#dit gear

EDIT: Updated GPU card below

If you’re reading this there’s already a good chance this is your scenario as well. As Digital Imaging Technicians, we need to be as light as possible with our gear for location shooting but still have enough speed and power to get off the clock as fast as possible and actually sleep a few hours before call the next day. Mac Pros are great for speed and power but heavy as hell when you are going up 3 flights of stairs to get to a rooftop location. I’ll not taking mine out again for season 2 of “Arrow”. I got killed last season with the extreme locations and weather we regularly found ourselves in.

So just go with MacBook Pros and thunderbolt enclosures and problem solved right? Well not really. I started out season 1 that way and was all excited about how light everything was. My UPS was going to last forever when I lose AC for one reason or another. My tests reported it was all fast enough. In the end it was fast enough and all would have been well except I hadn’t counted on the sheer amount of noise coming from multiple tiny fans to rip me out of my happy place.

Tell the sound mixer to suck it up? Well, I won’t and I can’t. I won’t because at the very least it’s unprofessional and I can’t because on every job I sit next to the DP right under the main 24” monitors unless the DP objects. My DIT cart which carries those 24” monitors is as close to the cameras as possible for a bunch of reasons. Mainly this is so I can actually be helpful to the DP, director, and script supervisor even when we are rolling if need be. It’s not uncommon to tweak a look during a take or have the director whisper to me to get a clip queued up ASAP while we’re rolling. Whenever possible, I turn down jobs where I’m asked to use a system that means I’m either stuck on a truck or ridiculously far away from set. It’s imperative that I’m as close to set as possible for me to call myself a member of the camera department and also for selfish professional growth. As an aside, I’ve been lucky enough in my career to have almost always worked with camera assistants that don’t think twice about wrapping up SDI cable or help me move my cart when I can’t do it myself. However they do this as a courtesy and I do not expect it of them. I was a camera assistant for many years and know full well that they are likely just as slammed as me.

I am totally off track. Back to fan noise. It doesn’t take much to have a Macbook Pro ramp up it’s fans to 100%. Silverstack, Davinci Resolve, Adobe CS6 apps, AJA VTR Exchange, Blackmagic Media Express and Livegrade all running at the same time will do it every time. I did install smcFanControl and it helps up to a point but eventually OSX takes over and has it’s way with your Mac’s fans. Throw a couple capture cards and an eSATA card into a thunderbolt expansion chassis and guess what - the power supply fan runs at 100%. I eventually transplanted my Magma Expressbox 3T chassis components into a mATX case with manual fan control and much better ventilation but I still am stuck with the power supply working at it’s full capacity. I couldn’t swap the stock PSU to an ATX PSU which sucked, too much soldering and too much risk. So after a couple months into season 1 of Arrow dealing with multiple layers of furniture blankets surrounding my cart to dampen the noise I went back to a Mac Pro setup. It was definitely quieter and had power to spare. However my best UPS lasted only 12 minutes max and my back hated me but that’s how I finished the season.

Maybe Haswell Macbook Pros will be quieter than Retinas but until then or the new Mac Pro I’m going back to my trusty (ahem..) hackintosh for season 2. BTW don’t do this at home. Hackintoshes are not plug-n-play and unless you’ve stressed the hell out of it using the exact peripherals you’ll encounter on your job don’t use one. There’s my disclaimer. Anyway the hack I’m using is in a 3U rackmount chassis with all fans manually controlled and has been a very solid build over the last couple years. Mountain Lion has been running without too much maintenance and it has more power than I need for “Arrow”. See screenshot below for basic specs and full component list at the bottom of this post. My UPS will give me 20 minutes if I’m not actively transcoding or cloning cards. Geekbench score is 12900 with CPU turbo boost disabled in the BIOS (for lower temperatures) and 13400 with turbo boost enabled in Geekbench 32bit test mode. (I don’t have the 64bit test version.) Not 12 core power but it’s ok. Best of all it’s not too much heavier and no more bulky than my Pegasus Thunderbolt RAID, Magma expansion chassis and Macbook Pro combined. Even with the internal 9TB RAID5 it’s still significantly lighter than a Mac Pro.

So finally I’m getting to my point. I didn’t want to haul around a 1920 x 1200 capable monitor (need it to work in Resolve comfortably) like I always have with my Mac Pro, again due to size and weight so I thought why don’t I use my aging 2011 17” Macbook Pro and connect to the hack via OSX Screen Sharing? It would give me a compact, lightweight monitor, keyboard and mouse. Simple right? Nope. If you haven’t used screen sharing then the rest of this will be extra boring but if you are about to attempt such excitement then read on. I should qualify - I’m going to assume you have at least a working knowledge of the network settings section of OSX and basic networking awareness for the rest of this to make any sense…

