiny new Vista one. So while some auxiliary features were missing, the core functions of Vegas are still there.

Adobe Creative Suite CS2 Premium

The production featured 7 virtual sets and I did the assembly of the virtual sets in Photoshop from different sources and my own photographs. Photoshop worked as it always did without a single glitch letting me work with my high definition photos without a complaint. Adobe Bridge had trouble getting around the new user folder structure and would sometimes lock up for long periods. As it was with Sony Vegas, the Vista file explorer is actually a better replacement for Bridge now.

Epiphan DVD2USB

I used the Epiphan to capture some b-roll of Excel spreadsheets to use in one of the video segments. Epiphan released Vista drivers a couple months ago and they worked fine in Vista. I was able to use Media Encoder with it to capture 1024x768 at 8 frames/sec (same speed as XP).

MOTU Pre8 Audio Interface

MOTU was one of the first companies to release Vista drivers at Vista launch. I know they worked quite hard on them. That's why I was quite sad when they caused Vista to blue screen on a regular basis. I never actually lost any data during a capture and they never dropped a sample or did anything else bad. Instead the drivers would blue screen when I was switching from one app to another. Say switching from Outlook to Photoshop, or Sonar to IE. It didn't appear to be at all related to the actual core function of the drivers which is to create and record audio streams. Maybe it had something to do with my running all those applications at the same time.

Over the course of the project I experimented with a lot of latency settings and settings around application ownership in Vista but this instability didn't disappear. On the plus side, the Pre8 would generate a bunch of click sounds in advance which often gave me time to hit the save button before the crash. At the actual writing of this article I still believe MOTU is one of the few, if only, company with Vista drivers so this problem is quite acceptable considering there are functional drivers at all.

Mackie Onyx 1220 with Firewire Option

Mackie has not released Vista drivers for the Onyx yet. I installed the XP drivers anyway and the seemed to work for at least two sessions and then they quit working altogether. At one point it recorded corrupt audio. Needless to say, I don't recommend using the Onyx for audio capture in Vista yet. On the plus side, it did give me an excuse to go out and purchase the Pre8 which I'd been drooling over anyway. The Onyx 1220 is a great analog mixer and the audio capture is not its key focus anyway, but it would have been nice to have it functioning.

Serious Magic Ultra 2

I used Serious Magic Ultra 2 to extract the video of the foreground subjects (puppets and humans) from the green screen in the background. Considering how little I knew about lighting a green screen (experience is a hard teacher) the application did remarkably well. The file browser didn't function that well in Vista (sense a theme yet?) and, sadly, it didn't support cut and paste or drag and drop files either. I limped along though and function just fine.

Intel Core 2 Quad Core 2.66Ghz
BadAxe2 Intel Motherboard with 2 Gigs RAM, 500 G Raid 0 SATA 2 drives.
NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT Display card

The workstation itself kicked butt. All the devices had working Vista drives and it was a speedy experience. I really enjoyed it. I'd love to share some performance statistics with you but I'm not qualified to do it justice. Just imagine using a system that knocks on the ceiling of the Windows Experience Index and you might get an idea. I mean, like, wow, I can’t believe I’m still alive to see such speed come to the world!

Wacom Graphire 4 Tablet

Wacom released drivers for Vista and they've made a big deal about it. They should. Under Vista the Wacom tablet makes quite the power user tool. Since the features of XP Tablet PC were integrated into Vista's core, the Wacom tablet now adds a lot of function to any pro workstation whether it’s audio, video or imaging. Even under XP a tablet provides a lot of enhancement with its absolution positioning and pressure sensitive tip. Dragging items, drawing images, entering notes and even using the buttons on the calculator accessory becomes easy using a tablet. With Vista you get to add text recognition, pen flicks and press and hold gestures. In XP I used to have to drop the pen and go to the keyboard every time I need to type in an exact value into some text box. Now I just ink it in. It made a huge difference in how I worked during the project and I think EVERYONE should use a tablet with Vista.

NewTek VT [4]

It is not really a Vista application nor would I ever install it on Vista until NewTek recommends it. The reason is that VT[4] is tuned to a specific configuration. I’m afraid that if I upgraded the workstation it was installed on I'd be afraid it would never work again. In fact, I don't even think of it as an application, I think of it as an appliance that just happens to use XP for its OS. The reason I mention it here is that I used it for all my studio capture and it had a slight interoperability flaw with Vista. Anytime the Vista workstation would attempt to access a share on the VT[4] it would only work for a short while. After that it would fail to read the share. Detaching the share and rebooting both systems would let me connect again, but again only for about an hour. This didn't happen when I tested the same share from XP or Server 2003 so it wasn’t a network configuration error. The NewTek box, on the other hand, could access shares on the Vista workstation just fine. This let me work around the problem by using Remote Desktop on the VT[4] and starting the copy from that direction.

