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.

Security Update 2008-003

Security Update 2008-003 / Mac OS X 10.5.3 is an important one for a few reasons, but relevant here are some exploits that have existed for a bit which Apple patched:

Apple Pixlet Video
CVE-ID: CVE-2008-1577

CoreGraphics
CVE-ID: CVE-2008-1031

Flash Player Plug-in
CVE-ID: CVE-2007-5275, CVE-2007- 6243, CVE-2007- 6637, CVE-2007-6019, CVE-2007-0071, CVE-2008-1655, CVE-2008-1654

Image Capture
CVE-ID: CVE-2008-1571

Image Capture
CVE-ID: CVE-2008-1572

It's always good to wait a week or so for the dust to settle whenever you update a production Mac (ie..a Mac that you use to make money with or use for an important project) but afterwards if the discussion boards are clear-ish go ahead and update.

QuickTime's Legacy Prefs

Here's a quick tip:

01) Launch System Prefs
02) Tap QuickTime
03) Select "Advanced"
04) Tick "Show legacy encoders"

Now you'll see some familiar old-school ways to encode your video in QuickTime.

Knowledge Base Updates

Here are a few Knowledge Base updates you may have missed:

Final Cut Pro: "This project is unreadable or may be too new for this version of Final Cut"

Final Cut Server: Opening firewall ports for Final Cut Server

Finding the timecode in iTunes

Final Cut Server: Uninstalling or deleting installed items

Final Cut Pro: Escape key may not end HDV capture

Final Cut Server: QuickTime or Java Component is not installed

AtomicView

While it's not Final Cut Server, AntZero's AtomicView is in many ways similar. Final Cut Server is overkill for many small companies but some of it's core features are invaluable. AtomicView basically does one thing that everyone needs: seek out and pull together all your media into a nice manageable interface. It doesn't monkey with any of the media, just creates a central place to oogle at it all. This is how they explain it:

AtomicView is a digital asset manager (DAM) software program available in versions for Mac and Windows. It can handle a multitude of formats and this permits unlimited organization of your photos, images, videos and sounds.

But I think this paragraph is funnier:

Our program is extremely rapid and reactive because its motor incorporates technology derived from video games and it uses advantageously the multiple processors available in the new generations of computer. Thus, for example, zooming in your files, changing the arrangement of the interface, can be done with an ease rarely attained in a utility program.
AtomicView shows its full speed potential from the moment of importation and allows the user to continue working while importing without blocking or slowing down.

You can check out some video demos at their site as well and see how it's rapid modularity environment interfaces with your upstream workflow paradigm or something. It's slick -even though I haven't personally tried it- and looks promising. At least it's not iView, right? Apparently AtomicView is about $188 USA.

Final Print

Final Print, which lets you print out a list of markers in a FCP sequence was updated today. I've never used it but I can see where it would come in pretty handy at times.

Final Print is a standalone application which prints a list of markers from a Final Cut Pro sequence. This provides a very useful workflow enhancement when handing off a project to someone else for further work.

Btw, it's $99. Yikes.

Drives that Won't Eject

Macfixit.com has a good reminder of why you should love the terminal. If you can't eject a drive it's likely that one file on it is in use for some reason or another. Pop open a Terminal window and type:

lsof /Volumes/VOLUME_NAME

You'll see a list of files that are "in use" on that volume. Lsof literally means List of Open Files. Things get tricky if you have oddly named volumes however. Like mine, which use parentheses in their names (I know...) but still, a good tip for troublesome drives.

Coincidently, macosxhints.com has an article about something very similar, although with a different way to eject stubborn volumes. They propose you download and run a GPL'd applescript.

Turns out there are about a dozen ways till Sunday to eject these ejectless drives. (yes, I'm making that a RealWord™ now). Here are some Terminal commands to eject stuff:

hdiutil detach `mount | sed -ne 's|^\(/dev/[^ ]*\).*/Volumes/'"$VOLNAME"'.*mounted by.*|\1|p'` -force

hdiutil eject -force /Volume/volumeNameHere

Hushing Loud CD/DVD Drives

Here's a neat little utility someone just emailed me about. DiscRotate 0.2 is a little freeware app that lets you control the spin speed of your CD/DVD drive to try and make it a bit more quiet.

Hack to Sort Sub-Clips

Macosxhints.com has a user submitted tip to sort subclips numerically here.

Basically, it's a quick alteration of some text files within the FCP Application package. Check out the hint and see what you think. I think it may cause some file save/export issues with XML project exports.

QuickLook's Rounding Math

QuickLook in Leopard, which you use by tapping the spacebar when a file in the Finder is highlighted, tends to round some numbers. As you can see in the screenshot of a flash drive a client handed me to use it's actual Get Info stats are:

Capacity = 3.72 GB
Available = 2.97 GB

QuickLook says it's:

Capacity = 3.7 (GB)
Available = 3.0 (GB)

Not much of a difference, I guess but still bothers me.