HitFilm for Mac Kickstarter

Posted on May 10, 2013 by | Leave a comment

This is one of the more interesting projects I’ve worked on at FXhome. Our visual effects and video editing software HitFilm has been out on PC for a couple of years now and we’ve been asked continually about the possibility of a Mac version.

For various reasons that wasn’t a viable thing for a long while. Thankfully, that’s now changed and we’re doing HitFilm for Mac. But that’s easier said than done (there isn’t a “build for Mac” button, alas), so we’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign to give the project a literal kickstart.

Do check it out and back it if you can, or spread it amongst your friends and colleagues. Click here to check it out.

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Posted in Filming, Interesting stuff, Work

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Fun with time dilation

Posted on April 9, 2013 by | Leave a comment

I’m in the middle of writing a short story that rather prominently features time dilation as a central plot device.

Turns out time dilation is a complex little blighter. That’s why it took somebody like Einstein to nail down the concept in the first place.

Anyway, while researching I stumbled across a bunch of time dilation calculators. One of the simplest was this one: http://www.1728.org/reltivty.htm

Go check it out. It’s fun.

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How to fix a Samsung Galaxy S3 on O2 with the 4.1.2 freeze problem

Posted on April 8, 2013 by | 9 Comments

I don’t normally write tech-type blog posts but having recently endured this utter pain in the arse of a problem, I thought I’d try to help others by posting my solution. I’ll attempt to be succinct.

First up: this is my particular experience. THIS ADVICE MAY NOT WORK FOR YOU. I DON’T GUARANTEE THIS POST’S ACCURACY. FIDDLING WITH YOUR PHONE IS DANGEROUS AND HAS RISKS. READ THIS WHOLE POST FIRST AND IF YOU’RE NOT COMFORTABLE WITH IT, DON’T DO ANYTHING. In other words, don’t blame me if you brick your phone. :)

The problem

My Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone started freezing intermittently about a month back. It didn’t seem to be caused by any specific action. Sometimes it would freeze while I was using it, the screen getting stuck on. Sometimes it would freeze when I wasn’t using it, and I’d only realise when the screen wouldn’t come on at all.

After a freeze there were 3 crappy options:

  1. Hold down the power button until the phone forced a restart.
  2. Take out the battery and put it back in.
  3. Wait for approximately 20 minutes for the phone to unfreeze by itself.

Sometimes the freezes would occur only ever hour-or-so. Sometimes they’d happen every few minutes. The result was an unusable phone.

This appeared to happen shortly after my phone received the Android 4.1.2 update over the air. A quick Googling seemed to confirm that others were having a similar problem.

Trying to use official channels

I’m on O2 in the UK. Thus my first port of call was O2′s repair team. I took the phone into the shop and they sent it away to be investigated. They gave me a super-basic Nokia as a loan phone, which I had to pay a £25 deposit on. Clearly they don’t trust their customers much, even when they’re paying £30 a month and have been with them for 7 years.

It came back a week later. 20 minutes after leaving the shop it froze. Exactly the same problem.

No details were provided as to what O2′s repair people had done. As far I could tell, they’d simply done a factory reset. Which I’d already tried.

I took it back and they sent it off again.

I received a phone call a few days later from the elite O2 repair squad saying that they couldn’t find any fault. Of course, given the nature of the freezes, it might only happen every hour-or-so. With a factory reset the problem would sometimes lessen, though it would still happen.

The phone came back. They usefully claimed that they’d upgraded the firmware to the latest version. I checked and it was on exactly the same firmware as when it had left.

At this point I considered going direct to Samsung. However, I elected instead to try to fix it myself as I had rather lost faith in supposed support teams by this point.

Diagnosis

First up, identifying the problem. This is a weird problem in that it only affects a few S3 users. Enough to show up a lot on Google, but not a lot for the mainstream press or carriers to be aware of it.

Also, note that your phone freezing could be caused by all sorts of reasons. It doesn’t mean you have this specific problem.