Windows Vista Ultimate Edition

Okay, I admit it, I love Vista and I’m not just saying that because I work for the company. We at Microsoft have been using Vista for years now and we really appreciate the final product. You would think we hate after having it consume our lives for so long, but it is really much, much better than XP.

Here are the Vista features I used during the project that I would have missed in XP:

· Tablet and Ink support, I already talked about that.

· File Browser –Support for lots of graphic type previews. I used tagging to organize my project assets. Copy dialogs gave me detailed information about all those large files I watched copy and allowed me to resolve naming conflicts. Super fast files searches. I like jumping around in the file path and it keeps a history with back and forward buttons.

· Performance Monitor – Very nice interface to let you know when your machine was overloaded, or when the render was crunching all your CPU. No more need to start up the task manager to see if your network speed is good enough for my gigantic file copies.

· Virtual Memory – The performance of the memory manager has had a lot of tweaking and in it really stretched the power of the PC. Even though I had all my applications live at the same time, and my paged disk size was a tad over a gig, things ran just as fast as ever. Sometimes there would be a small delay when I brought up an app that had been sleeping a while, but I never saw that crazy hard drive thrashing you see in XP.

· Start Menu Search – It’s just nice being able to run a problem by typing its first few letters.

· Carousel Windows Switching – I had a lot of windows up at one time, being able to review them graphically helped me select the right window every time.

There are a lot of other features in Vista that make it great, but these features are specifically the things that increased my productivity and made my project easier to accomplish.

Summary

I encourage you to make your own mind up about it, but I found that the benefits of Vista made up for some of the current problems. You may have other devices and applications that prevent you from building or upgrading to a Vista workstation. This is only a temporary thing.

If you have the same setup as mine, or when support appears for your gear, you will really gain by moving to Vista. If you’ve been thinking about how nice it would be to upgrade to a spiffy new quad core, you really want to make sure it runs Vista too or you’ll feel like you are running economy gas in your new sports car.

You won’t lose any performance or any capabilities when compared to XP. I actually predict you will get things done faster and if by some horrible twist of fate you are forced to use some old XP box, your heart will break like mine does.

Zune FM Transmitter Install

gblahaerath — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 05:36:00 GMT

I made a video of installing a "pro quality" FM Transmitter in my dash so I could listen to my Zune. The consumer transmitters just aren't strong enough and so I went for something better.

Video: Zune FM Transmitter Install

It's The Little Things

gblahaerath — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 22:12:00 GMT

If it is possible for a man to love an operating system, it would be Longhorn server. I'm only just cracking the surface with it and NOTHING is cooler. The initial configuration tasks window you get after install is so refined and perfect. Who could have possibly imagined that a simple DVD could convert a thing of cold steal and heartless glass to something warm, loving and sophisticated. Who? No one until now.

Look, maybe some of you have never had the experience of installing a web server using Windows 2K3. If you haven't, consider yourself lucky. It's not the worst thing in the world, nor is it as bad as previous operating systems, but it is clunky. Lots of jumping through check box lists with poor navigation and, if you should be so unfortunate as to have misplaced your server CD or had the drive letter change of your CD drive, you'll have to show the installer multiple times where it can find its obscure DLLs. Maybe once or twice its okay, but I've done it thousands of times in my life.

In longhorn, all those bits are kept on the hard drive and the operating system KNOWS where they are. So, when you ask seek to install something, it installs! No questions, no confusion, it just goes. It asks you the minimal amount of things it needs and runs away. No stopping in the middle to ask you a yes or no question, no getting lost, no begging for CDs. What a relief!

So yeah, okay, maybe it's a little thing. But in operating systems, as in love, little things mean a lot.

Sun Fire Longhorn

gblahaerath — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 02:50:00 GMT

The forces of nature being what they are and B20's position in the Microsoft universe, it seemed inevitable that a unusual visitor might come my way one day. In this case, a Sun Fire x4100. Wow, I mean, this is the closest I've gotten to a Sun product since 1994 when I was doing a Solaris port (and a PharLap port) at Autodesk. I think it was a Sparc Station 1. Anyway, the forces of my nature being what they are, I decided to install a recent build of Longhorn Server just to see what happens.

