[Jeff Carpenter]

If you pick the Widget called “Widgets” you can erase some of them in there. But some you can’t. I can’t explain why.

SO, the easiest , surefire way to erase them – Spotlight them. Find the file and erase it. Done.

If you really want to be certain, you can look in two places:

(Main Drive)/Library/Widgets
or
(Main Drive)/Users/(Your Name)/Library/Widgets

It will be in one of those two folders.

[Jeff Carpenter]

You can always go in the System Prefrences where the Spotlight options are and set your entire hard drive to the “do not search” setting. This is there so you can omit areas of the HD from the search but I imagine that if you set the ENTIRE hard drive to not be searched, well, you’d avoid any effects that it might otherwise inflict on you.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Ah, ok. Here’s the new plan.

Log tape A. Then, go out into the Finder and find the Final Cut project file. Copy and paste THAT in the same folder. Name the new file “B.” Then go into the A project and capture everything. Then close that, open B, make the name and reel changes, and capture everything in that project.

Then open A up again and import the “B” clips from your scratch disc. You can now erase the “B” project.

This is clumsy and long-winded, but it should work.

[Jeff Carpenter]

What I would do is log everything on tape A and put those in a bin. Then make a new bin and copy and paste all of the clips you’ve logged into the second bin. So now you’ve got a copy of all the clips. Then just go through and change the reel name and change the “A” to a “B” at the end of each file clip name.

Then batch capture everything from each bin.

[Jeff Carpenter]

My own feeling on this is that it’s like hiring a musician to play the guitar and the piano at the same time. Yes, they are probably good at both, but it’s just not going to turn out that well in the end.

I know there are people who do it, and more power to them, but for ME, I find that I’m in a very different state of mind when shooting video or photos. As a videographer I try to be invisible. I don’t want people to notice me or my camera. A photographer needs to be much more of a “people person” and always in command of special-event situations (like cake cutting) so that everything ends up heppening correctly and in the right place.

They just feel like very different kinds of jobs to me and I would not want to do both at once. I’d always feel like I wasn’t doing one of them justice.

[Jeff Carpenter]

First, check around the Apple.com forums, it’s possible there’s a fix for this that I just don’t know about. Secondly, if you have an Apple store near you then you should just take it there. If this is a simple hardware fix you’d be better off letting them just do it.

Failing all that, plug a firewire cable into each Mac. Turn on the mini and hold the “T” key on the keyboard.

That SHOULD load the mini onto the other computer as an external firewire drive. You can just copy whatever you want off of it. (Now, since I don’t know for sure what’s wrong, maybe this won’t work. That’s how it’s supposed to happen, though.)

After you do that I would simply try erasing the hard drive with the OS X CD and then re-installing everything. There’s a good chance that will clear everything up.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Keep in mind that the Intel Mac Minis now come with integrated graphics. This means they use system RAM for the Video-RAM insead of a seperate card.

We’ll have to see how that plays out in real world testing, but I’d be inclined to say that you’d want to get the max of 2 GB of RAM in a new Mini if you’re going to use Final Cut.

If you’re really looking for something to just “hold you over” I’d suggest the refurbished section of the Apple page. Get one of the G5 iMacs on there and have fun editing with that for now. If you ever get that laptop the iMac can become a great home-computer or you can sell it, probably at a better rate than you’d get for a mini.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Have you:

* Repaired permissions
* Reset P-RAM
* Trashed Final Cut Prefrences

All things to try. Google any you don’t know how to do and you’ll find pages explaining each one.

[Jeff Carpenter]

To just play them he can download Quick Time.

If he wants to do anything else besides just watching them, we’d have to know what he plans on doing and what software he is using before we could give advice.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Granted, programs have grown in size since then, BUT I used to edit DV video on one of the old, 450 MgHz G3 iMacs and it worked just fine. Slow to render…but it worked.

The new machines are lightyears ahead of that machine. If you’re using DV you should be fine. And as was said before, yes, get a firewire drive and save your media to that.