Chris & Trish Meyer

Creating Motion Graphics is the blog for award-winning motion graphic designers Chris and Trish Meyer of Crish Design (formerly CyberMotion). Here is where they share not just their latest tips, tricks, and gotchas for the tools they use, but also discoveries that help them run their business, sources that inspire their designs, and musings on the future of the motion graphics industry.

Chris & Trish Meyer founded Crish Design (formerly known as CyberMotion) in the very earliest days of the desktop motion graphics industry. Their design and animation work has appeared on shows and promos for CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, HBO, PBS, and TLC; in opening titles for several movies including Cold Mountain and The Talented Mr. Ripley; at trade shows and press events for corporate clients ranging from Apple to Xerox; and in special venues encompassing IMAX, CircleVision, the NBC AstroVision sign in Times Square, and the four-block-long Fremont Street Experience in Las Vegas. They were among the original users of CoSA (now Adobe) After Effects, and have written the numerous books including "Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects" and "After Effects Apprentice" both published by Focal Press.

Both Chris and Trish have backgrounds as musicians, and are currently fascinated with exploring fine art and mixed media in addition to their normal commercial design work. They have recently relocated from Los Angeles to the mountains near Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Thursday, January 31, 2008

External Drive Cables

Shoot the messenger…with contact cleaning fluid.

While on the subject of external disk drives (see the previous post on LaCie power supply issues), problems with data corruption are also often caused by drive cables. There’s a few ways to cure them.

The most obvious problem is a bad cable. The free cables that come bundled with drives are often chosen because they’re the cheapest, not because they’re the best. For mission-critical applications, we like cables from Granite Digital. They were pioneers of higher-quality cable in the SCSI days, and we feel comfortable continuing to use them with FireWire.

Before you rush out and buy new cables though, there’s a chance they’re not bad - they just live in a bad neighborhood. Make sure you route all of your cables away from any power supplies. Those “wall warts” and “power lumps” create electromagnetic interference which can corrupt the data signal.

Also make sure your cables are passing along all the signal they possibly can. Applying a common audiophile technique to computers, we always apply contact cleaner to the connectors on drives or computer cards when we install them. Something as simple as “TV Tuner cleaner” from your local Radio Shack may help. We personally prefer the CAIG DeoxIT products, available from places such as Amazon and Markertek. These cured many a drive problem for us back in the bad old days of SCSI drives.

The content contained in our books, videos, blogs, and articles for other sites are all copyright Crish Design, except where otherwise attributed.


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