The Editblog

The Levelator is a handy little drag and drop tool that takes an audio file and attempts to level out the volume. A quote on the developer’s site says: “It’s not a compressor, normalizer or limiter although it contains all three.” I read about the Levelator on a post at Jake Ludington’s Digital Lifestyle. He has posted a couple of before and after waveforms shots to visually show the difference that the program achieves. I did some tests on a project I am working on and it did do exactly what it says. Here’s a before and after sample:

aiff before Levelator 1.3 mb

aiff after Levelator 1.3 mb
I think that the overall result might raise the overall levels a bit too much (especially bringing up the background noise) for mission critical work but if you have a less critical instance where you need to smooth out volume levels then the tool could be quite helpful. Plus you can always bring the volume back down a bit in the final mix. It’s also nice that when you drop a file on to be converted it makes a new piece of media and doesn’t hurt the old one. And best of all .. it’s free. Check out the developer site here.

DIRECTORSNOTEBOOK.COM

Directors Notebook is an interesting piece of software for a filmmaker. It is what they call a digital “project notebook” that organizes information during pre-production, production, and post. From the website: “It’s like having a production assistant at your beck and call 24 hours a day to help you manage your projects and save time.”

I used this app years ago when it was an add on database to Filemaker Pro. It is now a stand alone application and has several different levels and versions depending on what you need that application to do. They even have a simple free version called Directors Boards that helps with the organizing and creation of storyboard from existing drawings, scans or photographs. If you are a filmmaker then it is worth checking out.

technorati tags:filmmaking, software, directing, storyboards, macintosh

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Aspect Ratio Calculator

If you are like me, you hate math. And while math is a good thing for balancing my checkbook and figuring out how many miles to the gallon my rotary engine is getting in $3.05 gallon gas, I really prefer to leave the math behind when I try and figure out the correct size to make a quarter screen Quicktime of the latest 16:9 project I was to email for approval. Thanks for FresHDV for pointing to this link to the utility above. And it’s written in Java! Not that that makes any difference.. It’s just fun to know.

technorati tags:java, app, aspect, ratio, editing, software

Blogged with Flock

I recently made an entry about a handy little app called the Video Disk Space calculator. One of my main criticisms was that it did not support the DVCPRO HD codec. So I went to the developer’s site and asked if they could support this codec in the future. Lo and behold an email arrived today and version 1.1 does just that! It’s nice when a developer listens to the users.

Other new supported features are:
Added Codecs: DVCPRO HD, MPEG-2 Low, Medium and High
Added ability to display a smaller selection of Codecs
Added ability to calculate length from a given disk space
Added Terabyte option for disk space
Revised SD 8 and 10 bit data rates
Added Help file
Now a Universal Binary

Download it here.

If you use disk management utilities, and what editor out there doesn’t, I don’t know what would be more handy than Disk Inventory X. It’s not a repair or back-up or diagnostic utility, it’s only for management of files. Just like the name implies, it’s for inventory. Why do I love it so? (more…)

There are a lot of video disk space calculators out there.. but this handy little tool from some place called Rabid Jackalope is one of my favorites. It’s very simple: pick the video format, your length in minutes and you get the required megabytes or gigabytes. There is also a handy date rate chart so you can see just how much is going through the pipe. The only thing missing is DVCPRO HD as one of the formats. With the Panasonic HVX200 coming on strong, that is very much needed. I sent a feature request / question over but haven’t heard anything. I hope the jackalope adds it. It is freeware and can be grabbed here or here.

We’ve all known about FCP Rescue for a while now. Today I found a new competitor in the Final Cut backup game called FCP Attic. It’s available here and is very handy in that it will backup all settings including Button Bars, Keyboard Layouts, Window Layouts and user Plugins among other things. For some reason the Track Layouts was grayed out and didn’t back up but oh well.. a lot of stuff did.

I really wish it would backup Column Layouts as well as I have tons of them but I guess you can’t get everything for free. One thing I really like is that it backs up user plugsins. These are all plugins located in your user > library > preferences > Final Cut Pro User Data > Plugins. I have a lot of plugins that I have purchased over the years so I’ve always tossed them in the user plugins folder (as opposed to the Application Support in the main Library folder) as they are easy to back up. Everything is backed up to a selected folder so it also makes it easy to take your settings from one machine to another. Sure you could just grab that Final Cut Pro User Data folder and back that up but it’s fun to have an app to do it for you. Oh… and FCP Attic grabs your plist and caches and stuff like that as well. Thanks chesa/pro video/film.

I found this handy little app over at dvcreators.net the other day. It’s call QT Movie NoteTaker and it is a simple piece of software that allows one to load in a Quicktime movie, play it along and make notes on the movie as it plays. The current time is displayed each time the note button is pressed and you can then type your comments. You can add a recurring note that can be added with one push of a button as well as add a note and stop the playback if you need to make a loooooooong note. This is a great tool that I can’t believe I haven’t encountered before. Email the Quicktime movie of your cut, email the software, have client make notes and email the notes right back with the push of a button! How simple can it be. It says that a Pro version is in the works that will add SMTPE timecode support. That’ll be nice, but in the meantime I’ve been adding a burn-in (BITC) that begins with 00:00:00:00 and that matches the realtime counter… It’s just a work around. And hopefully they will give it a nice icon as the generaic application icon is kinda boring. It’s available for both OS X and Windows XP. Download it here.