Apple TV sync sucks. 750 Words Wednesday, 31 August 2011.

Sometimes i hate you

Not sure where to start here, I was going to write up a Post production blog but its a little late so I just want to get to 750 as quickly as I can then get on to other less important but necessary things. Which I hate doing and could make doing it easier but don’t.

 So yesterday I wanted to sync up the latest iTunes download to my Apple TV, so I turned it on and waited for the Apple TV icon to appear in iTunes. Once it did I clicked on it and as usual I check the storage, 435GB out of 928GB, good, I selected the episode I wanted to sync the clicked sync. 

 Once it was done syncing I noticed that the storage had changed, it was now somewhere around the 34GB make. Somehow I’d lost 400GB of material on my Apple TV, I checked that everything was still selected and they were. Odd, but iTunes and my Apple TV have done this before, I now have to re-sync everything again, not fun, as my WiFi also hates Apple TV, if I select everything to sync up over night my internet basically cuts off and resets, stopping the sync this happens pretty fucking quickly so not much is synced.

 So today I plugged the Apple TV into the hub via Ethernet and things were better, I could sync much more in one go, but still only 8 TV shows at a time, and even then my entire internet bandwidth is fucked and I can barely use my web browser, even posting tweets is an issue. I mean its only a max of 140 characters, its file size is in the kilobytes and yet it won’t upload, kinda shocking really, that Apple TV can use up so much bandwidth leaving nothing else.

 Gotta wonder if the newer Apple TV is any better. My internet connect with ATV’s has been shit so streaming to it is never really an option, I hate it when a TV show stops after 30 minutes because the connection was lost, I then have to wait for it to re-establish itself and navigate to the point it stopped then continue. This is no way to watch TV or Movies. So I hacked my ATV (The only tech I’ve ever hacked) only so I could add an external drive, I 1 terabyte external drive.

You also have to wonder why Apple didn’t make there own external drive for it, I mean I don’t wan tot leave my computer running 24 hours a day or have to turn on my computer just to watch movies and TV shows through my ATV. Apple dropped the ball here. Well thats my opinion anyway, give us the interface i.e. the ATV with a nice internal drive or in the newer one, nothing, but at least give us the option to add external drives to it without having to hack it. I don’t want to stream my media over an internet connect thats as unreliable as mine is, its annoying to the point of never using again because its useless, if I do buy a new one I’ll be hacking it and adding the external drive because thats what I want. Oh and Airplay, yeah, not to interested in that either, mostly as I only know one other person who has an Apple TV so unless people are in my bedroom theres no point. And if I want to watch a video on my iPhone I’ll just watch it on my iPhone. For me ATV is simply for my TV shows and Movies nothing else, I have music on it but don’t listen to music on my Apple TV.

 And who’s to say that my syncing problem (Above) won’t happen with the new ATV.

 Anyway, I’ve been reading the ‘Guerilla Film Making Pocketbook’ again this time about film festival and marketing. Its interesting how much I already knew but didn’t know that I knew or ignored myself or something like that. Using Social Media and forums specialist websites and such, being able to provide people with all the information they need about the project. I’ll be pulling out my ‘Guerilla Film Makers Blue Print’ book after and going through that too. More to cross reference what I believe with what other have actually done. I know its most likely going to be a little different for me on some level but its nice to have a foundation to build on. And I like reading this stuff, so there ;P

 So I reached my 750. Bye.

More film stuff, again. 750 Words Sunday, 21 August 2011.

I shaved

So, today (Saturday) I write these a day early. And if you just asked why, I just do okay, deal with it. So today I looked at an outline for a short film and I thought I might need to cut it down and simplify it a bit. As it turns out I didn’t.

 So I did what I’ve been doing all week, I turn on iTunes and clicked on the Classic Rock playlist where I have housed my Led Zeppelin and recently purchased Deep Purple albums, grants I only have one Deep Purple album and a best of Led Zeppelin album, I hit play and started to write the screenplay. Of course making sure shuffle was selected. And so I write.

 Every now and then I would just save my work and get up, go down stairs and make a cup of tea, and as my sister, on her weekend visits, brought her two pups down as well, so I would sit down stairs and play with them a little for a bit. I guess to waste time or think about where the script was and where it was going.

