[John Davidson]

I’m not sure how a laptop capable of interfacing via Thunderbolt with a promise array at a gig a second while also tethered to a 27in higher than HD resolution display could be considered usable only to amateurs. Kind of amazing to think I can do that now with a new macbook air 11. That’s some gadget.

(Typed on a macbook air 11 inch.)

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

I’m not interested in buying duck again right now with x’s current state. My point is, FCPX is at least a good way to sync separate audio sources for ingest into FCP7. In fact, it’s REALLY good at that. Better than dealing with Pleural Eyes.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Lion creates a recovery partition rather than a boot disk. Hold down option when restarting and ‘recovery’ will show up as an option. Many, if not more, features from a boot disk are to be found there – and it is much faster than using a boot disk, for sure. Don’t have a direct link to building a bootable disk, but I think I’ve read it’s possible via Disk utility.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Use Pixelmator. It’s $30 off the App store. Great photoshop alternative and you’ll be surprised as how speedy it is.

As far as everything else you wrote, I’m not even sure of the question. Preview is much more powerful in Lion. The biggest problems with Lion tend to be with 3rd parties programs who either only operated under the discontinued Rosetta support (CS1?) or didn’t invest $99 into the Apple developer kit to test their programs for their clients. This is especially true of many NAS providers, apparently. You can also hold down option when restarting, select the ‘recovery’ partition that is created by Lion and run disk utility to repairs permissions on your hard drive. This may solve many problems you’re having.

You can always go back to Snow Leopard. You’ll need to google a how-to to do it though.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

I’ve got Lion running on 2 macbook airs, a mac mini, and recently our 2010 iMac. Programs like 1Password need updates. Also, you’ll have to upgrade to Parallels 6 for $40 to run any Windows stuff (unless you use some other program to do that). Our Synology NAS works fine, but some have noticed issues with NAS, according to TUAW. Surprisingly, it’s been relatively painless for us, but I was beta testing since April, so it may be a little new to some people.

We’re installing FCP7, Logic, and Aperture on the Mini to see if there are any major issues. I’ll post back when I know more.

Disclaimer: If you read this and install it, please run time machine first so you don’t lose anything.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

I’ve directed all our people to stop focusing on FCPX at all. Any broadcast program that can’t export OMF’s natively in the year 2012 deserves no attention from us. Since it’s missing so much, learning it in it’s current form may be counter productive as we might be learning processes that will change when the program gets updated. I’d hate to have to unlearn something, our time is more valuable than that.

I spoke with the director of production at one of the big three last week. Two years ago they switched to FCP7 in all their suites after having been Avid for over a dozen years. I asked him what the network was going to do with X being what is was (incompatible with broadcast workflows, in particular), and he looked at me and said “nothing”. Since we deliver FCP project files to them for spot finishing, we will do nothing as well.

If you think that means I’m not going to cheat on my beloved FCP7 with everything NLE wench in the broadcast tavern, think again.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

I’ve been using Lion for months on our laptops. Ironically, when I have to go to Snow Leopard, I find myself mildly annoyed. I was never a big fan of spaces, but I really like the whole dashboard/launchpad/expose thing now. I’ll be interested to see how it works though with a dual 27 cinema display setup – especially fullscreen apps.
It’s a pleasant evolutionary step from SL rather than the Revoltalution of FCPX. I don’t advise anyone update anything until they’ve confirmed their favorite applications are compatible with it. Really.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

I’ve been beta testing as well – and the article is actually wrong in a few aspects. Every time a new apple product launches, they have to post something to show up in news results. Negative articles generate more interest than positive ones. I like Lion and think that, despite all the furor over FCPX, Apple’s going to have a pretty fantastic ecosystem – in six months.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

The site has been redone and updated. The one issue I’m having is that IE8 and the Twitter widget have issues (it makes you click to continue loading the script – this is a twitter widget issue, not a hype issue), other than that, it seems to be all right. By the way, you can buy Hype for $30 on the mac app store. There are little bugs and workarounds which the hype forums can help you with, however those forums are not as good as the cow, in my humble opinion. Would you mind checking it again, Richard? https://www.magicfeatherinc.com

And thanks for the heads up Tim. I use XP/Parallels on Mac for testing, but that’s not always the same as a dedicated windows machine (which I don’t have). By the way Tim, I posted this in the ‘letters to the cow’ forum, but Tumult (the company that created Hype) would like to speak with someone at the cow about a forum on the Cow. Seems to me that with HTML5 being the future, Creative Cow would be a great place for them to assist new customers – and draw more traffic to the cow. Hype is one of the top grossing apps on the App store. The app operates a bit like flash used to, and I really do love it.

ps. Not associated with the Tumult team at all, just interacted with them a little bit on their forums when building my site.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Thanks for the heads up Richard.

Firefox is an interesting beast. Did you know v5 of Firefox is available? The version you have is the most recent for Firefox 3 I believe, but we should still be compatible. It’s been working fine on all our systems. The only issues that should happen with Firefox according to the Hype export warnings is that reflections of images won’t work, however I’m not sure why you’re having that issue. Do you not see the ‘loading’ animation at all when you go to the site?

The site when created with Hype is much like older flash sites, in that the links and navigation aren’t browser navigation based, they operate more like a single SWF file. The links inside the side direct to scenes embedded within the code.

Hype is still in it’s infancy – right now it’s at v 1.0.3, however the greatness of the app is that it provides animations within IOS devices without requiring Flash. I dislike flash immensely. I’m going to rebuild most of the site over the weekend. When I do I’ll post back. I’d love to see if that fixes your issue.

Thanks!

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.