After a lot of tedious research, I figured out what was going on. Let’s cut to the chase:

  • Computers like smartphones have firmware. This is what drives the phone. When a new version of Android or iOS is released, you’re upgrading the phone’s firmware. The latest major version of Android is called Jellybean.
  • Firmware has a version number (eg 4.1.2) and a PDA build code. A version number could have several different builds.
  • At some point in late 2012, Samsung acknowledged a problem with the S3′s Jellybean firmware (possibly 4.1.1 and prior, I’m not sure) which could completely kill the phone stone dead.
  • Samsung released a fix for this right at the end of 2012. This update was available over the air. It was the 4.1.2 XELLA update.
  • Many phone carriers, including O2, periodically take an official Samsung firmware release, re-brand it slightly, and then it gets released as that carrier’s official release. This is why you might not get an Android update until weeks or months after the manufacturer (in this case, Samsung) originally released it. If you’re on O2, you only get the updates that O2 approve.
  • In this case, O2 spotted that the 4.1.2 XELLA update was important and set about releasing an O2-branded version.
  • Meanwhile, shortly after releasing the XELLA update Samsung realised it had a bug: it could cause the phone to freeze intermittently.
  • Samsung quickly released a new build which didn’t have the freezing problem. In fact, there’s been 3 builds since then.
  • At the time of writing (April 8th 2013) O2 haven’t released any further builds since the XELLA update.

What this means is that if you have an unlocked, unbranded S3 you’ll be totally fine, as you’ll have the  very latest firmware. Even if you did have the faulty XELLA update, it will only have been briefly.

If you’re on O2 AND are being affected by the freezing, however, you’re currently a bit screwed. You can check which firmware build you have by going to Settings -> About device. The build code is right at the bottom.

Even if you send the phone off to O2 to be repaired, all they can do is put the latest firmware on it – 4.1.2 XELLA. Which is the CAUSE of the problem.

O2 staff in shops and at the repair centre seem entirely unaware of the freezing problem, despite it being reported in many places including their own forums and support systems. As mentioned above, it doesn’t affect all users, but it is widespread enough for it to be easily found in a Google search.

Send the phone off to Samsung and you could also have a problem, as they may well be restricted to only working with the O2-branded and approved firmware.

Which is why, currently, I needed to fix it myself.

The fix

Still there? Yeah, I know. It’s a lot of reading. I had to cobble all this together from about 15 different sites, and that was after filtering out all the irrelevant and incorrect stuff. Not fun.

Once I’d diagnosed what was actually going on, the solution seemed theoretically simple: I needed to get to a newer version of the 4.1.2 firmware, beyond the problematic XELLA build.

So how to do this?

Turns out, there’s something called ODIN. It’s an all-powerful god of a program, appropriately enough. It’s able to change the firmware on your phone very easily, with a few crucial benefits:

  • It doesn’t void your warranty.
  • It doesn’t require the phone to be ‘rooted’. Rooting can be cool, but only if you know what you’re doing. Although I’d rooted my previous phone, the HTC Desire, I didn’t want to root my S3.
  • It’s very easy to use: BUT YOU DO HAVE TO BE CAREFUL.

Two things are needed.

  1. The ODIN software. You can get it from here. The version at the time of writing is 3.07.
  2. A stable firmware build. Conveniently, all phone builds are stored at http://www.sammobile.com

To find the firmware, go to sammobile.com and click the Firmware link at the top. Then click the Firmwares link just below that pops up.

In the menu system, pick from left to right: Smartphone -> Android -> GT-I9300 – Galaxy S III -> United Kingdom – BTU

This will display the available firmwares for the phone.

NOTE: THESE INSTRUCTIONS ARE FOR A UK PHONE RUNNING ON THE UK NETWORK O2. IT MIGHT BE DIFFERENT IF YOU’RE IN A DIFFERENT COUNTRY. I DON’T KNOW, I HAVEN’T TRIED IT.

The best bet is probably to grab the latest one. At the time of writing, and when I fixed my phone, this was the 2013 March 4.1.2 I9300XXEMC2 build. Basically, try to go for the latest, stable, official build.

