DV for Teachers » Mac OS

Managing Your FCP X Events & Projects using Disk Images

Tim — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 13:49:32 +0000

Steve Martin of Ripple Training, on Ken Stone’s site: Managing Your FCP X Events & Projects using Disk Images. This looks like an excellent workflow. Haven’t upgraded/downgraded/sidegraded to FCPX yet, but I know I will, and this will make working with it so much easier. A real find.

The Definitive Guide to Display Ports | Mac|Life

Tim — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 18:53:12 +0000

Mac|Life magazine presents The Definitive Guide to Display Ports. There have been many and many over the years, and it can be confusing. Bookmark or print this guide if you or your colleagues have portable Macs and you use them to give presentations or video on monitors or projectors. Valuable info!

Make Your Mac’s Help Window Behave

Tim — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 17:55:32 +0000

This is among the most disruptive aspects of Mac OS X, especially for switchers: the Help window that stays on top of all the other windows, no matter what. I cannot understand why this is the default behavior. Good news, however, from Macworld:

Fortunately, it’s possible to switch the Help Viewer to what’s called Dev Mode, which makes its window behave like any other window in OS X—if you switch to another app, the Help Viewer will recede into the background.

Hooray for Mac OS X Hints, or more precisely, its reader vczilla, for figuring out how to change this to sensible behavior. I saw it there, and Macworld reposted it to reach a wider audience.

New 64 bit Final Cut Pro? | Philip Hodgetts

Tim Merritt — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 14:55:13 +0000

Philip Hodgetts, long a Final Cut authority, asks if the rumors about a new 64 bit Final Cut Pro might be true and speculates on what that would mean. It’s only speculation, and the comments include lots of wishful thinking, but it’s informed speculation. After the unveiling of the new iMovie for iPad and the praise it’s had, there’s apparent reason for anticipation.

Regain the Timeline in iMovie ’11

Tim — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 18:25:03 +0000

Well, here’s some good news. It’ll only work on the latest iMovie announced yesterday, which means a $49 upgrade or the purchase of a new Mac, but it’s good nonetheless.

When Apple radically changed iMovie between the ‘06 and ‘08 releases, one of the biggest criticisms was the abandonment of the traditional editing timeline. […] Well, if you’ve been pining for a “real” timeline, it’s time to re-evaluate iMovie ‘11. With a couple of clicks, you can have it back. Here’s how.

This is very welcome. The difficulty of adjusting to the no-timeline interface, and its audio limitations, has meant that I install the older iMovie on all the newer Macs I configure. That may no longer be necessary. I’ll have to get my hands on iMovie ‘11 and play with it to know for sure though.

Via TidBITS Media Creation for posting this.

Peachpit: Automator for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Working with Actions > Locating Actions to Do What You Want

Tim — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 14:31:52 +0000

I’m looking for a good batch file renamer for my photo workflow, and bingo here’s a how-to for Automator from the auuthoritative folks at Peachpit Publishing. They publish terrific instructional books on all kinds of applications.

Via Peachpit’s Automator for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Working with Actions Locating Actions to Do What You Want

Tabs in Safari

Tim — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 13:02:33 +0000

I do not like Safari’s keyboard shortcuts to move among browser tabs.

⌘⇧{ or ⌘⇧} Command+Shift+Curly Bracket

^⇧⇥ Control+Shift+Tab

I much prefer the standard in the two other browsers I use most: Firefox and Camino:

⌘⌥⇠ or ⌘⌥⇢ Command+Option+Right or Left Arrow

That is all.

Paintbrush, A Free Painting App for Mac

Tim — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:52:57 +0000

I didn’t know Paintbrush existed. From the site:

Paintbrush can open and save to most major image formats, including BMP, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, and GIF. Full support for transparency is available for image formats which support an alpha channel (currently PNGs and GIFs). You can also paste images copied from many common Mac applications, including Microsoft Office and Apple iWork.

Target Disk Mode Saves the Day Again

Tim Merritt — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 20:18:11 +0000

Helping a student burn a DVD on a laptop that for some reason wouldn’t accept the blank DVD. I hooked the MacBook up to an iMac in the lab with a firewire cable, booted the laptop while holding down the T key, and voila! The MacBook’s drive mounted on the iMac’s desktop, and I could access the DVD project and start burning. The latest MacBooks don’t have firewire any more :( but the Pro series and desktops do. Useful.

Converting AVCHD files for iMovie

Tim Merritt — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:23:58 +0000

Macworld’s Chris Breen offers valuable info in Converting AVCHD files for iMovie. The lack of direct support for AVCHD in out-of-the-box iMovie stinks though. Camcorder manufacturers often include Windows-only conversion utilities, and one commenter suggests installing them using VirtualBox, a free Windows operating system virtual machine. That’s a lot of hassle for an increasingly common video format that will rapidly become ubiquitous.