[Mitchji]

Hi,

LCD’s are so cheap right now that I think a second monitor is almost a no brainer. A decent 17″ LCD second monitor will not cost much and working will be much more convenient than a single monitor.

Check here for some good prices:
https://dealmac.com/sections/displaystvs.html

Examples:
Dell UltraSharp 20.1″ widescreen LCD for $487

Samsung 715v 17″ LCD display for $217 expired

Dell E173FP 17″ LCD for $209 shipped expired

Samsung 213T 21.3″ LCD display for $550

Best Wishes,

Mitch

[Mitchji]

Hi,

This seems (to me) to be a more rational perspective (Link plus short excerpts):
https://www.macworld.com/weblogs/editors/2005/05/widgets/index.php
Widget security: fact and fiction

“However, I worry that the article may spread a bit more concern over the dangers of widgets than there actually should be.

Why do I say that? Consider for a moment not a widget, but a regular application. Applications have the ability to do everything widgets can do

[Mitchji]

Hi,

If you want to put them on DVD’s at the full original quality you can set the FCP “Limit Capture/Export File Segment Size” to 4.3 gigs and export from FCP. This will create QT segmented reference files which you can reimport as contiguous footage.

If you want to streamline the burning process you can connect a couple of FW DVD drives, make a couple extra copies of Toast and burn multiple discs at the same time. You might have to use a lower burn speed (I think 2x would be OK) for this to work.

Best Wishes,

Mitch

[Mitchji]

https://www.allume.com/downloads/files/stuffitexpander902.dmg

Best Wishes,

Mitch

[Mitchji]

Hi,

By creating the Pre-comp before I added a second layer I can get rid of the error message but I STILL get the spinning beach ball when I try to save the project.

Thanks,

Mitch

[Mitchji]

Hi,

Heres the link (need to register):
https://www.dv.com/news/news_item.jhtml?LookupId=/xml/review/johnson1204

Heres the text:

DV Rack
Serious Magic, $495
Monitor and Scope Software

DV Score: Very Good

Pros: Thousands of dollars of hardware in a $500 software package. Video monitor with real bars, blue only, and more. Digital video recorder built in. Components can be arranged almost any way you want.

Cons: Most components can’t be resized. Audio Spectrum Analyzer seems half-baked. IEEE 1394 input only.

Bottom Line DV Rack makes your laptop an essential tool on shoots.

Serious Magic: DV Rack

Isn’t the auto mode great? I mean, really. I’m gonna be the next Tarantino, the next Rodriguez, the next Lucas-and as long as I engage auto on the camera, the pictures and sound will just magically get recorded! Yeah, right.

Sarcasm aside, the fact is that no one ever got to greatness riding the auto switch. You really have to know how that assembly of titanium, plastic, lithium, and glass perched on your hand works, in order to get the best out of it. Many of the higher-priced cameras make it possible, even easy, to override the auto modes. They even provide rudimentary tools, such as audio meters and viewfinder zebras, to help diagnose and avoid problems.
Serious Magic DV Rack puts a virtual rack of video monitoring tools on your PC. Although an LCD screen might not be the most ideal monitor, DV Rack on a laptop will allow you to greatly improve your video wherever you shoot.

Yet, for really high quality work, this isn’t enough. Virtually all EFP (electronic field production) shooters will carry a video monitor along to check white balance, watch for overscan problems, and the like.

A smaller number will carry a waveform monitor and vectorscope, which in essence are to video what a thermometer is to a house: they measure and tell you how hot your video is. And virtually none will carry an audio spectrum analyzer, a video quality monitor, a shot clock, a camera setup utility, and, just for the heck of it, let’s throw in a DV still grabber and digital video recorder.

You may have guessed by now that Serious Magic (www.seriousmagic.com) has done it again. Instead of creating another me-too product, it created a new category that I think of as the Laptop Quality Control Department. The DV Rack is as amazing and revolutionary in its space as Serious Magic’s previous products, Visual Communicator and Ultra, are in theirs.