Note that this means you’re downloading the latest official SAMSUNG build. This is NOT the O2 build. In fact, it has nothing to do with O2.

It’s still an official, 100% legit build. There is nothing dodgy about this process.

You’ll probably need to register at the website to download. Simply click the name of the firmware to download it.

A note about locked sims

The sim card is the thing that tells your phone how to connect to your network carrier.

Some phones are locked to only allowing a particular type of sim. So, for example, you might only be allowed to use O2 sims in your S3 phone. Normally this is only a problem if you want to sell the phone or change networks.

In my reading it seemed that having a locked phone could cause problems with changing the firmware, with the phone then complaining and not recognising the sim and asking for an unlock code.

I didn’t have to contend with this as it turned out my S3 was not sim-locked.

The best way to check this is to put a sim card from somebody else’s phone into your S3. Make sure it’s on a different network carrier. You’ll soon see if it asks for a code. If it doesn’t, you’re good to go.

If it does, you may need to get an unlock code from O2. You can do this here. Alternatively you can try the methods described here, but these may only work if you’re on a 4.1.1 firmware build.

Game time

OK, here’s the actual process for doing the fix. THIS IS WHERE THINGS CAN GO WRONG, SO ONLY DO IT IF YOU’RE COMFORTABLE AND HAVE BACKED EVERYTHING UP.

I REPEAT: THIS WILL PROBABLY CAUSE DATA TO DISAPPEAR, SO DON’T LEAVE ANYTHING PRECIOUS ON YOUR PHONE. BACK IT UP.

You can find more info about ODIN by clicking here.

  1. Make sure you’ve got the GT-I9300 drivers already installed on your system. The easiest way to do this is to make sure you’ve installed the official Kies software from Samsung and connected your phone in the past. Windows will get all your drivers installed.
  2. MAKE SURE KIES ISN’T RUNNING. Hit ctrl+shift+escape if you’re not sure and check in the list for anything Kies-related. Kill it if it’s there. Having Kies running while ODIN does it’s thing would be bad.
  3. Extract the zip archive that you downloaded with firmware. This should result in a .tar or .tar.md5 file.
  4. Put your phone into download mode:
    1. Turn the phone off.
    2. Take out your sim card and SD, just to make sure they don’t interfere at all.
    3. Hold down the volume down and home buttons while holding the power button. This will start the phone up in a special mode.
    4. Press the volume up button to confirm. The phone will enter download mode.
  5. Extract the ODIN zip.
  6. Run ODIN – it’ll ask for admin permissions, so grant them.
    1. A window pops up with lots of buttons. Don’t change anything or fiddle around unless you know EXACTLY what you’re doing.
    2. By default you should have Auto Reboot and F. Reset Time already ticked. This is fine: leave them ticked.
    3. Make sure NOTHING ELSE IS TICKED. Having anything else ticked could destroy the universe.
    4. Click the PDA button and select the firmware file you extracted.
    5. ODIN will run a bunch of checks on the firmware file. This could take a little while. Afterwards, the PDA section will be ticked.
  7. Let’s do this thing.
    1. Connect your phone to the computer with a USB cable.
    2. Wait for the drivers to install.
    3. Once it’s ready, ODIN will change status to show something in the ID:COM box. It should turn blue, which means it’s ready to go. It might take a few seconds, so be patient.
    4. Double-check you don’t have anything else accidentally ticked.
    5. Click START.
    6. ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY DO NOT UNPLUG THE PHONE DURING THE PROCESS.

A progress bar will appear on the phone and in ODIN. Once it’s done the phone will reboot at least once. DO NOT UNPLUG THE PHONE.

Eventually a PASS! message will appear in ODIN and it’ll go green. This is good news.

Your phone will eventually reboot and you’ll end up on the start screen. At this point you can safely unplug the phone.

You can check the firmware in Settings->About device.  The build number should reflect the one you downloaded.

At this point I went to Settings -> Back up and reset and did a factory reset, to ensure I was starting nice and clean.

You can then log into your Google and Samsung accounts and reinstall everything and, if you’re like me, you won’t be suffering from freezes anymore.

