VLC for the iPad

VLC is coming to the iPad. Suddenly the iPad seems a lot more handy for dealing with clients.

How to Copy your own discs made in a Sony DVD recorder

I'm not sure what Sony is thinking here but if you burn a DVD using one of their DVD Recorders and then pop it into your Mac you'll see the contents are shown as empty despite it playing in DVD Player.app.

It's not empty. There really is a VIDEO_TS folder in there, only Sony doesn't want you to see it. I'm not sure what they've done to make it invisible since it'll still be invisible even if you show hidden files in the Finder (still gotta figure that one out, see below). Sure it'll show up on some Windows and Ubuntu boxes but not on Snow Leopard. Lets see if we can just change the permissions to access the VIDEO_TS folder...

Nope.

So how can you copy it?

Well, the usual methods work like Toast & Disk Utility although I had an issue with Disk Utility not ever "finishing" the disc. It just unmounted, never said it was done and the disc kept spinning in the drive forcing me to restart the Mac to get it to eject (Hey, holding the mouse button while the Mac boots still ejects stuff after all these years...go figure).

So, angry at Sony for hiding the VIDEO_TS folder from me even though the client who handed it to me OWNS the content on the disc (and couldn't have known about Sony's degage draconian attitude) I decided to find a way to get to the VIDEO_TS folder just to spite them in Snow Leopard. Here's what I did:

1. Pop the disc in. Open it in a Finder window.

2. Launch the Terminal.

3. Type cd (spacebar) and then click and hold on the icon at the top of the Finder window for the disc and after a beat drag it into the Terminal to set the path.

4. Hit Return while in the Terminal.

5. For fun type ls (for list) and see "ls: .: Permission denied" so force it to list the contents by typing "sudo ls" without the quotes and then enter your password and hit return.

6. Bang. VIDEO_TS is listed. Screw Sony.

7. Copy this to your Desktop with "sudo cp -R VIDEO_TS ~/Desktop" sans quotes and enter your password. If you want to copy to a place other than the desktop just put a space after VIDEO_TS and drag the window icon of the volume or folder you want to copy it to to the Terminal window. An example would be "sudo cp -R VIDEO_TS Volumes/volumename/foldername"

8. Toss the VIDEO_TS folder into Disk Utility or Toast and burn it as the client requested and screw Sony.

9. Feel free to change the permissions for the VIDEO_TS folder as you need from the Finder now.

About why the VIDEO_TS folder is invisible I suspect it has something to do with this:

Macintosh:SONY_DVD_RECORDER_VOLUME user$ sudo ls -al

total 8

d--x--x---   3 4294967295  nogroup   88 Jan  2  2004 .

drwxrwxrwt@ 12 root        admin    408 Sep  8 23:03 ..

dr-xr-xr-x   2 4294967295  nogroup  768 Jan  2  2004 VIDEO_TS

Macintosh:SONY_DVD_RECORDER_VOLUME user$ 

"sudo ls -al" forces the Terminal to show the permissions of the files in the directory and as you can see two files are assigned to "nogroup". I suspect this is what's helping to hide the folder although I'm not done investigating just yet.

UPDATE:

Another option is to just pop the disc into a box running Ubuntu and simply drag it to some volume to copy it. How can you not love that?

Dimmer for Mac

Dimmer is a new FREE app that adds some additional levels of brightness to your display.

"Dimmer is an application that helps give that extra detail to the brightness of your display.

By all means the brightness settings on Mac OS X are great but Dimmer allows that extra depth of brightness. This is a great application to use when you find the lowest display setting is too dark and the second lowest display setting is slightly too bright."

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.