The Editblog

There’s a lot of Macintosh applications out there to let you view and manage the contents of a hard disk in a visual type of way. There’s  Disk Inventory X (Editblog article) but it’s from the PowerPC days so it requires emulation with Snow Leopard which doesn’t install by default. There’s also the great Baseline (PVC article) which is quite full featured but costs $20.

Enter DaisyDisk. It also scans a disk and presents the disk in a very fun and very visual way. You can look via files and folders, see the size of files and folders via both a visual view and a list view. Best of all you can use QuickLook to preview the files. You can’t delete from within the app but the developers are working on that. Right click to reveal in Finder and then delete from there is the workaround. The app isn’t perfect as there’s not a lot of documentation and it includes something called “Super-User” mode that isn’t documented. I would have thought that it would unlock a lot more features for how you could manipulate files but it doesn’t seem to do anything.

Is it worth the $19.95? It is not, especially with Baseline being available for $20. But right now you can get DaisyDisk for free by checking out the upcoming MacHeist bundle. If you click around the MacHeist page enough and go to coordinates 151.7, 174.4 (I think that’s right) you’ll see the TWEET FOR A TREAT button appear. This is the key to getting a free license for DaisyDisk. If you click it you’ll be asked to sign in to Twitter. If you do you’ll tweet about the upcoming MacHeist bundle.

Now I’m not a fan of how companies are now giving away free stuff and entering users into contests only if they tweet about it on Twitter. It totally spams followers and the more people do it then the more companies will use this type of marketing and the more it will devalue Twitter as a useful user-to-user communications platform. More noise, less signal. In the case of MacHeist and DailyDisk I didn’t sign in and tweet about MacHeist but when I went back to the MacHeist page there was a download link to a free DaisyDisk license. Sign in to MacHeist and you’ll get a license code, without having to spam your Twitter followers about it. This isn’t exactly what they want but it is getting DaisyDisk into the hands of more users so this is a good thing, right? DaisyDisk is off to a good start so with some improvements it might be worth that $19.95.

If you’re a user of CoreMelt plug-ins and you haven’t updated to the new V2 line of products that was introduced at NAB 09 then now might be the time. CoreMelt is having a Summer Upgrade Special with 40% off upgrades to V2 products. It’s for 10 days only, July 21 – July 31. This coincides with an update to version 2.2 that adds a number of new effects and transitions. The version 2 of the CoreMelt is a stand-alone plug-in for Final Cut Pro, Motion and After Effects that is no longer part of the FxFactory-engine based architecture. They new release is fast, has a lot of great effects and adds CoreMelt’s own tweaked interface to the Filter tab of FCP:

Tune in to Studio Monthly for an upcoming review of CoreMelt V2.

About a month or so ago we recorded a new That Post Show which was a 30 day follow-up to an earlier show about Avid’s Media Composer 3.5 announcements. A number of us on the show had been using the new MC version for a while and we had a great discussion that included two people from Avid there to chime in on the discussion and answer questions. The show is now online. Listen at that link or subscribe via iTunes (iTunes link).

It was a crazy, busy month of February at the Editblog on PVC where we attempted one QuickTip a day (as well as all the other tasks of editing) for the entire month. They all went up (usually before noonish), some for Avid, some for Final Cut Pro with a few others thrown in the mix as well. Here are links to them all:

Quicktip Day 01: Use that CAPS LOCK! – FCP

Quicktip Day 02: Map your 9-split exactly to the keypad – FCP

Quicktip Day 03: Project folders in the Finder sidebar – Mac OS

Quicktip Day 04: Tear off the Avid tool palette

Quicktip Day 05: FCP Keyboard changes are viewable in the menus

Quicktip Day 06: Edit FCP Column Heading

Quicktip Day 07:  Custom Avid bin column headings

Quicktip Day 08: Play Base Layer Only – FCP

Quicktip Day 09: Save FCP Column Layouts

Quicktip Day 10: Save Avid Column Layouts

Quicktip Day 11: turn on settings in User Preferences – FCP

Quicktip Day 12: Expos̩ to the function keys РMac OS

Quicktip Day 13: Check Your FCP AV Devices

Quicktip Valentine’s Day 14: Insert a ? or a ? – Mac OS

Quicktip Day 15: Option click to select a file name …. or not? – Mac OS

Quicktip Day 16: Expand all FCP tracks via mouse

Quicktip Day 17: Add Avid filler at start

Quicktip Day 18: Determine total Avid bin duration

Quicktip Day 19: Try the option and shift modifier keys under the Finder menus – Mac OS

Quicktip Day 20: Annotate pictures with Preview – Mac OS

Quicktip Day 21: Set the FCP Logging Bin

Quicktip Day 22: slate buttons to increment numbers – FCP

Quicktip Day 23: Saving a Custom Avid Effect

Quicktip Day 24: Apply Saved Avid Effect to Multiple Clips

Quicktip Day 25: Access Custom Avid Effect

Quicktip Day 26: Saving EDL Comments in Avid

Quicktip Day 27: Promote to Avid Advanced Keyframes

Quicktip Day 28: Turn off Video Scopes Playback – FCP

I received an interesting email this morning:

My name is Ewout de Wit and I study Marketing and Consumer Behavior at Wageningen University (Netherlands). To finalize my Master program I will conduct a research on “post-production software” and additional software (third-party).

