Kicking the tires on Snow Leopard and doing some edit work too

Over the weekend I installed Mac OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard!) and crossed my fingers as I booted up Final Cut Pro for a number of quick edit tasks I had to complete. Install was lightning fast (relatively speaking to other OS updates) at under an hour and claimed an extra 10 gigs or so of hard drive space (though that might not be totally accurate) when all was said and done. This install was on my edit machine at home, the machine that is often the guinea pig for mad scientist-type software experimentation, so I chose to do the quickest and simplest upgrade option and not a “clean install” as I usually do when a new OS rolls around. In fact a clean install isn’t a simple option with Snow Leopard but apparently it can be done by rebooting and formatting your hard drive with Disk Utility and then installing. I’ll do that on the office machine at some point. But here’s the usual warning, do not upgrade to Snow Leopard if you are in the middle of a job or don’t have the time to devote to working out problems that can arise from such an update. And always make a bootable back-up before performing any upgrade.

Video storage space calculators round-up

It’s one of the questions I get asked more often than most: How much drive space do I need to hold [insert media format and time here]? At one point I tried to keep some rough numbers in my head, as in way back when DV25 was about the only format and resolution to worry about, but these days with all of the different resolutions and frame rates it’s way more information than I care to remember. But fear not as there’s many different places in which to find video storage space calculators. Web based, widget based and iPhone based ... read on for a round-up.

Enlightening interview about distribution with Maverick Entertainment founder and president

I was catching up on podcasts recently and I got to the July 16 episode of Filmmaking Central.  On this episode host Dave Basulto spends an hour interviewing Doug Schwab, President and Founder of Maverick Entertainment. This is one of the most honest and informative discussions on feature film distribution that I’ve heard in a long time and is a great listen for anyone making movies. Blogs and podcasts often discuss the technology and craft of filmmaking ad nauseam so the good distribution discussion is often few and far between. Maverick Entertainment is a direct to video distribution company and though you as a filmmaker may be shooting for theatrical distribution the reality is that very few films see the big screen. Schwab engages in a very thorough and very honest discussion about the reality of feature film distribution. There’s a lot of great tips within the show about what distribution companies are looking for as well as tips to get your film in front of a distributor or buyer. You can listen to the episode right off of the BlogTalkRadio webpage or subscribe to the Filmmaking Central podcast (iTunes link) and look back into July for the episode.

Battle of the audio track deletion batchers

Just the other day I posted links to VideoToolshed, a resource for a number of handy software utilities gear toward the video editor. One of those tools was QtTools, which has been rebranded as qtChange02. I posed the question asking if it could batch extract empty audio channels from QuickTime files. Bouke, the proprietor behind VideoToolshed, said he would add the feature and he did. In the comments David Heidelberger posted and said that he had already written an application to do just that. Audio Track Batcher. Let’s see how these tools might work to correct a capture problem where you media has too many audio tracks.

VideoToolshed releases FcpReconnect to aid in media management

We all know Final Cut Pro’s media management capabilities aren’t its strongest feature. The guys over at VideoToolshed have released a utility that tries to make up for some of those shortcomings. Plus, if you’ve never browsed through the products they offer then take a few minutes to do so as you might find one that meets a specific need you might have.

VideoToolshed is a small post-production house in the Netherlands that has quite an impressive collection of little applications and utilities, available for both Mac and PC, that address a lot of small but often quite pressing needs in the post-production world. Their website is rather sparse, their English sometimes fragmented and their software isn’t particularly pretty but from just looking at the volume of products they have produced over the years and how they have addressed specific needs you can tell someone has put some thought into these products. I often wish that I knew how to write Mac applications (I once tried to learn and it didn’t go very well) so I could do something similar to what Bouke and his team does (that’s assuming he has a team!): They see a need they have in their post-production workflow and then write an app to address it. The most reason one to catch the eye is FcpReconnect.

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