The Joy of Opening Up My Mac Pro Part 2: Upgrading RAM.

For the second time since I’ve set it up, I have opened up my Mac Pro yet again to do a simple upgrade.

The procedure this time around is to add extra RAM to my system.

This is in anticipation of my upcoming work for animation. I just wanted to make sure that my work station is in tip top shape before I dive in to it next Monday.

Adding RAM to an existing system guarantees instant speed boost and when it comes to my equipment, I want them to go really fast.

Not that my Mac Pro is a slouch; I just wanted to make sure that I will not be scrambling for additional RAM in the thick of the production. There are cases wherein some scenes in Flash have these heavy background elements that tend to slow things down. Having more RAM than my stock 2 GB will be quite a benefit.

Another thing is I’ve been using Aperture 2, a photo-editing software. I’ve been shooting pictures in the RAW format and to be able to process them, I needed to run this software. Aperture is a RAM hog, I tell you! Again, more memory will make things more speedier.

Tuesday morning, I ordered a 4 gigabyte kit composed of two 2 GB RAM sticks from a reputable online store in the States. I had it priority shipped via FedEx and it arrived before noon yesterday.

Adding RAM is so easy and it all starts by opening the side panel of the Mac Pro. I had to shut down the machine and wait for ten to fifteen minutes for it to cool down in accordance to the manual because the innards of any computer do get hot. As in my normal habit when it comes to handling any expensive equipment, I was making sure that I was following the instructions in the manual as carefully as I can.

After removing the side panel, I can now remove the two trays that hold the RAM modules. I had to lay down some paper towel on my table for the trays to rest on lest I risk damaging them by putting them on the hard surface of the table.

My Mac Pro had two 1 GB modules, one installed on each tray. Each tray had four slots, enough to install eight RAM modules should the need arise. I had to remove the one on the top tray and install it next to the other one in the bottom tray. Removing the module is as easy as releasing the clamp that holds it down and pulling the module out. Installing the module back involves aligning the module with the slot and pushing it down until the clamps snap back into place.

Once I did that, I was able to install the two new 2 GB modules into the now vacant slots of the top tray. I now have my new four gigabytes on the top tray and the two stock 1 GB modules on the bottom tray.

Sliding the tray back into their slots inside the machine was so easy that it made me marvel at how well Apple designed this machine. There are slots in the RAM bay that helps you guide the trays into their respective slots. I had to lay the Mac Pro on its side so that it would be easy for me to push the tray down and lock them into place.

Once I have the side panel back and re-connected all the plugs, I was able to fire up the machine. A quick check on the machine’s profile and lo and behold, 6 GB of RAM!

I immediately did some tests by opening Aperture right away. It loaded up much faster and the photos showed up just as fast.

Next was Flash. I noticed a slight bump in speed when opening files. I was also able to scrub the Timeline a bit smoother with heavy background layers turned on. Still not as smooth as I was expecting it to be, but a gain in smoothness nonetheless.

Now that it is the last day of my posing work, I am finally wrapping things up and preparing myself for next week’s animation project. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am looking forward to how my current set up will perform in an animation production. I have done some animation on my iMac before; it would be treat to see how fast I will be able to do it on my smoking hot Mac Pro!

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Wrapping Up and About To Moving On.

And where have I been? Aside from being busy attending to personal matters, I am just about to wrap up my posing work contract for this new Flash series. This will be my last week working on it and I will be jumping into another new Flash series project next week.

I might be doing some animation for that production, so it will be interesting to see how my Wacom Cintiq 20WSX will fit in in a Flash animation environment.

I have been using the Cintiq for many days now and it’s been a joy to use, especially for posing work. The speed to which I draw an element in Flash has doubled compared to my regular Wacom Intuos3, which I admit has been gathering dust since I installed the Cintiq.