In my research I mainly will focus on the online behaviour of content creators with respect to post-production software plug-ins and tools. I specifically study the search behaviour, the main factors that influence the buying decision making and price perception. Since last week I’m distributing the survey links at several forums related to post-production / editing.

I was wondering if you could mention my survey request in one of your blogs. Would be great to collect more responses through your web site. Of course I can provide you the results of the survey. Look forward to hear from you.

I took a few minutes myself and answered the survey myself. It’s an easy few minutes that asks questions about our behaviors when evaluating and buying post-production tools. There’s also specific questions asked about a number of vendors that many post-professionals know very well. Please take a few minutes to answer the survey (it’ll probably takes less than 10 or 15 minutes). If nothing else I think the results would be rather fascinating study of our software/plug-in buying habits and what influces them. Click on over and take the survey yourself.

Adobe’s CS4 Production Premium suite of applications was packed full of big new features. There’s mocha for After Effects, native RED .R3D editing in Premiere Pro and After Effects, XML import of Final Cut Pro projects, a unified interface among the applications, better dynamic linking and a lot more. And there is also the ability to automatically transcribe video and audio clips. For editors doing documentary work or a lot of talking heads then this could be a killer feature. Automated transcription almost seems to good to be true … and you know what they say about something that is too good to be true…

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If you make use of Noise Industries FxFactory products then head over to their website and check out the FxFactory Awards. From the FxFactory website:

Send us your best work made with FxFactory® plug-ins to win cool prizes and have it showcased on the Noise Industries website.

FxFactory Awards 2008 contest entries will be judged according to their creative use of FxFactory® plug-ins and overall impact of the video material. Submissions will be accepted starting December 15, 2008. The deadline for submission is January 15, 2009. Winners will be announced January 21, 2009.

The winner will get a Drobo. Since FxFactory now supports Adobe After Effects then this could be a great place to showcase some of the cool After Effects work being done with the plug-ins. Good luck to all those who enter!

I couldn’t let the day get by without giving the new native RED .R3D import and editing function a quick test. My first thought after playing around with this functionality is that this is by far the best implementation of native .R3D editing and it blows the Final Cut Pro support out of the water. I won’t go into a lot of detail on setting it all up as all the info is available other places and in a document that comes with the RED Adobe CS4 installer. There’s also some initial reactions from Noah at Twenty398 as well as the best way to learn about this new workflow: a 30 minute video on AdobeTV.

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A tripod is often … very often … a good thing when shooting video. I don’t have one to complement the HV20 and it is on the get list. A steady camera is a happy camera and you won’t make your audience sea-sick as the camera bobs and weaves. But sometimes you just can’t shoot with one. What do you do when a shot that you need for your edit is too shaky? You can always try to stabilize the shot with software like Magic Bullet Steady. Steady is available as a stand-alone purchase or as part of the Magic Bullet Suite 2008. The important thing to remember with any software designed to stabilize a shot is that it isn’t always a life-saver and can’t save every shot. But on some it can work wonders.

The best way to see what it can do is look at it in action. First is a shot that I was trying to hold as still as possible with my fake Fig Rig. It’s not too bad but could use some smoothing out. It’s a 5 second piece of a 9.5 second total shot at 1440×1080 ProRes resolution (it was converted from HDV). Magic Bullet Steady took 5 seconds to analyze the shot and about 10.5 seconds to render. Apple’s built-in Smoothcam took 1 minute 5 seconds to analyize the shot and 14 seconds to render. This was on a Mac Pro Quad-core 3 ghz. Here is the result, with the MB Steady option toggled through its 3 different motion parameters:

There appears to be an issue with Vimeo, Wordpress and some combination of browsers. If you are getting odd or fast playback let the Vimeo stream buffer and then start the video over. Sorry for the inconvenience. We are researching the problem.

Magic Bullet Steady test from Scott Simmons on Vimeo.

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I was recently having an email conversation with Shane Ross of Little Frog in Hi Def about Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. It was discussed on episode 2 of That Post Show by myself, John Flowers and Paul Zadie. Most of us really liked what we’ve seen of Premiere Pro CS4 thus far, but that was admittedly the shiny new features and just (at least for me) limited playtime in the application. Shane asked the hard questions that many other editors I’m sure are asking. Does the app have “all the basics that I as a storyteller crave?” I knew some of the answers, but not all of them so I dug around a bit deeper with Premiere Pro CS4 to try and find out.

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