Drobo vs 32Bit Snow Leopard

A lot of you out there have Drobos and are running Snow Leopard with Drobo Dashboard; if you are and are running under 32bit there may be performance issues with your Drobo. Mac OS X Hints has some more info on this and a solution.

Tip to use older Firewire devices under Snow Leopard

Macosxhints.com has an interesting tip on replacing a newer ktext file with an older one to get some older firewire devices to mount/work under Snow Leopard.

I haven't had any firewire devices that fail to work under Snow Leopard but this is good to know if you run into the problem.

Motion 4: May be unable to open projects

Here's a handy tip if Motion 4 refuses to open a project for you after installing Snow Leopard and FCS 09:

To address this issue, be sure Motion is not running. Then, open Terminal (located in ~/Applications/Utilities), and run the following command:

sudo touch /Applications/Motion.app

The Knowledge Base article is here.

What's Touch do? From it's Man page:

The touch utility sets the modification and access times of files to the current time of day. If the file doesn't exist, it is created with default permissions.

Snow Leopard and Desktop Preview - Main

A few people (including me) have noticed quite dramatic artifacts when playing a project using Desktop Preview - Main under snow leopard. The artifacts look like quickly flickering horizontal lines which do not hold their positions when you stop and then start playback again.

I'm not sure what the exact combination of things causes the artifacts but it's something that appears for some people when under 10.6.1 but doesn't when booted from 10.5.8. Using either FCP6 or 7 doesn't seem to matter, it seems to be related to Snow Leopard.

QuickTimeMPEG2 Component vs Snow Leopard

If you install Snow Leopard and have the QuickTime Mpeg2 component installed, Snow Leopard will likely delete it. So, before you install Snow Leopard back this file up:

/System/Library/QuickTime/QuickTimeMPEG2.component

If you have already installed Snow Leopard and are now missing this file there are three things you can do to get it back:

01) Go to your Time Machine backup and restore it.

02) Head over to Apple and see if you can download it again if you bought it there under your account in Downloadables.

03) If you initially got it via Final Cut Studio then pop your FCS Install disc back in and then in the Finder hit Command + Shift + G (for Go to Folder...) and head to /Volumes/Final Cut Studio/Installer/Packages. Look for QuickTimeMPEG2.pkg and install it.

And this is curious, if you Right Click on the QuickTimeMPEG2 Component in Snow Leopard and choose Open With... you'll see the odd option KoreanIM as the default. If you try to open it with KoreanIM you'll be greeted with "Hangul cannot open files of this type."

Fun stuff.

Snow Leopard and Firewire Problems

From xlr8yourmac.com: (there's no direct link to the posting, sorry)

Reader's workaround for Snow Leopard Firewire problems - My main work machine is still running 10.5.8, but have 10.6.1 running on other Macs and I've not seen any FW issues like this so far, but only used a FW HD dock with them once. (As far as external drives, I've primarily been using an eSATA JMB360 Expresscard connected eSATA HD dock with the 10.6.1 MBP.)
" Firewire and Snow Leopard
Since installing Snow Leopard I had problems with two Firewire DVD burners, one would not mount disks and the other exhibited read problems. They worked fine when connected by way of USB and had worked fine under Leopard. My Firewire hard drives worked OK, although others have had the problem with hard drives as well.
The problem is with a Firewire extension in Snow Leopard IOFirewireSerialBusProtocolTransport.kext

Replacing it with the extension from 10.5 seems to solve the problem. (but does that work w/64bit kernel boots?)
Some people have replaced all five Firewire extensions with those from 10.5. Results have been mixed. For some it is successful, for others the thing that works is replacing only the one extension.

One caveat. Be sure to repair permissions BEFORE restarting. If you don't, for some reason the replacement extension(s) may not be recognized despite repairing permissions after a restart and then restarting again.If this occurs you would have to repeat the entire process.
-Ken"

I haven't seen any issues with 10.6 and Firewire yet but could be helpful for someone.

More Ways QuickTime X Fails

1. The title bar of a QT X window seems to obscure part of the image. It will fade away revealing the portion it covered when you mouse away from the window. Fading away is a large problem. When sitting with clients looking over versions of an edit, I can already hear their confusion as they can no longer see the Title plus Version Number plus Date of the two side-by-side clips we're watching. Editors and clients need to see which playback window is what version at a glance. Clients won't like this.

2. The floating controller window does not resize when you resize the video's window. This can lead the floating controls covering a large portion of the video.

3. Just the fact that the controls are over the video is an issue. Any time you want to adjust the video in some way, some portion of it will be obscured. I'm sure this will reap havoc with subtitles.

4. When you begin playing a video the controller is there for a few seconds no matter what, again, blocking part of the image.

5. QT X cannot play all open videos simultaneously apparently (I haven't tried it yet, this is from an email), which makes playing multiple versions of a video simultaneously to compare them impossible.

Snow Leopard Tips (or why QuickTime X sucks)

When you install Snow Leopard (which you shouldn't in the middle of a project, and best to test on a non-mission critical system) there are a few things to be aware of.

1. It won't install QuickTime 7 by default. It will however, keep it installed if you already have a pro-app license which is good because QT 7 can live side-by-side with QT X. You can install it later from Apple if you don't install it during a clean 10.6 install. Oh, and QT 7 has more export options than QT X. Yup. You can also install it from Optional Installs on the Snow Leopard install disc. Btw, after it installs QT7 the player app will be in your Utilities folder of all places. That makes sense...not.

2. Snow Leopard calculates drive sizes using base 10 not base 2 anymore. Seriously. Apple's reason is here. MacFixIt's take on it is here. Lifehacker's take is here.

3. When you eject a volume and it's in use by something, Snow Leopard will tell you what's using it. Ejecting is more reliable overall, or at least that's what Apple claims.

4. Snow Leopard defaults to a Gamma of 2.2. Read the link.

5. GPU Accelerated video encoding :)

6. QT Player no longer adjusts the size of the player's window incrementally when you adjust it while holding down Option. I use this little-known feature extensively to know what the logarithmic sizes of a video are to export a movie as for clients at say half or quarter of the original size. However...this function isn't completely gone in QTX, now you just have to hit Command + I to see the Info Window and then use Command + + (plus) and Command + - (minus) to scale the video player's size incrementally. A small change but old habit's die hard for me.

7. Command + J "Show Movie Properties" is gone. If you need it (and as a Pro user you likely do, for text layers and such, stick with QT7). I don't even know if it's possible to access it with QTX, it may be somehow.

8. Holding down Shift to change a player window's aspect ratio is gone. Stick with QT7.

9. There's a bug in QTX where if a movie is playing and you drag the playhead around the movie may stop playing rather than continue on from the point you release the mouse.

10. QTX does let you make screen recordings, that's pretty cool.

11. QTX, when you tap Command + F for full screen mode still has the annoying occasional bug where an item's label in the dock will remain onscreen despite the mouse being nowhere near it. (FCP's Command + F12 full screen preview is notorious for this bug. Version 6.x at least)

12. QT X doesn't seem to have any preferences available from the Player App.

13. You can't set In and Out points in QT X anymore.

14. Quicktime X seems to have a minimum screen size of 478 x 359 pixels. Videos smaller than that are scaled up fuzzily.

15. QT X seems to have an issue opening SMIL files.

If you're Terminal-friendly here are some commands to alter some of QTX's preferences.

Apple's QuickTime Feedback page is here.

I haven't tested FCS3 with 10.6 yet but I'll get around to it. I may just wait until QuickTime X Pro, if Apple even bothers. Seems like now is a good time to install VLC if you haven't already.