I have also gotten used to working on two monitors: I open all my reference images and PDF storyboards on the 30″ Apple Cinema Display and have Flash launch on the Cintiq display. Toggling the cursor from the Cintiq to the 30″ ACD has become second nature to me.

Now I have been told that the Cintiq might not be that useful when it comes to doing animation in Flash. I could see the benefit of it in other animation software such as Toon Boom where it is more akin to working on 2D Animation, that is, you draw the inbetweens in some cases and most of the work require real drawing by hand instead of tweaking vector lines.

In Flash, you rarely draw the inbetweens. Rather, you sometimes let the software do the inbetweening for you and you just move elements around to make it work. So I really am looking forward to how the Cintiq will perform when it is time to use it to do some animation.

So here’s looking forward to that. Now I have to get back to work and wrap this current production up!

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Wacom Cintiq 20WSX Review.

It’s been more than a week since I installed and started working with my new Wacom Cintiq 20WSX Pen Tablet Display:

My first impression on using it was sort of a mixed bag. In fact, there were a lot of odd things I noticed at first before I eventually settled in and fell in love with this wonderful piece of technology.

The very first thing that I noticed and had a slight difficulty with was the screen resolution. I have been using a 30” Apple Cinema Display and believe me, the resolution of the screen on that beast is huge: 2560 x 1600 pixels! On it, I have so much real estate to work with that, while working in Flash, I can stretch the Timeline down and still see a lot of the work area:

On the Cintiq, however, I am back to working on a resolution equivalent to the size of my previous monitor, a 20” Apple Cinema Display, which runs at 1680 x 1050:

Working with two monitors of different sizes had me troubled at first. Initially, I wanted to run both the Apple monitor and the Cintiq monitor in mirror mode: I would be working on the Cintiq and the Apple monitor will display what I am working on in real time. But since these two run on different resolutions, I could not do that.

I did try it at first, but whenever I change the default setting of extended mode to mirror mode on my Systems Preference’s display settings, the resolution of the 30” Apple Display would then resize to match the smaller resolution of the Cintiq, which is perfectly a waste of available pixels on the Apple display.

Also, for some strange reason I could not make the tablet function of the Cintiq work in mirror mode; I could use the mouse of my other Wacom Tablet, though, but that totally defeats the purpose of the Cintiq.

The next thing I had trouble with was setting up Flash so that when I launch it, the window will appear on the screen of the Cintiq instead of on the Apple display. It took me a lot of time to figure out the correct arrangement for this; I had to move all the palettes and windows to the Cintiq desktop so that anytime I launch Flash it would appear on that display. The menu bar, however, stays on the Apple display, along with the Dock:

Now this faces me with a dilemma that I had to learn to work around with. To open Flash or a file, I need to have the cursor to appear on the Apple display to access the menu bar. Once the file opens and displays on the Cintiq, I now need to have the cursor switch over to that display to be able to draw on it.

This is something that can easily achieved on the Cintiq, however. There are buttons on the side of the unit called express keys, programmable keys that can be assigned with different key strokes:

One of these keys have a default function that allows me to toggle the cursor from the Cintiq to my other display and vice versa. It took me a while to get used to working on this and at times I had to pause a moment to figure out where my cursor is.

I finally settled with Flash opening on the Cintiq and my storyboard and references open on the Apple display.

Another really odd thing that I noticed immediately after using the Cintiq for the first time was how strange it is to be finally drawing on the natural position. I’ve been so used to working on a regular Wacom Intuos 3 tablet for so long that working in this more natural position was pretty unbalancing at first.

On a regular Wacom tablet, you are looking at the screen to see what you are drawing but your hand, which is holding the pen and doing the necessary strokes on the tablet is off to your side on the table.