The unit itself is very nice. Very light, very easy to unpack and install in the rack. It's a 1U tall unit with nice access into the chassis and clearly labeled and organized ports on the box. As configured, it came with two Model 825 AMD Opteron processors (a dual core model), 8 Gigs ram, and 2 73G SAS 10K drives. The platform itself comes with a few extra features, the nice ones like 4 Intel PRO/1000 MT NIC ports, AMD 8000 series chip set, ATI RAGE XL display chip and 1 LSI Logic 3000 series SCSI controller. Top shelf components from manufactures that go to great efforts to maintain compatibility and drivers. This gave me the idea that the Sun Fire 4100 might just work with Longhorn Server just using the on-board out of the box drivers.

I got myself a copy of Longhorn Server, I won't tell you what build other than to say it is after Beta 2. It really doesn't matter, if this install actually works I'm sure at some point the drivers will appear in a public distribution. Even though I'm an employee of Microsoft, I really don't know.

Anyway, I slid the DVD into the drive (a very sexy tray-less front loader) booted the machine and went to lunch. After a while I came back to the system to see the configuration task dialog. I give it a name, password, join it to the domain, it reboots. Easy as cake. Take note, I didn't need a setup up floppy to load raid drivers, didn't need to hit return and F8 a bunch times, or any of that. I just loaded the disk in the server and turned it on for the very first time. Everything got taken care of for me. This is the way computing SHOULD be!

After reboot I logged in to see what got configured. As I guessed, everything important found a driver. The raid array, the display card, and the network adapters all found drivers. It's a fully functional system right out of the box. I haven't seen this in a server IN A VERY LONG TIME. The out of box experiences rivals ANYTHING ever done by Apple.

Much of the credit goes to the Longhorn Server team and the redesign of the installation process. The rest of the credit goes to the team that decided on the components that went into the Sun Fire. The Intel NICs are the best supported NICs on the planet and even though the platform is AMD, it was a wise move to go with the Intel product. The LSI controller is another great example. Other manufactures that choose other chips don't have this luck this early in the development cycle. Still others might have to wait after RTM depending on the strength of the driver teams.

My little heart is making pitter-patters, this is SO cool.

iSCSI meets ASIC

gblahaerath — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 22:10:00 GMT

One of the events this week at the PAC involved compatibility testing of Longhorn with the latest bits for Volume Shadow Copy Service. VSS has 3 different pieces (storage management, application agents, and storage hardware) so once or twice a year Microsoft gets the vendors together in one building to discover if there are any interoperability problems. I have a soft spot for storage so I always like these events. This week I got to see something cool that I'd like to mention.

iStor Networks sent two software engineers to the event with an GigaStorATX. Its an iSCSI system raid controller that can surface arrays of SATA drives on an iSCSI interface. There are a growing number of products out there like this, but the GigaStorATX differs in a cool way. It's iSCSI implementation isn't written in code, its written in logic gates on a chip. It's generally known as an ASIC or Application-Specific Integrated Circuit which are used in most modern single purpose technology items like cell phones or televisions. Don't get me wrong, they still wrote a program in a C-like language, but instead of compiling the program into op-codes that are executed by a microprocesser, the results are complied into a layout of logic arrays that in the end become transistors etched into a silicon wafer. Its not at all easy to do, but advances in technology in this millennium certainly makes it a lot more realistic and the benefits from a successful implementation can make it worth it. The benefits from ASIC implementations can be decreased cost, increased performance, and reduced power consumption over the same algorithm running on a microprocessor. Since I don't know the actual details of the iStor chip, I can't tell you if they got ALL of these benefits, but I can tell you that the engineers were excited about one thing: SPEED.

First thing to note, the GigaStorATX comes in two flavors. One with 8x1 GigE Copper ports and one with a single 10 GigE Fiber port. The 10 GigE port can pop straight into the backplane of some recent switches like D-Link's DXS-3350SR. There would be no point for all that bandwidth if it couldn't be used, but the GigaStorATX apparently can use those ports without much effort. I got to read a performance report from iStor (caveat emptor of course) that hooked up their device to a bunch of Dell 850s with 3ghz PentiumD (yeah the dual-core one) chip running Windows Server 2K3 SP1 and using iSCSI initiator 2.0. The target was a 15 SATA drive raid array and the test was sequential read/writes conducted using IOMeter. Using 4 initiators and 4 targets, the iStor was able to sustain 600 MB/sec with blocs between 64K and 1MB. Pretty cool. As a comparison, I have achieved 40MB/sec using one initiator and 1 target on a different make iSCSI array with the same test parameters. Another test they did involved 4 iSCSI HBAs (which offload the protocol from the server) where they peaked at 400MB reads. I also use HBAs and I've seen a mere 60MB/sec from a single HBA. In both perf tests, if you do the math, you'll find that the transfer rates are pretty close to practical maximums over ethernet which suggests the ASIC is limited more by the transport media than its own ability to move the data off the drives and onto wire.