 It was around that time I remembered that I have another best of album in iTunes, ‘The Who’, so once back up stairs I threw that double album into the classic rock playlist making 83 tracks of mid 60’s to early 70’s classic rock. Its a good playlist.

 Having a new set of music added to the magical mojo playlist, I started up writing again, and every now and then I would take a break pop down stairs and play with the pups and make a new cuppa tea. Go back up stairs and write some more. I did this routine a few more time. Maybe 6 times in all.

 And after 4 hours of classic rock I had finished the short film script, 12 pages of it. Ok its not “finished” its in a rough draft, need a little bit of work, but I think it’ll be fine.

 I can’t remember a time when I wrote for so long and kept the quality of writing up the whole time, like the rest of this week, I think it’s been the breaks, I’ve usually just gotten my head down and typed until I couldn’t type anymore and I’ve always noticed a significant drop in quality which has alway meant that I’d have to go back and retype it, always a pain to do. So my mantra for writing is now to break often, get a cuppa tea and where possible, play with puppies. I’m so confident I think I could take that script out now and shoot it with out much trouble. But I won’t. Or can’t. Yet.

 So now I’m at 8 scripts in a week, I started last Sunday and since then I’ve written something every day, weather it be a treatment an outline or the script I’ve written something and that is key to everything. Even if its just this 750 exercise, its something written, keeps the skills sharp so to speak/type.

 I just took a comedy break, I have Comedy Central on the tele and it was distracting me, but instead of turning it off I figured I’d just watch it.

 I now have a total of 15 ideas for short films, some I might not be able to do, or even get them to work, but I’ll just move forward, I added another idea today, its a VFX video rathe rather then a short film, but lets face it, if you can’t have fun doing this then why bother doing it. So I would like to make a few video that are just for shits and giggles, no story or plot just visual effects on a grand scope, and a little ridicules. I think only making short films with a message or for recognition would get tiresome after awhile, so taking a break to make something silly and fun is needed for someone like me, if I can’t have fun with it then I don’t want to do it.

Something else I realised today, and that is that when I watch videos and films on Vimeo I get inspired, even if its a video on BMX bikes or skateboards I still feel the need to shot something that likes that good. Vimeo for me equals inspiration. And Youtube, not so much, I watch videos on Youtube, made by the tier 1 tubers and all I feel is sick, all those resources and nothing to show for it, I doesn’t inspire me at all. And as there are people on Youtube uploading great content, but not getting the recognition they deserve because the tier 1’s always do the same thing, and that is, at the end of their uninspired poorly presented badly acted diarrhea ridden dialogued videos, they do a ‘talk to camera’ section where they say how happy they are that you watched their utterly putrid pile of insect infested bile they also ask you, or their “fans” to like, favorite and comment “and lets see if we can get this video to the featured section”, I mean they have enough viewers that that will most likely happen anyway, it might take a day longer, but it will happen eventually. The way I see it, there are videos out there that deserve to be on the featured page far more then their dog vomit, but because they ask you to do all that crap their video might and I’m guessing does, push the better videos out of sight, so they never get seen. That is criminal. But I guess we can all live in the hope that at some point the tier 1 tubers will slowly disappear from the front pages allowing new, more inspiring video to shine through the mist of youtuber bullshit. My message to them, you’re already the most popular people on youtube, mostly because you were there in the beginning, so if you see a video on youtube from someone not very popular, and you love the video or the film, tell people, promote that video, give these people the opportunity to shine. Or maybe the reason you guys don’t do that, is because you don’t want better people with better material pushing you off the front page. You game the system because your in a position to, and to those that aren’t, I guess its tough shit. You say that you youtubers are all one big family, so act like it, or is it that the younger or better looking or better film makers in your extended family are basically the competition in a race, a marathon where they might be fitter then you and be able to run faster and longer then you, but don’t have mopeds like you.

 Congratulations, your stunting the content on your beloved Youtube to shit contrived fart jokes, making sure to keep your videos short enough so not to exceed the attention span of your prepubescent viewers.

 The last two paragraphs were for the tier 1 youtubers, the people you see on the features and front pages of youtube every fucking day. And no, I’m not a hater or a troll, I’m a fucking realist.