On the Cintiq, you are actually drawing on the screen; you can see your hand and the tip of the pen and the output that is produced when you do a stroke:

Now that I am drawing in the more natural position, my hand is now covering what I am drawing. On the Intuos 3, I usually get the benefit of seeing the output of what I am working on immediately because the image appears on the monitor as I draw on the tablet. I am looking at the screen and not on my hand, so there is nothing blocking my view of what I am working on. On the Cintiq, my hand is now covering some parts of what I am drawing so I have to remove my hand from time to time to check if the model of the character is right. It felt really odd at first, this coming from me who has not drawn anything on a real sheet of paper for quite some time now.

Another dilemma was when I try to right-click on something: the menu will appear at the bottom of my hand, so I had to lift my hand again to view and select an item from it. Again, this was unsettling at first, but I soon learned to work with it. There might be a way for me to configure my computer so that the menu will appear on the left side of the cursor rather than on the right which is the default anytime I right-click, but for now I’m getting comfy with what I am getting at the moment.

Using the Cintiq for the first time momentarily hurt my eye more than when I first viewed the display of the 30” Apple Cinema Display. On the 30”, I have at least 24” of viewing distance. On the Cintiq, however, I sometimes find my nose almost touching the screen during more detailed work and I am really, really looking down at the LCD screen.

I thought about tweaking the lighting of my work area so I can find a good balance between the light coming out of the Cintiq and the ambient lighting to minimize eye strain, but soon my eyes got more accustomed to it all, as it always have.

Targeting is also something I need to get used to, for during my first use I had a hard time clicking on anything with the cursor, especially on the Cintiq. There is this invisible space of roughly 1/8 of an inch or less between the tip of the pen and the objects on the screen; that, of course, is the plastic/glass surface of the display. At an angle, the cursor appears to be offset a bit from the tip of the pen. I had to redo my screen calibration to get these lining up to my preference:

Lastly, using the Cintiq’s tablet function when the cursor is on the other monitor surely takes a lot of getting used to. Because the Cintiq had to map to the 30” monitor and I had to contend with a much larger tablet surface, the movement it takes to move the cursor from one corner of the desktop to the other is almost 3x as much as on the Intuos 3, whose mapping is only as small as it’s 4” x 6 drawing surface. Early on, I can see this being a problem should I try to use the Cintiq to animate. I have gotten used to working on the smaller 4” x 6” mapping that going the Cintiq route to do everything else might present some compromises. That remains to be seen once I actually do some animations in the future.

Early on my initial use of the Cintiq I noticed a lot of things that made me think that I have blundered on insisting to get one. To be honest, I had a minor sense of buyer’s remorse hours after I installed and used it. I felt like I had to compromise a lot just to make it work and found myself looking for reasons to justify having it in my stable of equipment.

But the more I used it, the more I learned to live with it, and all my initial misgivings slowly faded away. Drawing in the natural position became so, well, natural! I probably got so used to working with the Intuos 3 that I have forgotten how it felt to draw that way. In fact, I could not imagine ever going back to the regular tablet, especially when I had to draw something.

Cleaning up freehand lines on the Cintiq is definitely faster than on the Intuos 3. What usually takes me several passes to perfect on the regular tablet I can do in one pass on the Cintiq. Being able to rotate the screen on its base to get to those awkward angle is not a novelty; it is absolutely indispensable! It’s like using an animation disk on a light box:

The drawing surface of the Cintiq, that thin plastic/glass material that separates pen nib from LCD screen, actually feels like paper underneath my hand; it has a slightly rough texture that almost accurately simulates the feel of paper. It does not feel as slippery as the surface of an Intuos 3 and that gives a more natural sensation.

In fact, it felt so natural that I sometimes would instinctively lift my hand away anytime I complete a brush stroke, fearing I might smudge the paint that I just laid down with the brush tool. I would also unconsciously blow at the surface and sweep at non-existent dust anytime I erase something. It felt that natural!

So there it is, my take on the Wacom Cintiq 20WSX. Would I recommend it? It is too early for me to say because I have only used it with Flash and have only doodled a bit using Painter Essentials, which felt really great. If you do a lot of digital painting, the Cintiq is a definite step up from any regular Wacom tablet. It feels just so natural.