To be honest, I never expected high performance out of iSCSI, just performance that is better than NAS volumes. Until now, I don't think I would have ever considered running a SQL Server database on such a volume, but the GigaStorATX looks pretty good for that. Sadly, you can't just buy a GigaStorATX directly, but they have a list of oem partners here. If you are a good web searcher, you might also find vendors by looking for 8-port and 10 Gig iSCSI enclosures or publicly traded companies that have relationships with iStor. Honestly, I think anyone that uses iStor's technology should just slap a sticker on the box that says "iSCSI by iStor" since it is just that cool.

Preventing cross team access to VSTF projects

gblahaerath — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 22:51:00 GMT

So I maintain this Visual Studio Team Foundation server (VSTF for short) for Microsoft's architect evangelists to use when working with outside companies on a common project, usually a technology adoption project or a proof of concept. Microsoft uses the term "engagement" for any collaborative project like this. Since I don't want to create a whole new source control server for each new engagement (one is hard enough) I need a way to keep different VSTF projects hidden from other users on the same server. It seems like a common scenario that a full fledged source control system could handle, and ya know, VSTF does support it. How to do it, however, is not a documented scenario so I decided write down the bread crumbs on how I got there.

Be very afraid of SERVER\Team Foundation Valid Users since it creeps up everywhere in your team projects. There is no policy that keeps it from being added to any new project, so you have to be vigilant in keeping it out of the team projects.
Create an AD sec group that will contain all users of the server. Add it to the root of your server security in VSTF and give it the "View server-level information" right. Yeah, I know, it does the same thing as Valid Users group but it doesn't get modified dynamically. After creating this group, you can now remove the Valid Users group (as long as you are prepared to accept that this is not recommended by the documentation). Now you can sleep easier since all access is now secured in an active directory group.
Create AD security groups to manage your users on a per project basis. It's easier to manage that way especially if you have tools for managing AD. In my case, for each engagement I create a "leads" security group and a "users" security group. Add these team groups to the server access security group.
Create the new team project site on the VSTF server.
Get the TFS Administration Tool. Do it now or you will lose your mind on the next step.
Use the admin tool to add your groups to the new team project site. If you don't have the tool, you will have to add the groups manually to the VSTF Service, SQL Reporting Services and to SharePoint Portal Services. One side effect of using the groups is that in this new structure you only need to add users in one place, the AD group, as opposed three places.

Assuming I got all the bread crumbs here, anyone logging in from one team will not be able to see the projects of other teams, nor be able to make changes to them. One other thing I recommend is useing OUs to further segregate teams from each other and to allow team leads to admin the security groups in their own OUs.

How we capture hi-def Vista video streams

gblahaerath — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 00:57:00 GMT

We've developed a pretty novel way to capture presentation and demo content from Vista here at the PAC. There are a couple of old ways that don't work quite well, maybe you've used them:

Convert the VGA signal to composite video.
Use a continuous screen capture utility like Windows Media Encoder's screen capture mode.

Method one still sort of works, but since the base resolution is going to be 720x480 at best; it really doesn't work all that well anymore. It also destroys color fidelity and makes text unreadable. Vista has such a great look that destroying it using a 1950s transport medium is quite the crime.

Method two just doesn't work anymore on Vista. The DirectX based GPU acceleration features of Vista either bypass the GDI based capture methods OR it drives the performance the graphics to zero as each rendered frame is pushed to the GDI layer for capture.

We did some web searching and found a very novel piece of technology from a company named Epiphan. They create several products that sample VGA and DVI signals in real time and then transmits them as JPGs over USB to a capture system. We use the VGA2USB product and the newer DVI2USB product. The DVI2USB product is our current favorite with better drivers and better performance. We've used the VGA2USB product for quite sometime now and we've notice that it occasionally blue screens when we stop capturing the streams from Windows Media Encoder. Because it’s a stream, we never lose any presentation data because it was already committed to the disk, but it is a bit disconcerting. Regardless, both units have worked liked champs and have captured hundreds of hours of high resolution video from the screens of presenter's laptops.

If you do go this route, you should probably invest in a good distribution amplifier to split the VGA signal cleanly. We like the Kramer VP300 but you can get cheaper units from companies like IOGear. Try to stay away from the simplistic “split VGA” cable since the loss of signal will put a dent in your captured stream.