When we installed our video system last year, we admittedly didn’t think of everything we should have.  As a result, we were left with a large gap in our functionality.  This gap was basically the ability to run Keynote presentations into our HDSDI system smoothly.  Now we were able to do this, but not as well as it needed to be done.  See, we were using an HD interface from Blackmagic Design, which was great, except it wouldn’t allow OS X to use Core Image to send graphics across the HDSDI channel.  As a result, we had a NASTY 4-5 second lag every time we changed slides.  Worse yet, we had no ability to to any smooth transitions or builds of any kind.

Fast-forward 9 months to this past September.  Things have calmed down, and it’s now time to try and resolve this issue without killing our budget.  Basically the solution is to convert the DVI signal from our Mac’s dual-head card to HDSDI, and add sync to it so that we can run it through our live switcher.  I’ve found only 2 products so far that can do this:  The Miranda DVI-RAMP, which we tested 2 weekends ago, and the Matrox MXO, which we tested this weekend.

Both systems did a great job of converting DVI to HDSDI.  The DVI-RAMP has some features on it that we don’t really need at this time, but everything it advertises it performs very well.  The Matrox isn’t as loaded up as the DVI-RAMP, but it also costs about 80% less and still is enough to do what we need.  Our Keynote operator was blown away by how responsive her computer was this morning during the first test.  To add to that, this morning’s message included a LOT of graphic elements that changed much quicker than normal.  It’s safe to say that having this component in place actually improved the morning from a presentation standpoint.

I’m hoping that the evaluation of the MXO comes back positive so that we might be able to hang on to the one we have.  Currently we have it strictly on a trial basis. 

There’s a few other places we could use equipment like this in the control room…

• On CG:  We could finally upgrade to the newest version of Pro Presenter and use their Extended Resolution plugin to output our lyrics over DVI at 1920×1080.
• On Playback:  We could quit using the Blackmagic Deck Control to play back our videos and again, use Pro Presenter with the ER plugin to give us one-click playback of our clips.
• Combined with some BTX/Gefen hardware:  We could put just about any signal we wanted to across our HDSDI framework and get it to wherever it needs to go.

So as you can imagine, I’m pretty stoked.  Being able to add a lot of functionality for a relatively low amount of cash is great, but when you can make life easier for your volunteers at the same time, it’s REALLY a win.  I’ll come back to this subject later as our evaluation continues.

If you’re charged with the task of maintaining your organizations Active Directory, check out this article from Microsoft TechNet Magazine, “11 Essential Tools for Managing Active Directory.”  The article covers 11 free tools to make your administration job easier, and free is always good.

I’m not lazy… really I’m not… but I’m always looking for ways to make my job easier.  One of the things that I don’t like spending time on is tinkering with scripts, especially login scripts.

I ran across this script that uses ifmember.exe (available here) to help map drives for any given user based on their group membership.  Basically, you add a user to a security group, and when this script runs, the share associated with that security group is automatically mapped to a drive letter for the user.

You can read details about the script here.  The author, Simon Butler, did a fine job on the article and there’s no sense in me retyping it on my site.

While I was at GCC a couple weeks ago, Kyle showed me a nifty little utility for gauging where file usage is happening at on your hard drives.

It’s called TreeSize.  It’s made by JAM Software, and it’s available in three different flavors; Free, Personal, and Pro.  Each step up offers more powerful searching and reporting capabilities, with the Pro version topping out at $50.

Below is a screen cap of TreeSize Free.  Even the free version is pretty useful for finding out where a majority of your hard drive space is getting used at.  The purple bar represents the total file size for each folder.

In the next screenshot, I set TreeSize’s filter to only check for audio files (.WMA .MP3 .AAC .AIF .M4A .M4P).  While these files affect our storage capacity on our file server, we filter out these same file types with our backup software, so they don’t take up space on our backup drives.

I like the free version, but I’m gonna download the pro version and and give it a spin as well.

It’s about 2AM right now in Northeast Ohio, and earlier this evening I started the task of taking all of our virtual servers down so that I could defrag the host machines that they live on.

For taking care of large virtual disk files, I use Contig, which is part of the Windows Sysinternals software lineup.  Basically Contig is a tool for defragmenting large files.  It can take wildcards and even recurse subdirectories if you want it to.  This makes it pretty simple to go to the directory where your virtual machines are kept and defrag all of your .vmdk (virtual disk) files in one sweep.

I was nervous for a good while this evening, because the Contig utility was taking an EXTRA long time to defragment a piece of the virtual hard drive that is part of our Exchange server, and perfmon was showing little-to-no disk activity at the same time.  About halfway through the second paragraph, however, the virtual disk finally finished up and Contig continued on to the next file.  WHEW!

Looking at our file server’s disk usage, I am amazed at how our storage needs have skyrocketed.  When I started in 2005, our dinky little file server had a 30something-GB SCSI drive on it, and it was enough to hold everyone’s information.  Since then we’ve moved to a 425GB RAID array, and we’ve managed to fill over 80% of that space.  Safe to say we’ll be looking for another storage solution sooner than later.

I rarely (and I mean RARELY) come in on Fridays, but I decided to come in this Friday because there were some PCs that needed prepped for our interns by Tuesday.

We have a base package of software that gets installed on our PCs by default, and until now, it’s been somewhat of a pain, especially when I have to prep a PC that I don’t have an image built already for.

I don’t know what led me to do this, and I don’t know why I never thought of it sooner, but I found that if you run an installer from the command line and add a “/?” switch, there’s a real good chance you’ll see an option to run the installer in silent mode — basically this means no user interaction … SWEET!  Take that option, throw in some scripting, and you’ve got a VERY hassle-free way to install a good bit of software.  There are some rogue installers out there that don’t give you a silent install option, and so those are in a separate folder.  Once those are done, the script kicks in, installs the rest of the software, and also copies all the sysprep tools onto the new machine so that we can reseal it and get it ready for imaging.

There’s quite a few imaging tools out there.  I decided to use SystemRescueCD for what we’re doing.  SysRescCD is basically a live Gentoo Linux image that contains a nice array of tools for disk troubleshooting, partition resizing, and backup.  I simply boot the CD, make a samba connection to my imaging share, and run a script that packages the MBR, the partition table, and all of the partitions up, compresses them, and uploads them to the share.  A separate script will download the image you select, and apply it to any blank harddrive. 

If you’ve got a decent knowledge of Linux (my Linux skills are nothing to brag on), download the ISO and give SysRescCD a try.  If you want the upload and download scripts to make life easy, give me a shout and I’ll pass them along.

Last night I stumbled across a neat little program that allows you to burn ISOs to CD or DVD for free.  It’s called ImgBurn, and it’s a pretty straight-forward program.  You load your ISO, hit the copy button, and you’re good to go.  I used it last evening to burn the Windows Vista ISO I downloaded from Microsoft’s VL site.

It looks like you can actually put ISOs into a queue as well if you’ve got a lot of stuff to burn, but I haven’t had a chance to mess with it much.  It seems like a good enough tool to pass along though.