UPDATE:  SEE THE ISSUES THAT I HAVE BEEN EXPERIENCING RUNNING THE CINTIQ WITH THE MAC PRO AND MAC OSX 10.5.4.

UPDATE:  AS OF JULY 31, 2008, I AM VERY CLOSE TO FINDING OUT WHAT HAS BEEN CAUSING MY ISSUES RUNNING THE CINTIQ WITH THE MAC PRO.

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Wacom Cintiq 20WSX Interactive Pen Display.

My Wacom Cintiq 20WSX Tablet Display officially arrived last Wednesday.

I got the call from the sales agent late Tuesday afternoon. Early on I was getting pretty anxious on when the unit will arrive because the agent had to move an earlier estimated delivery date to a week later. That was a bummer at first, but he made up for it fast by nailing the second delivery date.

I picked up the unit that Wednesday morning at the store in downtown Calgary, whose traffic flow is very much like Makati, with all the confusing alternating one way streets. Confusing to me because I rarely ply that route.

The box that the unit came in was pretty large and heavy, almost as big as the box of the Mac Pro, so I had to do some substantial lifting. When I opened the box, the packaging was what I expected from Wacom: very neat and orderly.

There were three main items in this big box and one that I needed to take out first was the box containing all the accessories such as cables, driver CDs and the power brick.

Next up was the Cintiq stand, which I had to take out first and place on my table.

Now here’s where the benefit of reading the manual first before doing anything else comes in: the stand is spring loaded and had I not read the manual, I could have tinkered with the levers of the stand out of curiosity, inadvertently activating the springs and injuring myself and damaging the equipment.

I pride myself in being not the typical male who shuns manuals and does not read instructions. Reading the manual first before proceeding in doing anything else saved me from a lot of self-inflicted harm on expensive equipment and self on many occasions.

Once the stand is firmly in place, I then took out the main pen display unit itself (which had a substantial weight) and mount it onto the stand:

When mounted, I can adjust the incline of the Cintiq using two levers in the stand behind it. I can also rotate it in any desired position; it will move on the stand’s bearing hub. The thick cable that powers the unit is mounted at the very center at the back of the unit and centers nicely in the hub, thus allowing for almost 360° of rotation as long as the unit is inclined not more than 25°. I have mine inclined at almost 45° so I had to move the feet of the stand at almost an inch from the edge of my table to give the unit some clearance anytime I rotate it.

Before I can use it, I had to install the Cintiq as an LCD monitor first. The video card on my Mac Pro supports dual monitor displays, so I can still run my 30” LCD monitor and have two monitors running simultaneously.

Once I figured out that I can plug the DVI-I connector of the Cintiq to the DVI-I connector of my video card and plugged it into the power brick and to an available UPS outlet, I was able to turn it and the Mac Pro on. I also had to make sure that the Digital/Analog (DVI/VGA) switch on Cintiq was set to Digital.

The Mac Pro immediately recognized the Cintiq as another display and had set it up in extended mode by default. I had to use my mouse first to move between monitors and set the resolution of the Cintiq to its optimum setting of 1680 x 1050 pixels because OSX had it set up to a different one at the onset.

Now that I have the LCD monitor function of the Cintiq working, I now needed to install the Pen Tablet drivers so that it can fully function as a pen and tablet. Once I plugged the USB connector into an available USB port on my Mac Pro, I proceeded to install the drivers. Instead of using the driver that came in the CD, I downloaded it from the Wacom site, ensuring that I have the latest driver version. I already had another Wacom Tablet plugged into this Mac Pro and installling the Cintiq driver just added another device on the Wacom Tablet section in my Systems Preference.

Once the driver was installed, I calibrated the pen display tablet to precisely align the screen to the location of the pen tip.

And that’s it! The Wacom Cintiq 20WSX was up and running in no time:

I shall post my first impression and review of the Cintiq on my next post.

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