I hope this helps somebody – it was a right faff trying to figure this out, so hopefully this’ll let some people cut straight to it.

The cool thing? You’ll now get the latest updates direct from Samsung, without having to wait for O2.

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Posted in Misc

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A quick summary of why TAKEN is a terrible film

Posted on April 8, 2013 by | Leave a comment

Since it was released I’ve been told by friends that I Really Must Watch Taken, and that I’d Really Like It. They all talk about how they expected it to be rubbish and were surprised by how good it was, that Liam Neeson is excellent, and that generally it’s better than you might think from the trailers and premise.

Hm.

The reasons why I didn’t like TAKEN can be split into two categories. Spoilers…

Action Movie Reasons

  1. The action is largely uninspired, from both a choreography and cinematography/editing perspective. It mostly involves Neeson waving his hands around quickly and regularly jumping through windows for no apparent reason.
  2. There’s a really lame car chase at a quarry in which all the cars look exactly the same.
  3. It suffers from classic Death Amnesia Syndrome. This is whereby a supporting but apparently important character dies a horrible death, there’s a brief but heartfelt 30 seconds of mourning, and then everybody completely forgets about them. In TAKEN, the character Amanda dies from a drug overdose having been kidnapped and possibly raped. Neeson looks sad. But at the end of the film, having rescued his own daughter, Amanda is not mentioned or mourned whatsoever. Daughter is far more excited about her new singing lessons!
  4. For an apparently highly trained mofo, all Neeson seems to actually do is beat people up. He does a tiny bit of investigation, most of which is a bit too convenient, but generally all his skills seem to involve waving his hands around and jumping through windows for no apparent reason. There’s no intelligence or planning or cunning. Which makes him (and the film) a bit dull.
  5. There’s a key moment right at the end in which the film had a chance to be AWESOME. It’s after the daughter is rescued, and the camera is pulling back, framing Neeson and her in a doorway. She says “you came for me…” to which he responds “I said I would.” BAM – END CREDITS! Except that isn’t what happens. Instead it cuts to a tedious airport scene with them arriving back home and being reunited with other family members, then cuts to ANOTHER tedious scene of daughter excitedly arriving at Holly Valance’s (???) house for singing lessons. Awful, awful ending. A sudden cut to black after those two lines would have been an iconic, efficient, memorable and hard hitting ending, cementing the film as a nasty, tight, brilliant exploitation flick. The two superfluous and sentimental scenes on the end cement the film as being arse.

Thematic Reasons

  1. The film is oppressively xenophobic. I mean that in the dictionary definition of the word: “unreasonably fearful of or hating anyone or anything foreign or strange.” Everything is fine and dandy until Neeson’s daughter leaves the cosy safety of America, to super dangerous Paris (!), where she’s kidnapped by Albanians and sold via a white slave market to evil sheikhs. Every non-American (with the exception of a friendly and understandably bemused Albanian translator) is a murderer, kidnapper, prostitute rapist, dealer, pimp, pervert or corrupt official. I kid you not. The entire film is a cynical exercise in preying on the audience’s fear and paranoia of the world beyond their front door. The message is clear: stay at home, don’t stray.
  2. As such, if you’re not the sort of person filled with fear and loathing of the outside world and people who aren’t the same as you, the film falls flat on its face. It has literally nowhere left to go. Intriguingly, the film is produced and co-written by Luc Besson, a Frenchman. I wonder whether he tailored the film specifically to appeal to the insular concerns of some Americans, or whether he designed the film to appeal to scared people of all nationalities? Well, except for Albanians – though they’ll certainly come away from the film rather concerned that the entire world thinks they’re uniformly bastards.
  3. To be precise, I’m not complaining about Neeson’s character having the above viewpoints. I’ve watched and loved many films with central characters that espouse extremely dubious views on the world. The problem is that the film is entirely in agreement with the character.
  4. Talking of which, the film also thinks that torture is super cool. Oh, and murder by torture. At one point Neeson is torturing with electricity and Evil Albanian who he knows has kidnapped his daughter. The torture works and he gets the information he needs, so he leaves the guy to be electrocuted to death. An act of revenge for what the kidnapper did to his daughter, sure. The problem is that the film thinks it’s awesome.
  5. Similarly, Neeson shoots the innocent wife of a corrupt official so as to force information from said official. It works. A glib line -”apologise to your wife for me” – is the only acknowledgement we get that maybe it was a dubious tactic.
  6. Every woman in the film except for Famke Janssen is shot, raped, murdered or forcibly addicated to drugs.
  7. Talking of Janssen, she escapes being directly abused but instead plays an entirely powerless, useless housewife character that sits around doing nothing for the entire film. I couldn’t help but think back fondly to the same actress in the X-Men films kicking ass. Hell, even in the unabashedly misogynistic James Bond series she still held her own and carved out an awesome character.
  8. The film somehow thinks that 6+ months of rich, white girls being kidnapped in Paris wouldn’t have been noticed by anybody. Erm.
  9. Neeson somehow infiltrates the Evil Albanian hideout as a French inspector, despite speaking with an American accent throughout. What?

