Error Code -50

Sometimes you'll run across this handy error message while trying to copy something to a drive. I have no idea what it means. But I do know that the Finder thinks the drive is still in use by something when in reality it's not.

- lsof | grep in the terminal reveals nothing.
- Using an app like WhatsOpen reveals nothing.
- Relaunching the Finder doesn't help.
- Repairing the drive with Disk Utility won't work because...
- You can't eject the drive.

You have two options in my experience.

A. Force Eject the drive.
B. Restart.

Ejecting Hard Drives

Would it be so difficult for the Finder to let us know which drive's cord was tripped over at a live event?

It couldn't be that hard to just name the volume that vanished right?

Super-VHS

Super-VHS has a pretty interesting history. Playing catch up to Betamax too late with too little while SuperBeta and ED-Beta tried, the extended recording times of VHS quietly conquered* all.

A friend recently called me to ask me about how to transfer some S-VHS to a hard drive for editing. He mentioned in passing that it wasn't a "real" S-VHS tape but didn't know what that meant. Now, quite unfortunately, I've dealt with S-VHS before at a local TV station who uses nothing but (and still does...) and learned a thing or two about S-VHS that you won't find in the manual but you will find mentioned online after whistling for The Great Gazzogle:

Modifying VHS Cassettes for S-VHS recordings

Videophiles were the first to theorize that since the only distinguishing feature of an S-VHS tape is a small 3mm hole in the cassette, it should be possible to use more common and inexpensive VHS tapes by duplicating that hole. In attempts to record S-VHS content to a VHS tape, picture quality is somewhat better however after several months the quality drops dramatically to a point of severe graininess or pixilation in dark areas in the images, due to the standard tape's lack of required coercivity. Eventually the recording becomes unwatchable however but can be re-recorded without problems in VHS format as the oxide media is still undamaged, although re-recording in S-VHS format will eventually encounter the same problems as before.

Is that true? Yep. In my experience is, although to varying degrees of "lost". 

Take a VHS tape, drill a small hole in the case in the lower left in the groove, record your precious memories and then promptly loose them in a year or three. It's the dark secret lurking in many new stations, libraries, high school and university's archives just awaiting discovery and a few tears.

So a tape is essentially lost to technology. While backups are a good idea, backups to different formats is an even better idea.

Thankfully, 5 1/4 floppies didn't have a coercivity problem to you can still play that copy of Amazon Warrior you kept on the b-side of Project Firestart.

* with wee bit of help from the porn industry.

RT Still Cache Error Message

Here's an error message I haven't seen in a while:

This is what you get when you load several hundred images into the timeline at once.

Still-Freeze Duration Bug

On a machine I still have Final Cut 6.0.6 installed I keep running into a bug with Still-Freeze Durations.

The duration Final Cut assigns an imported still image is determined by the Editing tab of the User Preferences (Option + Q).

However, for me in Final Cut Pro (and if I'm recalling correctly, versions after 5.0) the Still portion of Still/Freeze Duration doesn't exactly work.

In my experience when you import a still image FCP will set it's duration to exactly one second less than what's set in the Editing prefs. The Freeze duration will be correct however, meaning that if you have a clip loaded into the Viewer and hit Shift + N to make a freeze frame it'll be whatever the Editing tab's Still/Freeze Duration is set to.

But, if you say, drag a photo into the bin it'll be one second shorter.

On the left is the bin, on the right is the preference. For me, it's consistent.

What's Keyframed in the Wireframe?

Here's something you may not have noticed.

I think the keyframe indicator in the Motion tab of the Viewer is pretty horrible. It's buggy, has scaling problems and is generally trickier to use than it should be so here's a tiny bit of help.

When you set some keyframes, and you have Wireframe + Image on in the Canvas (toggle it with "w") relevant parts of the wireframe will turn green to indicate that they have a keyframe and that the playhead is currently on their keyframe.

In the above image you can see that among the green there are some white indicators, namely the "1" and the upper left and lower right handles. Here's what the Basic Motion tab looks like for this shot of clouds:

You can see that Scale, Center, Upper Right and Lower Left all have keyframes. Scale is the large X-like crossing lines, Center is the center handle and the upper right and lower left handles are right where they should be. If the "1" were green, that would mean that the playhead is on a Anchor Point keyframe.

Keep notes inside a Final Cut project (and save file)

Two days ago out of the blue I recieved a panicked call from a friend who needed something cut together fast. As in I would have about 3 hours to cut something together before it went live that would normally take about 5 hours. Needless to say I talked them into paring the project down to something managable and actually feasible.

While I worked on the project the client sent me some notes which I needed to keep while I moved from one location to another so I decided to find a way to have brief notes displayed in Final Cut while I edited that would be saved along with the project. Here's what I came up with:

1. Hit Control + X to open the basic Text Generator.
2. Type or paste in your notes.
3. Goto the Video Tab of the Text Generator and then drag the preview image (the one in the Viewer) to your footage bin; it'll turn into a Still.
4. Change it's name to something useful.
5. Save the project.

Now you'll have a text note that's saved along with the project file. You can edit it, rename it and even apply labels to it.

Canvas Corruption

Sometimes the Canvas window gets a little confused.

When Firewire Ports Go Bad

A friend as a Firewire port that's slowly going. As it gets progressively worse it starts to do some interesting things when you mount Firewire hard drives or cameras. One thing is this when you mount an HVX-200:

As you can see the files listed on here not only are not real files you'd find on an HVX-200 mount but they make no real sense. This behavior was consistent with only the names changing.

For me, the most interesting thing was that FCP would see the footage while the P2 card was mounted like this but there would be massive artifacts during playback. Plugging the exact same camera and card using the same Firewire cable on another Mac acted normally.

Out of curiosity I reset the PRAM, SMC and all that on the Mac without any of it helping.

Log & Capture Drop-Outs Tip

I've been gathering up and organizing footage for an upcoming documentary. As you can imagine there are boxes and boxes (which spiders LOVE to hide in) of old VHS and Hi-8mm tapes. Not only are tapes surprisingly delicate after being warehoused in non-air conditioned buildings but they also love to stick to themselves after not being run through a deck for 20+years.

As I catalog and load tapes into FCP with Log & Capture I've noticed that some Hi-8mm tapes have glitches in them that only FCP or my analog to digital converter (Canopus) seem to be affected by. When the tape plays in the old deck or camera visually and aurally it's fine, but FCPs Log & Capture window will jump and skip and just not show entire seconds worth of footage sometimes.

When you play back the captured footage portions are literally skipped as if FCP decided to do ripple-edits on it's own, randomly.

As this footage is important, and often the only copies left on Earth, I had to find a way to load in all the footage minus these mysterious skips. What mostly does the trick is to connect the old tape deck to the converter box via an s-video cable; that virtually eliminates the drop-outs. Conventional composite video can't cut it and I'm not sure why. What's more mysterious is that the drop-outs are always in the exact same  place.

So, if you have some persistent drop-outs while loading in old tapes try using s-video, technically the quality will be slightly higher (but you likely won't notice) and it'll help eliminate most of the drop-outs. If anyone has any info about these kinds of mysterious drop-outs let me know.