September Blogwad

Hard Disk Warning!
Larry Jordan says don't leave a hard drive sitting on your shelf for more than a year with data that you want to keep. Explains why and gives some suggestions on how to keep old hard drives from losing data.

The Freesound Project
Sound effects here. They are available under Creative Commons licenses. Not sure if that would include any of Link's work. As I understand it, Creative Commons means that you aren't doing the project for money and your work will also be available to others under the Creative Commons agreement. But I'm not an expert.

DA Font
Some fonts here some are in the public domain, others are available under Creative Commons licenses. Again, I'm not an expert in Creative Commons licensing. But public domain is obviously cool.

Ripple Training
Some good tutorials in the Ripple Training section of the ProVideo Coaltion website.
Remove the Jitters - Covers the SmoothCam feature in Final Cut Pro 6.
Photoshop & Motion - Simple way to do a quick animation on a multi-layered Photoshop document in Motion 3 by using its 3D features.
Color Workflows With Different Video Formats - Covers how to use different codecs with Color. Warning here about working with Long-GOP formats, like HDV.

HDV video to SD DVD Using Compressor 3 and DVD SP
Exporting HDV Video from the Timeline to Standard Definition DVD
Man, working with HDV can be slow. Hopefully these tutorials will save you some time if you need to make a DVD from some HDV footage. They are over at kenstone.net
Also at kenstone.net, a tutorial on making a Blu-ray high-def video disc on a Mac. Takes you from FCP through Compressor to Adobe's Encore:
Blu-ray with Final Cut Pro, Compressor and Encore

ProRes 422 was one of the big features of Final Cut Pro 6. It was essentially a QuickTime codec, but Apple wasn't going to give it away. Too bad, because it's an efficient codec and very useful, especially for high-def footage. Well, Apple is finally letting people playback ProRes 422 footage on systems without FCP 6 installed (but you still can't create ProRes files without FCP 6.) Here are the links to playback ProRes on Mac's and PC's.

Mac OS X 10.5: Creating and maintaining a bootable "universal" external disk
I didn't know you could do this:
You can make a "universally bootable" external hard disk that will work with both Mac OS X 10.5-compatible PowerPC-based Macs and Intel-based Macs.

Bluetooth Earpiece--2-way radio
Do production? Need to buy a bluetooth head set? Then consider the Dragon. It will work as a 2-way radio with another Dragon headset. They even sell a device that will allow you to link up to 5 Dragon headsets together. Probaby not the cheapest way to communicate with a crew, but it's nice that it will do double-duty as the wireless headset for you cellphone.


Making Compressor Multiprocessor Aware
This one of Larry Jordan's Tips of the Day. Uses QMaster to make virtual clusters on multi-processor systems.

My Most-Used Freeware--Bitrate Pro

I don't know why Apple doesn't include something like this in Compressor and/or Final Cut Pro. The free Bitrate Pro will do a lot for you. How much space will 2 hours of DV footage take up? 20.95 GB. If I want to fit 1 hour and 45 minutes of video on a single-layer DVD what is the highest bitrate that I should use? 5.98 Mb/s. These are the kinds of calculations you can do with bitrate pro. Includes all kinds of handy info about how much data is on a DVD single-layer vs. dual-layer and what data rates different codecs use like ProRes, DV, DV50, and DVCPro HD.

AJA has a similar piece of freeware AJA Data Rate Calculator that is more geared toward figuring out storage for editing. They have presets for most of the editing codecs that their hardware has native support for.

I couldn't remember the name of Bitrate Pro, but I was able to track it down on this cool page that Apple has for video software downloads. You can always use versiontracker or macupdate, but I get overwhelmed by all the software on those sites. I think Apple helps make it manageable to explore freeware and shareware (although there's a lot of demo stuff thrown in there too.)

Compressor 3 Tutorial

"Compressors' New Interface"

I just took a glance at this, but it looks like another good article over at kenstone.net. Not only does it go over some basic things about getting around the new version of Compressor, but it looks like it does a good job of talking about how to encode for DVD's.

I had a lot of trouble with variable bit rate encoding with Compressor 2, so I've been just sticking with constant bit rate. But once I upgrade I'm going to have to figure out the average vs. max bit rates for variable bit rate encoding. Some stuff on that in the article, plus it will help you figure out the normalize setting for your audio.

[via Studio Daily Blog]

To Replicate or Duplicate?

"Macrovision and DVD Creation - What You Need To Know"

This is a good article on some interesting aspects of DVD production, namely copy-protection issues and also replication. Replications is not duplication. I have a hard time remembering which is which, and this article reminded me that replication is what makes a real DVD and duplication is what gets you a DVD-R just like out of your computer. To do a real replication, you aren't supposed to deliver the replicator a DVD-R but instead a DLT tape. Anway, the article does a better job of explaing these issues than I, so if you're interested go check it out.