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Useful Tools for Editors: NAB Happened This Year Edition

Scott Simmons

Useful Tools for Editors: NAB Happened This Year Edition 1

NAB happened this year. There were many different things to see. I wrote a bit about it in addition to PVC’s video coverage. Since there were many useful tools on the NAB show floor it seems appropriate for a fresh Useful Tools for Editors as I’ve got some things I’ve had bookmarked for a while. Let’s get to it.

Mark for DaVinci Resolve

If you’re doing any graphic design and layout work in Resolve you might find a use for some kind of guides since Resolve doesn’t have any customizable guides built-in. Enter Mark. From the Mark website: Mark is “A collection of 16 combinable composition guides based on and inspired by principles of dynamic symmetry for DaVinci Resolve and Cavalry.”

Mark is around $14 (the store is in Euros) and there is a free demo that gives you three guides to see what Mark is all about.

iFunbox

I like it when I find useful tools from Twitter conversations because, you know, Twitter isn’t all a buncha yelling. iFunbox is a free Mac and Windows utility that gives full file access to your iPhone. I know these kinds of utilities aren’t new as we’ve been using tools to dig into the iPhone file structure for years but I hadn’t heard of this one so here ya go.

Now, I said that iFunbox is free but they also offer a paid version that looks like a 4.4 version for Windows.

Tyme

For years I’ve tracked billing hours using the Hours app and service. I was never happy with the reporting side of things as it was a chore when it came to billing. Maybe I never learned it as well as I could but I wanted a change and asked for some advice on Twitter for a new time tracking app. I settled on Tyme and it’s been a good switch. The interface is easy to read and the project management is simple and straightforward.

The Tyme statistics tab is incredibly useful

There are three main tabs: Projects, Times and Statistics. Filtering on those tabs makes it easy to narrow down to a single project when it comes time to bill. And there’s a ton of features I haven’t even tried yet including shortcuts and location-based time tracking. For me, any time tracker must work on the desktop, iPhone and Apple Watch as it’s so handy to use your watch to start and stop timers. What Tyme is missing (that Hours had) is a web portal taking time tracking to the web. Not a dealbreaker but I’m sure I’ll miss it at some point. My only real gripe? The Tyme Apple Watch app is just okay and not really great.

color a color matching game

Want a fun web browser game that will test your skill in all things color? Not color grading but all things just … color?

Then head on over to color and play away. It’ll take you through different color property challenges like hue, saturation, complementary, analogous, triadic and tetradic. And yes I had to go through them all just to learn what triadic and tetradic are!

Moom

I have been looking for a Mac app that will let me save a pre-arranged group of Mac Finder windows and one of those that have come up in the chat has been Moom. Moom will let you move and zoom on windows and it’s pretty cool. It doesn’t do exactly what it is I’ve been wanting in a Finder-window rearranger and rememberer but it still could be a useful tool for those on the Mac. Here’s a good review that hits a lot of the detail.

What I’m still looking for is an app where I can make a specific arrangement of Finder windows and save them to an easy to recall preset that remembers both the window arrangement and the directory locations of each of those windows. I’m shocked that I can’t find this simple utility (so maybe it’s not possible?) but I’ve been told Keyboard Maestro might be able to do it.

Display Maid

Another app I was playing with in my attempt to get this Finder-preset saving app was Display Maid. It is cool and does some unique stuff. Like this:

It’s a cool little $6 app (you can download it from the Mac App Store as well) and you would think it would do what I want. When you’ve got the Finder selected you even get an option to Save/Restore Window Positions For Finder and it will move them back to a previously saved position but it doesn’t seem to open and restore the closed Finder windows. Still could be useful though.

DALL•E 2

It’s cool when the AI can help the editors. DALL•E 2 is an AI system “that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.” Imagine typing in a description and get a usable image out of it. That’s kind of what DALL•E 2 is going to be all about. Here’s an example of “a painting of a fox sitting in a field at sunrise in the style of Claude Monet.”

That’s pretty crazy. This version 2 is an update of the original DALL•E introduced in January 2021. You can’t just go in and use it at your will as there is a waitlist to get access and I don’t know anything about cost or use case but this is a great example of the wonderful and crazy world of AI. Imagine where we’ll be in 10 years.

All you want to know about Avid Media Composer licensing

This is mainly just a tweet and tweets are usually all at the bottom but this one is important for Media Composer folks. Avid licensing has gotten confusing in recent years with the move to a subscription option as well as cloud licensing. Add in the move away from dongles and it’s been tricky to understand what is going on. https://www.avid.com/resource-center/avid-media-composer-in-2022-lets-talk-licensing dives, deep, deep into everything Media Composer license.

If you’re in the Avid world I would bookmark this article as it will answer all the questions about how Avid licensing works. It’s long and deep but if you’re in the Media Composer world this is something you need to understand.

Smithsonian Open Access

Did you know that the Smithsonian has a website where “you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking?” I did not despite this resource being live and online for a few years. It’s called Smithsonian Open Access and after browsing around a bit looks like it could come in handy on occasion for just the right thing. Need an image of an Asian Small-clawed Otter? A portrait of Mary Helen Churchill Baird? This resource has you covered.

Depending on the image some have a high-resolution tiff as well as the standard jpeg option. There are also some 3D models available but thankfully no 3D models of Mary Helen Churchill Baird but there are for a lot of bones. These resources are available under Creative Commons Zero which you can read more about in the FAQ.

Links from Twitter

And finally … my Mac Studio review got a shoutout from Marques Brownlee.

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