Regardless of the interface, screen sharing is easy to set up and works well when you only want to use 1 network connection at a time. I need 2. I want gigabit ethernet for the fastest experience possible using screen sharing and the Wi-Fi connection primarily for internet but also for wireless screen sharing should it be necessary in locations when my cart can’t be right on set. This is a problem as the network services list in OSX defaults to the top connection (Apple calls this a service instead) for internet access. There is no way to tell your browser (in browser connection settings) to use another service instead. Likewise, screen sharing cannot connect with the 2nd Mac unless it uses the top-most service. To change the order of the services in the list shown below, click on the settings icon at the bottom of the network list and select “Set Service Order”. Then select the desired network you want to reprioritize and move it up or down in the list. I tried to use a bunch of Terminal commands that came up via Google searches to assign the services to specific tasks but I wasn’t doing something right as they never worked. Using IPv6 Link-local only protocols didn’t work either. Neither did bypassing the cart router just using Cat5e cables - crossover and standard versions - to connect both macs. (If Wi-Fi was off this works fine.) Yes, I did have file sharing and screen sharing set up with proper user permissions in the Sharing section of OSX system preferences. Make sure you do as well before doing anything else or you won’t be able to log in at all.

Time after time I could not connect to the 2nd Mac through screen sharing if I had an active Wi-Fi service. The problem was I was trying to connect to 2 separate routers both of which used the 192.xxx.x.xxx address protocol. Even though both connections had different IP addresses they were still all using the 192.xxx.x.xxx config. The answer after much trial and error was to set up one router (the one that will be on my cart) to use a router address of 10.0.0.1 (Subnet Mask gets changed as well to 255.0.0.0) instead of 192.168.0.1. That is done through your router’s admin / network settings in your browser. Enter 192.168.0.1 or whatever your router’s IP address is in your browser’s address bar to connect. Until I tried that I had my internet router set as 192.168.0.1 and my cart router set to 192.168.0.2. That was stupid. So currently the Wi-Fi network is the top level service and ethernet is below that.

The hack is always connected to the cart router via ethernet cable as they are both housed inside a large Pelican case that I have modded with 2 - 120mm speed adjustable fans for ventilation. The Macbook Pro can be connected to the router using ethernet or through Wi-Fi. Either way works except I lose internet if I connect to the hack using Wi-Fi. I can still get it back by tethering to my iPhone though so no real issue there. Because I’ll need to be online with the hack daily to keep in good standing with my Adobe Creative Cloud activation, tethering or Wi-Fi now also works on the hack without interfering with the ethernet screen sharing session. Screen sharing connects consistently between both computers and all is well.

Below: Hackintosh desktop in full screen mode from my Macbook Pro using Screen Sharing.

I hope this is useful to someone as I could not find a single guide that replicated my scenario. With this working I can now quickly leave my cart further away from set if needed for logistics and still have full control of it right on set including my HD-SDI router via software.

As for my hackintosh components (I always get asked this anytime I mention hackintosh stuff) here they are as I’ll have configured for “Arrow”, an Arri Alexa show:

CPU - Intel i7 970 hexacore

RAM - 24GB - Corsair CMX12GX3M3B1600C9

Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5 (rev. 2.0) with latest BIOS

GPU - Sparkle ONE GTS 450 1GB OC Single Slot (Quadro 4000 works fine too but runs hotter and uses more power)

EDIT: GPU - Geforce GTX 660 2GBDDR5

Capture Cards - Aja IO Express & Blackmagic Design Decklink Extreme 3D

RAID card - Atto R608 with Cache Assure

RAID drives - 9TB RAID5 - Western Digital Red 4 x 3TB

Power Supply - Antec 1000W Truepower

Other PCIe cards - 1 x FW800 PCIex1 card, 1 x USB3 PCIex1 card

Transport drives / additional backups - bunch of GRAIDs - 6TB and 4TB

Hackintosh guide - none specific for my exact motherboard but all kexts and installers are from tonymacx86.com

Other Notes:

BTW I do all media management on set at my cart. I’ve had people tell me that set is no place for such a delicate task and my reply is simply get your ass out of the truck and figure it out on set. It’s not difficult or dangerous if you have a high quality UPS. I’ve found no reason to have to be off set ever with my cart other than for logistical reasons or noise concerns with sound. The exception I’ve experienced is if you are syncing dailies then you will probably have a serious RAID and may need to be further away due to noise issues. I had 2 - 18TB RAID6 fibre arrays last year on a Scratch Lab job and wasn’t as close as I would have liked. This rant is part of a much bigger debate and should probably be addressed in it’s own post in the future but anyway, that’s my 2 cents on DIT operations for now.

To take the hack network kext out of the question for any potential problems setting up screen sharing, all tests above were performed between 2 Macbook Pros. When I got it all working I just copied my settings over to the hack and it worked as expected. Also don’t forget that routers sometimes crash and need rebooting.

You’ll need to have a monitor connected to the Mac you’re trying to screen share with (Macbooks and Imacs excluded,) in order to support a descent screen size during your screen sharing session. I’m using an old 7” Lilliput LCD with HDMI input that gives me 1920 x 1080 during screen sharing. The 7” is very light and won’t be used anyway (the picture sucks) so it stays out of sight inside my cart but is powered up at all times.

Your target Mac's sound is not received by your remote Mac during screen sharing. If I find an elegant way of solving this I'll update this post. For now I'm using a Sennheiser wireless mic Tx and Rx combo which is lame but works for when I'm editing using screen sharing.