Fixed one little bug. Working on the fun bonjour-equipped full-cluser-controlling version now.

CompressorController-1.zip

Now that iLife 09 is shipping, a few reviews of iMovie09 are starting to appear. Gizmodo covers some of the new features, and it certainly seems impressive. Crunchgear has a more general iLife09 review, and Beau Colburn just focuses on the new image stabilization features.

I’ve got my copy, but haven’t had a chance to play around yet. Perhaps next week I’ll do a more general review.

UPDATED: Screengrabs changed to allow for syncing more events. Check out C4 below.

This is off topic for the normal blog content, but here goes.

iPhone users at the UofM know that getting data from UMcal into your iPhone is painful at best, obnoxiously painful at worst. It involves a one way sync into iCal, then a sync through iTunes under the phone.

Not anymore! Synthesis AG has released “Todo+Cal+Sync” (clever names, those Germans). It’s a $14.99 app for the iPhone which can sync with the UMcal servers. It’s a standalone application on the phone – it doesn’t sync into the phone’s calendar app. That’d be ideal, but at least this solves the issue of adding events on your phone, or double checking an event, etc. No longer will I get to the east bank and then realize I don’t know what building I’m going to.

Here’s how to get it set up.

A) First, purchase and launch the app. Tap the sync settings icon in the upper left:

B) Next, select the settings tab at the bottom. You’ll be modifying settings in the three areas I’ve highlighted below.

C) First go into the server settings menu (B1). Add your username (C1) and password (C2) (university X500), and set the SynML version to 1.1 (C4).

D) Then, tap the url field (C3) and make it look like the screenshot below:

Get back to the main server settings screen (B1 above) and go into the Calendar and Todo settings. Make each of them look like they do below. You can choose the number of “past days” and “future days” – longer spans will take longer to sync.

You’re done! Click done on the settings screen, click the synchronize button, and it (should) work.

AudioQuest has announced a system for field terminating HDMI cables. This is a big deal for folks doing custom home theater installs. At this point this solution seems to be simple a 3d model, but they say they’ll have a product out in 2q 2009.

Saw it on Engadget HD.

Whipped up a small little app for controlling a Compressor cluster node. It’ll let you start, stop, and reset Compressor and Qmaster. It goes a bit deeper than the system prefpane – actually stops the launchd process, kills any stray processes, etc. Reset will toss your cluster settings so that you can readd it to a new cluster, or recreate a cluster.

I’ve tested on a total of one machine so far, so who knows if it’ll blow up and murder you…

CompressorController.zip

We recently got a load of Xacti HD1010s, along with Azden WLX-Pro wireless mic kits. Hooked em’ all together, and they sounded … awful.

Here’s the problem – the Azden has a mono output, while the Sanyo has a stereo input. You end up with your wireless mic going to just the left channel. However, the Sanyo seems to use joint stereo encoding, which ends up giving you a right channel ‘warble’ echoing the left channel.

So, what you need is a mono to stereo adapter in line. Of course, you can’t magically make stereo out of a mono source, but you can duplicate the signal. So, I just make some adapters that went from the tip on a female minijack connector to both tip and ring on a male minijack. Problem solved.

I went looking for a premade adapter, but couldn’t find anything that seemed sure to work.

Apple has officially released Quicktime 7.6, which adds support for demuxing MPEG-1 files. IE, you can open a .mpg file and export it to an H.264 file. For the first time in the history of quicktime, the resulting file will have both audio and video.

So, that’s pretty cool. Now we just need to see what else it breaks.

It’s not on every clip, but YouTube is allowing file downloading. What you’ll get is the H.264, “High Quality” version (but not the HD version).

That’s pretty slick – how delightful to not have to worry about all of the semi-functional YouTube downloader apps.

Trent Reznor has released (sorry, some “mysterious shadow group” has released) 400 gigs of raw HDV footage from three concerts on a recent tour. They’re available as torrents from this page, so you can cut your very own concert dvd. It even includes Final Cut project files!

Talk about crowd sourcing…

Yesterday at the NotSteveNote, Apple introduced a new iLife, along with new iWork and MacBook Pros. Not a ton of excitement overall, but the new iMovie has some interesting improvements.

Personally, I really liked iMovie 08 – I thought it was a perfect product for folks getting started in video. Not many people seemed to share that opinion though, so iMovie 09 brings back a lot of the feature that people missed from iMovie 06, while retaining the new new interface and editing style. Apple’s iMovie page gives the full rundown.

A few things they didn’t mention at the keynote: green-screening, flip minoHD support, and archiving of file-based media. Here’s hoping the Final Cut team is paying attention (assuming they still have jobs).