David,
Thanks for the reply.
The video issue is not a hardware problem, it might be a memory leak in Aperture or a GPU API problem. I can replicate the problem on a iMac 24" Intel, a MacBook Pro 17 Intel and a MacPro Quad Intel, all with different GPUs. The card in the MacPro is a GeoForce Quadro FX4500 and it has a lot of built in temperature and air flow sensors so no overlimits are happening to the hardware, it runs for days on all the other applications, but since i see the problem on multiple Mac's it appears to be software in either raw component, core image or Aperture. If i am just keywording or tagging and not image editing i can work for hours without the dreaded unsupported image purple screen. It may be a problem with core image's raw processor for the Hasselblad since when i see the problem in Aperture I also now notice that Quick View can no longer provide previews of H3 or even older H2 files. It is only when i start making adjustments in Aperture that it goes to the black screen, the white screen or the unsupported image screen and not always right away. If i quit Aperture and restart the problem goes away and we can work again for a while. I have not seen this problem in Phocus or LightRoom.
I am also seeing another odd problem, importing 3FRs into Aperture i sometimes (about 10%) of the time get a magenta cast on the left or top of the image and a cyan cast on the left or bottom of the image, split right down the middle of the image (left or top depending on portrait or landscape). Sometimes re-importing the image will fix this and sometimes not. I am not seeing this problem in Phocus or Flexcolor. But it can also happen when i convert to DNG and then import into Aperture. We replicated this issue at my dealer with a brand new H3DII-39 with their system, their CF card, reader, etc. It started happening with the 2.1 release of Aperture and Mac OS X Raw component (the one before the latest version).
I am working closely with Apple tech support and they escalated the call. Today they told me that the H3DII-39 is NOT supported by Apple, and that only the CF39 is supported. What do you think, i was quite surprised? Can we get an official word on support for the H3DII-39?
Writing a Phocus-like plug in for Aperture would not be that hard (I have already written several Aperture Plug-ins). This would allow Hasselblad to not share any proprietary algorithms with Apple and Hasselblad could control the release of updated lens maps, etc. outside of any Apple release schedule (other than dealing with API changes that might happen as Aperture moves from V2 to V3). Hasselblad could still use the basic processing in Core Image but you might want to have a different pipeline to do the Hasselblad magic (DAC, etc.). The algorithms should not change and most of that code could be reused from Phocus in the Aperture plug-in. There is a lot of math, i have written some raw converters for astronomical CCD image acquisition and it can get complex fast. With the work you are doing in Phocus you clearly would not need much help from Apple for a plug-in, but it is time and money and effort. I guess i want the best of all worlds
Don't get me wrong, i like Phocus and it is a great advance from Flexcolor. But it is killing our rather fine tuned workflow, time = money I can't wait to try 1.1 however! If we were only using Hasselblad cameras we could dump Aperture or Lightroom but the reality is we use multiple vendors, sigh....
I did not understand how the DNG wrapper could possibly carry the advanced adjustments but my (usually excellent) dealer insisted that they did, thank you for clarifying. My understanding of the Universe has been restored
I tried the magnify (both the Universal Access and the one now built-into Leopard using the wheel mouse while holding down Control) and when in full screen mode on two 30 inch Cinema displays something is not letting the Zoom keystrokes get to the OS. In single window mode it does. If i move the mouse to the third screen then i get system-wide zoom back but then the full screen Phocus window on the second 30 inch display closes. This is very repeatable. The third display is a Wacom Cintiq 12WX graphics tablet / LCD screen. There is also a fourth display which is a broadcast quality 16:9 reference monitor for video work but we usually have that display turned off so maybe Phocus is getting confused by the four displays. Our setup works fine with other two screen applications (like Aperture, Logic and FCP) with the third and fourth displays.
While we are on the subject of the extra displays it would be soooooooo cool to have a quick way of moving all of the adjustment tools to snap to the graphics tablet LCD third display and get bigger to allow for more precise adjustments. Trying to unhook all the adjustment windows and moving them does not seem to work very well, they keep snapping back.
What do I use system-wide magnify for? Well for all of us over 50 the magnify tool is "critical" for seeing those tiny menus and adjustment tools - I do not use it for image viewing since the software scaling is not acceptable for critical image examination, just for menus, tools and the little tiny RGB read out for example. I have now processed about 1,500 images in Phocus and the quality is stellar, it rarely crashes but it is slow compared to Aperture. Scrolling can be difficult since it is easy to get ahead of Phocus and then it takes forever to get back to where you want to be, hopefully this gets better in 1.1.
Having to export a TIFF to Photoshop for dust spotting is killing our workflow, that is where Aperture and Lightroom really shine and save real dollars in labor. Any chance this feature will make it into Phocus?
The keyboard shortcuts in the current version 1.0.1 are mostly three key combinations which is awful, i feel like i am back to my UNIX VI text editor days . I see very few single letter commands, just the few you mention. I humbly suggest this could be a lot simpler and more elegant.
We already use the IPTC meta-data on import but i have not found a situation yet where a set preset can be used on a whole range of images during an import. Most of our work is outdoors or under varying lighting conditions and at multiple locations so each image is usually fine tuned individually if it is selected, although we like to make a quick pass for color correction for every image other than the pure throw away shots. Our fine-art reproduction work for a major artist could use a preset i guess since they are all shot under the same carefully controlled lighting but that is a small part of the work.
Hopefully all of this input will be useful. I am still working with Apple and will post anything I learn.
Thanks again for the suggestions and pointers,
Glenn