VHS Tapes of Death

I've been handed some VHS tapes of some exceptionally rare material for an upcoming documentary I'm going to be editing. After setting up the 'ol VHS capture setup one tape (which thankfully wasn't the ONLY copy in existence) decided to get stuck it it's shell and smear debris all over the VCR's head.

Taking apart the VCR and cleaning the head thoroughly with some alcohol and lint-free cloth the next tape I put in (which was a known good test tape) was extremely snowy. I popped that tape out, popped another one in and it played clear, as hoped. Putting the test tape back in it was fine as well. Subsequent VHS tapes (even the literally only copy left on Earth) all played 100%.

So, like some possessed miniDV tapes of yore, somehow running a second known good tape "fixed" the VCR's sniffles. I'm guessing there was some lint or alcohol still left somewhere that the tape whisked away but thinking about possessed electronics a la Carnage is more fun.

Mini DV Tapes of Death

I've always had a hate-hate relationship with MiniDV tapes. Tonight was even further evidence that Mini DV tapes were invented as stress multipliers by anti-social engineers. I'm convinced of it.

So I'm working on a documentary that's using some footage from some old Mini DV tapes which I've been loading in via the tape deck in an HVX200 firewired into the Mac here. Mostly they've been issue free thanks in no small part to FCP's ability to reconcile 12bit and 16bit audio post-capture but there is this one tape that refuses to cooperate.

And similar to the infamous Iomega Click of Death this tape seems to "infect" the tape drive and prevent other tapes from proper playback. So, for example, Tape A has a massive dropout and never recovers, remove it and pop in an immediately previously perfectly fine Tape B and it now too has playback issues -mainly blue horizontal stripes and no audio- which are identical to Tape A.

Neither Powering down everything or ejecting and inserting the tape multiple times nor cleaning the drive did any good. So I grabbed a tape that hadn't been in this camera before and tapped play. It plays perfectly fine.

Figuring the planets have moved out of some portentous alignment I popped the problematic tape back in the drive and it's fine, zero issues now, naturally.

So there you have it. If you have a problem Mini DV tape eject it and run some other tapes through the deck to clear out the evil and then try the possessed tape again. I yelled at the tape as well (deadlines...ha, love 'em) but statistically there isn't enough data to say that was of any appreciable help other than to boost my emasculated deflated ego.

Why Text Can't be Dragged Any Longer

You've placed some text into your Timeline and need to drag it out (yes, you can COMMAND + J it instead, I know) but for some reason you can't drag it any longer. Cthulhu has decided to make your afternoon a little more hassleful but you can fight back.

You need the lower text element to be as long as the other but it won't drag (extend) any further. Here's why:

If you double click the text element in the Timeline to load it into the Viewer (that's what those perfs are telling you and if you don't know what a perf is I'll cry and feel even older, thanks) you'll see that the portion of the text you've placed into the Timeline, as demarcated by the In and Out points is near the end of the text element. You can't drag it past the "end" of the text element. The solution? Move the In and Out points of the text element.

This is what it'll look like after you move the In and Out points of the text element further back. Since text elements don't change (default ones anyway) the text on screen will look the same. But how can you move both simultaneously?

Hold down SHIFT and Click and Drag either the In or Out point and you'll be able to slide both, simultaneously left (or right if for some reason you want to do that).

Done.

Btw, and I should have mentioned this originally with the post but as mentioned in the comments for this post you can tap S in FCP and Slip the text element right in the Timeline. Thanks for reminding me, folks!

How to Un-Nest a Nested Sequence

It you've nested a portion of your timeline and for some reason need it not nested to make some adjustments there's a simple way to un-nest a nested sequence.

1) Find the Nest in the Browser.
2) Drag it to where you want it in the Timeline (you may need to be mindful of target tracks depending on the nest and timeline settings) but before you let go of the mouse...
3) Hold down COMMAND. That is to say, hold down COMMAND after you've begun dragging the nest into the Timeline. When you hold COMMAND you'll see the "shadow" of the nest explode to un-nested.
4) Let go of the mouse and you're done.

Audio Waveform Bug (redux)

A while ago I posted about how FCP (6.x) has trouble with displaying Audio Waveforms while it's not zoomed in. Today I ran into another interesting Audio Waveform issue again with FCP 6.x (thanks to the client's machine I'm working on).

Here's the before:

You can see that only one waveform is shown and even that's fragmented. The top two audio tracks are disabled via Control + B. When I delete them since they're not needed this is the consistent result:

Suddenly FCP decides to show the lower audio track's waveforms all the time when it was horribly inconsistent before. In fact, it was so bad before that I wasn't able to really edit the audio precisely quickly because the waveforms would come and go. I tried restarting FCP, the Mac, clearing caches (including the waveform cache) and nothing helped until I just deleted the audio tracks that aren't needed anymore (until the client wants them back or some nonsense)

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?