translator

[egypturnash]

Somewhere in the middle of the day...

I was calling Final Cut Pro something obscene. "Monkeyfucker", I believe. "Having problems?" asked Eddie. "Yeah... it keeps on running out of memory when I know it damn well has enough. I think it has a memory leak."

He, of course, had no clue what I meant by this, and asked. So I explained. I actually managed to explain a mildly arcane and confusing concept to someone who knows nothing about computers. How? The power of analogy.

Imagine we only have so much paper. We can't go buy more. All we have is this pile about chest-high. But we have a perfect magic eraser that makes it as good as new. Now. You need paper. So you go grab, say, twenty pages from the big pile. And you draw on them. We copy the images off into the next stage of the process, and you erase the paper and put it back in the pile. But... maybe you're a little forgetful, and you only put back sixteen of those twenty pages, and the other four just kinda fall behind your desk. You keep doing this. Sooner or later, the studio only has, oh, twelve pieces of paper to use, because the rest are behind your desk.

So we fire you.

And then the magically efficient human resources crew (note: Spümcø doesn't even have an HR person, let alone a whole department) comes in and cleans up your desk, leaving no trace you were there. And they find aaaaall that paper behind your desk; they put it back in the big pile. Look! We have paper again!

This is what happens when I snarl, and quit FCPro.

But then we decide, welll, we need you. So we hire you back. We didn't mean it. But you keep losing paper behind your desk. And eventually all the paper in the studio's forgotten behind your desk again. So we fire you again. Clean up. And hire you again. And again, and again, and again...

---

I probably could have extended the analogy to explain the other reason I suspect FCPro says it's out of memory now and then, memory fragmentation... but I didn't feel a need to.

Comments

[siddacious.livejournal.com]

i swear, if crappy programmers would just learn a bit about proper memory allocation/deallocation, the world would be a better place. i couple of months ago, i spent way too much of my time chasing down leaks due to crappy programming. asshats.

Agreed.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Asshats doesn't even beging to describe how much I loathe programmers that don't understand proper memory allocation. Even if it's a huge problem to 'gather' empty whatevers, you can do it a bit at a time, or at least give the user the option of pulling out Ye' Old Kirby and sucking the junk up to tidy the proverbial room. =-.-=

[hydra-velsen.livejournal.com]

I'm just pissed about people in the office who steal my damned stationary! We have this woman named Sherry that hoards staplers, paper, pens, etc, in her desk, and she probably takes about half of what enters the office!

[neillparatzo.livejournal.com]

I don't think the problem is crappy programmers. I think the problem is that C and C++, as languages, just don't lend themselves well to smart memory management.

Sure, there are tools to detect memory leaks, and a smart programmer knows how to set things up to make memory leaks less probable due to human error, but in a big, complex, interdependent program... things still do fall through the cracks.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Given that it's from Apple, and did not exist until after OSX was well in development, there's a good chance that FCPro is written in Objective-C.

Also, the way we use it at Spümcø is probably a lot more of a workout than the still-image handling code ever got - it's for editing video, not making video out of individual stills. It gets astoundingly sluggish when you start throwing around a minute or so worth of very short duration stills - that is, a bunch of stuff on 1s, 2s, or 3s with a base frame-rate of 24fps...

(Animators think on 24 fps. Even if they're now doing 3D work that's gonna be rendered at the highest framerate possible. If you learnt classical hand animation, you think in 24fps.)

[lapdragon.livejournal.com]

What, you mean Apple's iMovie or whatever isn't good enough for professional video editing?

Haw!

Okay, I'm going to bed.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

There's a reason iMovie comes free with new Macs and Final Cut is $1000!

What it is, besides an interface that's aggressively flaunting Apple's style guidelines slightly less, I don't know.

Now THAT is a rare and wonderful skill, indeed!

[(Anonymous)]

The ability to coherently explain an arcane concept to anybody is all too rare. And to be able to convey it to someone who lacks the fundamental basic core knowledge? That's a true treasure - businesses pay good money for folks with that talent.
And YOU managed to do it, extemporaneously, verbally, RIGHT THEN AND THERE...
You should be worshipped - you have the knack for Communications. I hope that your employer has you writing and creating, and not relegated to just doing grunt-work animation.
I envy and admire you.

VulpesRex

Re: Now THAT is a rare and wonderful skill, indeed!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I hope that your employer has you writing and creating, and not relegated to just doing grunt-work animation.

Unfortunately not - I'm just a geek minion!

Using a nonlinear editor for frame based animation...

[doctorpinkerton.livejournal.com]

...in my admittedly limited experience, I suspect that ANY standard editing package is gonna bog down pretty horribly after a few hundred frames. I certainly have been there with Adobe Premiere and Avid...