StarFire - Yet Another Transcoder

StarFire, a new video encoder that is NOT free ($8) has been released and is making the news rounds. I haven't had time to try it yet but it's yet another transcoder which people are looking to to replace VisualHub.

It's at version 1.0 and lists these features:

StarFire lets you encode your favorite video files to iPod, iPhone, AppleTV and PlayStation 3. It also lets you export to various format like MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, FLV and DV.

Movist

I use VLC a lot to view all kinds of things and often recommend it to clients. It's still in development for the Mac and 1.1 is in beta now I think.

But a FREE video player app called Movist is really growing on me. It's lean, fast, has a nice GUI and is founded (surprise!) in FFMpeg.

Give it a spin and see what you think.

Miro Video Converter

Miro Video Converter is a FREE (and Open Source) transcoding app. So far it looks good for its intended purpose.

Here's a list of it's capabilities so far:

Convert to MP4 Video
Convert AVI to MP4
Convert H264 to MP4
Convert MOV to MP4
Convert WMV to MP4
Convert XVID to MP4
Convert Theora to MP4
Convert MKV to MP4
Convert FLV to MP4

Add that it'll also transcode to Ogg Theora (video) and it's a pretty handy app.

Permute

Permute (NOT a free app) could be part of an alternative to the much missed VisualHub. It has a good selection of presets and you can modify them as well. It's clearly not for professionals who need more fine-grained controls or non-consumer formats but for quick conversion of things to xBox or iPhone and the like it could be handy.

I haven't done extensive testing with it but if you're looking for something to fill in the hole left by VisualHub this could be a good start.

Error Code 0 (Zero)

I got a call from a friend in a panic who kept seeing this when he tried to copy footage from one drive to one a client handed him. The weird thing is other test files would copy but it seemed like only the files he wanted to copy produced this error. I thought that was strange that just the files he needed to copy wouldn't.

I told him to check permissions on the files and the two drives to make sure he had read/write perms on them and he did. Then it hit me...

If you see that when trying to copy a file to a hard drive, it's likely it's formatted as FAT32 and the file you're trying to copy is larger than 4GBs. All of his "test" files were small ones so didn't produce the error.

He fired up Disk Utility and formatted it (including the Options button in the partitions window to format it to GUID) to Mac OS Extended Journaled (he did journaled since it wasn't going to be used to edit from).

Updated Articles

Apple has recently posted several knowledge base notes about their pro apps.

Final Cut Studio (2009), Color 1.5.2: Unrendered freeze frames in Color displays an unexpected frame

Final Cut Studio (2009), Color 1.5.2: Video Output of REDCODE material clips at 97 IRE

Final Cut Studio (2009), Color 1.5: Upgrading a Color 1.0.x project to 1.5.x changes any existing Trackers

Final Cut Studio (2009), Final Cut Pro 7.0.1, & 7.0.2 with Mac OS X v10.6: Final Cut may stop responding when capturing DVCPRO HD via FireWire

Get Info vs Movie Inspector

Ever notice that sometimes the file size shown in QuickTime's "Movie Inspector" window and the Finder's "Get Info" window are different for the same file?

There's probably some good reason.

Keeping External HD's Cool

A friend of mine is working on a documentary about an unfinished, unreleased feature film that should be pretty interesting when completed. He's been loading in (digitizing) TONS of behind-the-scenes footage from 25+ year old poorly preserved VHS, Hi8 and VHC-C tapes to a pile of external hard drives. One of his hard drives decided this past week to seem to work fine capturing footage from tape but when he looked at the clips in FCP (and QuickTime) there were horrible show-stopping glitches that would actually hang FCP and QuickTime.

They seemed to occur at random intervals, about 2 hanging-glitches per 3 hours of capture.

I suggested after visiting him and putting my hand on one of the drives as he recaptured a 6+hour tape that he needed to cool it better somehow. External drives without fans usually don't last terribly long in my experience when working with video. We dug around and pulled out a small electric fan plugged it in (separate circuit from the HDs) and just pointed it at the drives, stopped the capture and started it fresh.

Later that night he called me thanking me that it seemed to have worked.

Hard Drive Crash Simulator

DriveSavers has a neat little interactive demonstration of how and why hard drives crash.

I had no idea fingerprints were so thick.

Trim accurately in QuickTime X with AppleScript

MacOSXhints.com has a neat little tip from "Anonymous" on using AppleScript to trim on the frame with QuickTime X. Just the fact that this is a tip should let you know enough to steer clear of QuickTime X.

tell application "QuickTime Player"
activate
trim document 1 from 0 to 600
end tell