ProVideo Coalition.com: the EDITBLOG on PVC by Scott Simmons

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.

Since 10.6 is a release that concentrated on performance rather than new features I expected to see a much improved Finder. As far as speed goes everything does feel much snappier. Windows open, lists load and scrolls happen with greater speed than before. iCal and Address Book boot in the blink of an eye. Disk Utility seems much faster scanning and loading available disks. Much has also been said about the tweaks to Exposé and they are nice. I use Exposé many, many times a day so any improvement is appreciated. While all of the new features have been well documented around the web, as an editor here’s a few that I think I’ll find most useful.

In the Finder go to Finder > Preferences > Advanced tab and enable Search the Current Folder from the pop-up menu:

This will search only the current folder and sub-folders within (not the whole Mac) when you use the Spotlight search bar in a Finder window. This has always seemed like the most logical way to use this feature so it’s a welcome addition.

I’ve seen a couple of new warnings pop-up when trying to eject hard disks. I was unable to eject a local disk and the warning told me that “Final Cut Pro” was using it. This will be nice to see exactly what is holding the disk hostage:

When you have a Finder window in icon view there is now a little slider in the bottom right corner to scale the icons up to 512 pixels, a really large size for an icon. Crank it up and it will be a really fast and easy way to preview still images without importing them all into your edit application or using something like Adobe Bridge:

As for Snow Leopard’s performance while editing, FCP didn’t seem to blink. It didn’t feel noticeably faster while working in FCP but 3 small jobs over the weekend (syncing a ProRes music video automagically with PluralEyes, capturing and logging a 1 hour HDV tape, basic timeline editing) went off without a hitch. One particular selling point of QuickTime X says “QuickTime X is optimized for the latest media formats — such as H.264 and AAC” and dropping a few native H.264 Canon 5D files on the timeline did allow for some pretty fast scrubbing and general timeline navigation ... thought I can’t really compare that to pre-Snow Leopard since I always transcode those files to ProRes for edit. I spoke with a 5D owner/shooter who swears that the native playback feels faster. For me the problem still comes when I add a transition, effect or motion change, since these H264 files don’t support FCP’s real-time architecture and they require a render. That’s an instant deal breaker for my workflow.

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Mid-project or not, I always wait for the 10.X.1 release. Guess I’m just paranoid.

Props for the 2001 MoonBus icon.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 08/30 at 10:00 PM

You can easily install QuickTime 7 from the Leopard DVD as an optional Install… both can run side by side.

Posted by Richard Harrington on 08/30 at 10:12 PM

If you use SxS cards on your Macbook Pro, the Sony drivers do not work with Snow Leopard. Sony has confirmed this and they don’t have a release date for new drivers. If this is a part of your workflow, DON"T upgrade to Snow Leopard. This only goes for mounting SxS cards via the expresscard slot on your MacBook Pro. If you use Sony’s USB reader then it will work fine.

Daniel Weber

Posted by Daniel Weber on 08/31 at 07:05 AM

I call my network HAL 1000.

Good info on the SxS cards Daniel. As with any new upgrade of anything there’s little glitches and gotchas that pop up that bite some and not others so it’s great to put that stuff in the comments of posts like this. Thanks.

Richard, yep ... read page 2.

Posted by Scott Simmons on 08/31 at 10:12 AM

Have you tested and confirmed that the gamma issue has been resolved?

Posted by Charles Angus on 08/31 at 04:20 PM

Charles, I have not tested as the gamma issue hasn’t really been a problem for me in my workflows but I know it is for many. If you find a good conformation test please post a link back here in these comments.

Posted by Scott Simmons on 08/31 at 04:54 PM

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