Invalid Content In Journal

Macfixit.com has a small interesting bit on a specific error that fortunately you've never seen. It involves an unmountable hard drive and when it's journaling is kaput. it wont' mount, but there's apparently a handy dandy terminal command to fix it.

The thing is it's generally unwise to use journalling on your Capture drives, namely speed issues. But if you have a drive that suddenly won't mount and flip on Repair Disk and see the Invalid Content in Journal error here's the fix.

Essentially copy this into the terminal with the appropriate name for your problematic drive:

/System/Library/Filesystems/hfs.fs/hfs.util -N /dev/disk0s2

The -N flag disables journaling on the device. You can find the device's name in Disk Utility's Info window.

Can't Eject A Volume Because it's in Use? Use lsof.

macosxhints has a really handy bit of terminal magic to find out just what's in use when you can't eject a volume.

Low Disk Space Script

I haven't tried this but it just seems like it could be handy somehow.

Low Disk Space Script "Low Disk Space Script is a simple AppleScript that tests two things:
That there are no hard drives missing
That there is a certain (pre-defined) amount of available space.
If one of these tests fail, it then automatically sends an email (to one or more pre-defined addresses) to inform you of the relevant problem."

Disksomnia

Disksomnia is kinda like the great grandson of Sleeper from the old Classic OS days who rebels against everything.

Disksomnia stops external disks from going to sleep. Video editing and sleeping disks are a bad mix, particularly if you have media spread across several external disks. If you've ever moved the playhead to another part of the sequence and stared at the spinning beachball while a disk wakes up then you'll know exactly what we mean! Disksomnia stops external disks from going to sleep (including those that ignore the Energy Saver setting to stay awake) by giving them a gentle poke every five minutes when Final Cut Pro or Final Cut Express is running. After installing and launching for the first time, Disksomnia is totally automatic and works invisibly in the background. There are no settings, no need to launch the app manually and best of all...no more sleeping disks.

A few people (including me) have had the exact same problem, where something in the firmware of an external -and sometimes internal- hard drive prevents it from listening to Energy Saver's preferences and it spins down every time there's lack of activity for what seems like 30 seconds.

Knowledge Base Articles

Here's two for ya:

Final Cut Server: Networking tips

Final Cut Server: Using the Preference Pane to back up the database may not save the postgresql.conf file

Caffeine 1.0.3

What's Caffeine besides that vile temptress which producers hand you for free late at night while your Tivo silently weeps for your return?

A tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Hold down the Command key while clicking to show the menu.

Maybe useless given Mac OS X's Hot Corners, but could be handy if you just like staring at logos trying to come up with just one more reason why they shouldn't use them.

- It's tricky to find a screenshot of this one ;)

Two Knowledge Base Updates

Final Cut Studio: Optimizing PCI Express card performance.

Final Cut Pro: Improving performance using an AJA Kona card with a Mac Pro.

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.