Anyway. I could go on, but the film doesn’t really deserve any more of my time.

That was cathartic, thanks.

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George Osborne and the strawman in need of a brain

Posted on April 5, 2013 by | Leave a comment

As a long-time and avid gamer, one thing I’ve become accustomed to over the years is observing repeated sideways attacks by ill-informed politicians and press regarding the morality and safety of games. Whenever a high school shooting occurs or an act of extreme road rage or other isolated boiling point event, the eyes of a few immediately turn towards gaming, once more seeing an opportunity to further their agendas.

The problem, of course, is that no serious study has shown a relevant link between gaming and violence. Studies are on-going and it’s a topic that should be taken seriously, but anytime you see a politician or lobbyist on the news decrying the evil of games, know for certain that they are talking out of their arse.

Focusing on a gaming as a culprit is a way of diverting attention from the more immediate and far trickier issues. Rather than discussing problems with the country’s education and health systems, inevitably complex debates that require research and insight and considered thought, it’s far easier to point at the bogeyman. The end result, alas, is that the real problems are left to fester while attention is kept on a strawman argument.

This tendency towards logical fallacy has reared its head with George Osborne’s recent comments alluding that Britain’s welfare system was a contributing factor in the manslaughter of six children by their father Mick Philpott.

“Philpott is responsible for these absolutely horrendous crimes and these are crimes that have shocked the nation; the courts are responsible for sentencing him. But I think there is a question for government and for society about the welfare state – and the taxpayers who pay for the welfare state – subsidising lifestyles like that, and I think that debate needs to be had.”

While there’s always room for a debate on improving welfare, a system that is far from perfect and which should always be open to iterative improvement, what Osborne is actually doing here is using the deaths of six children to further his and his party’s agendas. Which is a rather unpleasant thing to do.

By using ‘lifestyles’ plural, Osborne is subtly suggesting that this happens a lot. “Welfare state subsidises child killers!” is the message he is peddling here, albeit couched in the guise of measured and reasonable-sounding language.

As with the gaming strawman, the connection between Philpott’s crimes and the benefits system is loose and complex. While there may be some apparent correlation, that does not prove the presence of causation.

It comes down to a pretty simple analysis, in the end. With games, if they truly were capable of turning people into crazed, violent attackers you’d be seeing an awful lot more of it occurring, given that gaming is one of the biggest pop cultural movements on the planet at the moment. By the same token, if there were some direct link between Philpott’s horrendous behaviour and welfare, we’d be seeing lots of similar cases.

Of course, in both cases, we don’t. A high school massacre and Philpott’s idiotic scheme are both as isolated as each other, resulting from a myriad of influences and events that have occurred over many years. Given the general stupidity of Philpott’s plan, it would perhaps be more relevant to look at his history of schooling rather than his skill at claiming benefits.

The bottom line is that the Tories are using a horrid manslaughter case and a logical fallacy to attack the benefits system from the side, teaming up with the Daily Mail in an attempt to sway general public opinion. It’s politics-by-hatred. Politics-by-jealousy.

