Jan
09
Every now and then I hit a stretch where it seems I am doing nothing but subtitles. There are many tools out there to make it easier, but there was one thing I got tired of doing manually- splitting subtitles into 2 lines.
The most common subtitle format is to have 2 lines of subtitles, as it seems to be a generally good balance between enough time on the screen and not too much text on the screen. You want each line to be balanced, so there isn’t 40 characters on the top line, and only 2 characters on the second. All of this takes time. I got tired of doing this over and over again, so I wrote a script to do it for you.
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Sep
12
Last week, I showed you how to quickly write a plugin for Final Cut using the built in FXScript. If you’ve done any kind of work with it, you’ve probably noticed how quickly you run into its limitations. At that point, you’re ready to move up to FXPlug.
FXPlug is Apple’s SDK for creating filter, generators, and transitions to be used in Final Cut and Motion. It was introduced in 2005 for Motion, and a year later FXPlug filters could be used in Final Cut Pro.
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Sep
06
There are a ton of plugins available for Final Cut, and many of them are free. But what do you do when there isn’t one that does exactly what you need it to do?
You write your own, of course. Final Cut Pro, through version 7, includes a basic plugin language called FXScript. FXScript allows you to make custom generators, filters, and transitions quickly, with pretty limited knowledge of coding.
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Aug
29
I recently opened up a project that, just the day before, had played fine. Suddenly, there were constant dropped frames. I was playing the same footage off the same drive- what could be wrong?
Luckily, there’s a bit of preventative troubleshooting I do to make troubleshooting a bit easier when things go wrong. A small change on a computer can impact other seemingly unrelated things. Installing an application may change an underlying library, for example, which may be used in a completely unrelated application, rendering that application useless. To make these things easier to track, I keep a change log for the system.
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Aug
22
Apple’s naming scheme is not very useful for differentiating products. I have a MacBook Pro, but you need more info to find out exactly what that computer has. Does it have an Intel processor? Does it have an ExpressCard slot so I can import footage shot to a SxS card? If I buy this Mac Pro off of Craigslist, will I be able to use the Kona card I already have, or will I need to buy a new one?
Mactracker makes this easy. It is a database that has all the specs on every product Apple has made, making it easy to find exactly the info you need.
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Aug
15
Every few months, there is some new major upgrade to something- a point upgrade to an OS , Adobe, Avid, something. And almost always, something breaks. Maybe After Effects doesn’t load, maybe ProRes only outputs green- something is bound to go wrong. The key is to know how to prevent potential disasters from occurring, while keeping the flexibility to upgrade and grow.
Sometimes you can figure it out and fix it. Other times, you have a client coming in for a Resolve session in the morning, and Resolve no longer works. That’s where Carbon Copy Cloner comes in.
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Aug
08
In part one of “Getting Started In Terminal”, I showed you the basic format that commands use, how to find more info on a command, and how to read text in Terminal. Now that we have some of the basics down, we’ll look at how to do what you want in the correct place.
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Aug
01
Many of the tips and tricks on this site require you to run commands in Terminal. The command line can be a bit scary, but with a little bit of practice, you’ll be able to fly around and easily do things that are slightly geeky, and very helpful.
This post won’t have any direct non-video applications, but will lay the groundwork for many other very useful tips on this site.
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Jul
25
In my post introducing Function Flip, I laid out a few potential improvements that would help you control function keys. Function Flip doesn’t support multiple setups on one keyboard, meaning what you set is used across the board. It would be nice to be able to have one profile in Finder, another one in Avid, and a third one in Firefox.
Shortly after writing that, I came across an application that almost does that. Palua, from Molowa, allows you to switch quickly between the functions and the special keys.
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Jul
21
Despite the death of DVD media, I certainly still burn enough DVDs, and know I’m not alone. And there is nothing that is more frustrating and time consuming than a burn that fails. And nothing more embarrassing than giving a client a DVD that doesn’t work.
If you use high quality DVD media, you are less likely to run into problems. But how do you find out if that spindle is full of duds, or perfect for archival? Luckily, there is a way of checking the quality of DVD media.
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