Knowledge Base Articles

Here's two for ya:

Final Cut Server: Networking tips

Final Cut Server: Using the Preference Pane to back up the database may not save the postgresql.conf file

Caffeine 1.0.3

What's Caffeine besides that vile temptress which producers hand you for free late at night while your Tivo silently weeps for your return?

A tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Hold down the Command key while clicking to show the menu.

Maybe useless given Mac OS X's Hot Corners, but could be handy if you just like staring at logos trying to come up with just one more reason why they shouldn't use them.

- It's tricky to find a screenshot of this one ;)

Two Knowledge Base Updates

Final Cut Studio: Optimizing PCI Express card performance.

Final Cut Pro: Improving performance using an AJA Kona card with a Mac Pro.

Flip Mino Footage

If you're unfortunate enough to have to use some footage someone brought in captured with a Flip Mino, I feel for ya. Here's a page I found after someone phoned me asking how to do it.

I love the bottom part which is all you really need to know:

After ensuring the "Open Using Rosetta" is not selected, and DivX is installed, you should be able to view your videos in iMovie '06.

If that's not "Mac Friendly" I don't know what is. Thanks Flip! (Warning, their site plays music as soon as it loads...yay!) This from the company who's working with Apple to resolve the problem -like it's theirs- ...yeah, whatever.

Next up we're going to start getting footage recorded via Google's Vidnik.
At least the Vidnik guys have a clue and actually try and fix things:

Quicktime is producing MPEG-4 encoded movies with an edit list. The first displayable frame of the movie is a b-frame, not an i-frame. Other transcoders and players, when they encounter such movies, drop the initial sequence of b-frames from the video. I'm making a change to Vidnik detect that the first displayable frame is not an i-frame, and rewrite those movies, such that the first frame is an i-frame. I'll test, then upload a new version.