[Matt Riley]

[Bill Marcellus] “If you haven’t used this program (and it appears that you haven’t) it TOTALLY blows the doors off of any color correction tools within any Avid short of a full out Nitris. Of course, a Nitris costs considerably more than $1295 (or $499 for the upgrade).”

I use an Avid DS every day and I can tell you that color correction isn’t exactly one of its strong suits. I actually find Color Finesse to be superior to DS’s color corrector in many ways. There is no real-time secondary color correction in DS (and the “selective” color correction is really just a hack built from a simple tree). What DS does kick butt in is effects trees, media management and speed. Raw speed.

Color (neigh, Final Touch) is something to get VERY excited about. The fact that Apple chose to leave it as a separate app means a couple of things. One, that Color is strong enough to stand on its own. And, two, that Apple “gets it” when it comes to a collaborative workflow in a boutique facility (one artist working on the edit, one working on the color, etc. rather than a one-man-band approach).

Yes, FCP 6 seems like it received the least amount of attention in the studio package, but I think the integration and the addition of a real pro-level color grading app more than makes up for it.

-Matt

[Matt Riley]

I just bought two of these enclosures from Other World Computing:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEFW924AL2K/

Along with 4 of these hard drives:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Maxtor/3H500F0/

I’m using two drives per enclosure in a mirror (RAID 1) configuration for redundancy. The enclosures seem well constructed and installation was pretty easy. Considering I got 2 TB of storage and 2 enclosures for about $800 with next-day shipping, I think it is a pretty good deal. 🙂

Plus, OWC is always a pleasure to order from – very simple and quick to respond to any questions that arise.

-Matt

[Matt Riley]

I read somewhere last night that the Mac version of AE8 allows for 3.5 GB of RAM *per processor/core* which sounds groovy to me. So, if you have a quad G5 or a quad-core Intel Mac Pro, After Effects would be able to address 14 GB of RAM.

I’m not sure of the specifics of this yet (or whether it is true – I’ll find the link where I read that) but that sounds like a Good Thing

[Matt Riley]

You can use Compressor’s ability to run an AppleScript upon completion of a task to do this. First, make a simple AppleScript to notify you of the end of your compression task.

Open Script Editor and copy/paste the following into a new script:

—
say “compression complete”
—

Save it as a script in a convenient location and then switch to Compressor. Tell Compressor to execute the AppleScript you just created by modifying the settings file you are using (click on the Actions tab/chiclet in the Inspector window when your setting is selected in the Presets window).

You can, of course, make this script as advanced as you want. For instance, you could have it set the volume to full before announcing the compression is complete, just in case you had the volume turned down from some earlier task. The sky’s the limit.

Hope this helps,
-Matt

[Matt Riley]

I’ve logged/imported hundreds of P2 cards (which means thousands of clips) since the HVX200 was first released into the wild. We were one of the first places in the midwest to take delivery of a camera, so we’ve been working with it for a while.

I’ve NEVER copied over a lastclip.txt file and have never had a problem importing any clips. We use FCP for editing P2 material and a custom AppleScript along with a PowerBook and external FireWire drives to copy the data from the P2 cards.

Perhaps missing the lastclip.txt file(s) is not the real problem.

-Matt