Cameron almost managed to make it look like the Conservative Party’s ‘nasty party’ reputation was a thing of the past. Looks like it’s back.

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Why would the games industry want to be more like the movie industry?

Posted on February 25, 2013 by | Leave a comment

This post makes generalisations and uses isolated evidence to make a slightly huffy point. Sorry in advance.

A few weeks ago David Cage, head of game developer Quantic Dream and creative lead on fascinating-if-flawed games Fahrenheit (aka Indigo Prophecy) and Heavy Rain, gave a talk at the DICE summit in Vegas in which he lamented the games industry’s “Peter Pan syndrome” and unwillingness to mature as an art form/entertainment medium. Gamasutra have a decent account of it here. The inimitable Rock, Paper, Shotgun have already written a decent counterpoint here, with John “Quoted on the BBC” Walker neatly pointing out the flaws and oversights of Cage’s argument.

However, Walker wrote his post before this Sunday’s Oscars 2013 show. The annual Academy Awards is the event at which Hollywood trots out its most beautiful to show off just how awesome and cool and Important (with a big I) and talented it is, demonstrating that it’s the premier arts/entertainment medium. Better than books (movie adaptations of books are revered, novelisations are dismissed. It’s a one-way thing), better than comics, better than radio, better than TV, and certainly better than video games.

Cage and others frequently complain that the games industry is like the movie industry in its very earliest days, all vaudeville and bombast without the subtlety and nuance that cinema discovered during the 20th century. As gamers, we agonise over the rubbish, insulting and derivative representation of women both as characters in games and within the industry itself. We cringe at the ‘booth babes’ that line up at game industry events, flaunting flesh to supposedly tempt stereotypically horny, male, sweaty nerds towards the latest man-shooter.

The 2013 Oscars began like this:

I’m not especially outraged. There’s already rumour that all the named actresses were in on the joke. If this had been part of Saturday Night Live or an episode of Family Guy, it might have been slightly amusing. Perhaps it even was slightly amusing, even in context. Perhaps it was sexist, perhaps it was satirical. I’m not sure, and I don’t particularly care.

The main thing I take away is that the main event of the movie calendar, the big showcase night where the industry highlights to the entire world exactly what it is, where Hollywood declares its cinematic importance and sophistication, began with a song about boobs.

I’d be pretty embarrassed to work in an industry that chooses to represent itself like that, particularly while there are genuine ongoing issues such as the imploding VFX industry being protested right outside and silenced on stage.

Mostly, though, I’m observing that games are actively trying to deal with issues of sexism, feminism and emotional maturity, engaging in those difficult conversations with the ultimate goal of getting better, while movies are racing in the exact opposite direction.

David Cage never did have a particularly good point. But the next time he insists that “the time has come for a meaningful constructive, balanced new partnership [between the gaming industry and Hollywood]“, I’ll think of the boob song.

I think games are doing just fine without Hollywood, thanks, David.

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Posted in Games, Mostly serious, Movies

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Making time

Posted on February 25, 2013 by | Leave a comment

November 10 2012, eh? That’s the last time I wrote a blog post here, apparently. Turns out having a baby is quite time consuming. Now there’s some never-before-observed insight.

In the time when I’ve not been looking after the rather spiffing little chap called Yared Rohan Jones I’ve found myself either sat staring at a television or engaged with an escapist video game (mostly the superb The Walking Dead, which I’ll review when I’ve finished series 1). I don’t mind that – much like Eddie Riggs’ boom-guitar, it’s important to have some cooldown time if you don’t want to burn your fingers.

BUT! I think it’s probably just about time I got on with things. Thusly, I shall begin quietly and gently with some blog posts. This may or may not lead in to some short stories, which then could expand into continuing editing work on my novels.

The funny thing about having a baby is that it reminds you how cool life is, but it also reminds you that it has a start and an end. And you don’t want to get to the other end and realise you didn’t quite get round to something. Hence getting on with it.

Oh, also:

Image

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Posted in Mostly serious

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