Although DV Rack can run on just about any contemporary PC (sorry, no Mac version), it is abundantly clear that the right home for this program is on a laptop. DV Rack wants to be in the field, and with the costs of high-powered laptops falling every week, there’s really no reason to skimp on one. Just be sure the laptop comes with an IEEE 1394 port because that’s how DV Rack gets its signals. My test bed is a two-year-old Toshiba Satellite 1905-S303 Pentium 4 2.4 GHz laptop.

On the rack
Let’s step through what you get in DV Rack. Of course, the most important piece of gear is the video monitor, and DV Rack provides one with all of the buttons pros expect to see. First is the Bars button, which in conjunction with Blue Only, is used to adjust the color response of your computer screen to match video standards. Adjustable zebras for both white and black can be activated on the monitor, along with safe action/safe title area markers and ticks along the sides that correspond to the rule of thirds. A very nice feature is the Split button, which allows you to see and compare either two recorded clips or a clip and the live camera at the same time. I’m still not 100 percent sure if the color rendition of a laptop screen can be tweaked to exactly emulate a TV tube-for one thing, view angle is critical on an LCD in a way it never is on a tube-but for the time being, I’m going to give DV Rack the benefit of the doubt. The most objectionable thing I saw on the monitor was rescaling jaggies when the monitor was blown up to full-screen size, but that’s understandable-stretching 720 x 480 to 1024 x 768 will do that. Still, it’s nice that the full-screen option is available to make noncritical viewing from a distance possible.

Backing up what you see on the video monitor are the waveform monitor, for brightness measurements, and the vectorscope, for color measurements. They work as expected and give accurate readings, which feature selectivity between whole-raster and individual line readings. But it was here that I encountered my greatest frustration with DV Rack: Other than going full screen with the monitor, DV Rack devices can’t be resized. I can easily imagine wanting to use the waveform monitor as a full-screen display, but it just isn’t available. You can zoom in and out of the waveform and vectorscope, but they are sized to nestle nicely beside the monitor and don’t quite fill the entire width of the screen when side by side.

The same is true of the Spectra 60 Video Analyzer and the Automated Quality Monitor (DV-QM). The Spectra 60 uses the laptop cursor to isolate the color and luma values of any selected pixel in the raster. You get both numeric readouts and bar graph indicators, and the readout can be displayed in RGB, YUV, HSV, HSL, and CMYK color space values. The DV-QM allows you to set maximum levels for video and audio, and will alert you when either exceed those values. Even better is its ability to warn when the talent has popped a /p/ on a take, something that can be a real hassle to fix in the edit bay.
(Top to Bottom) The Audio Spectrum Analyzer, Digital Video Recorder, and Shot Clock can only be seen in this DV Rack screen shot. It’s a bit frustrating to have so many tools, yet be constrained by screen size.

Several other modules fill the entire width of the screen, not unlike the way real gear is mounted in an actual rack. First in the usefulness parade is the Digital Video Recorder, which can start and stop in sync with the roll button on the camera. Files can be saved in many formats, including Canopus and Matrox AVI, and QuickTime, among others. This allows clips to be instantly editable. You will want a really big hard drive for this trick, though, as DV consumes 13 GB per hour. Also, an automatic prerecord buffer will grab that shot even before you hit the roll button.

Another great module is the DV Grabber, which will save a JPEG, PNG, or bitmap still of whatever is on the screen when you hit the button. The Shot Clock displays both running time of clips being captured and time of day, which is controlled by your Windows clock and can be updated from the U.S. Naval Atomic Clock at the click of a mouse. Although camera timecode can be seen in the Digital Video Recorder, I thought it odd that it couldn’t also be displayed as an option in the Shot Clock, which has a visible red LED-style display. This would be a real asset for field logging.

One of the most ambitious modules is the Audio Spectrum Analyzer. An impressive collection of leaping red bars and active waveforms, the Audio Spectrum Analyzer purports to let you know where your audio is thick and where it is thin. Unfortunately, there isn’t any detail on what specific frequencies of the spectrum any of the bars covers-and even the generally excellent manual glosses over this important info with terms like “low bass” and “highest treble.” This is an unfortunate lapse on an otherwise excellent attempt at a spectrum analyzer. Maybe in version 2?

The extras
Finally, there is the SureShot camera calibration application. Along with the included chip chart and convergence card, SureShot offers a semiautomatic way to help ensure proper focus and exposure on any given shot. Problem is, this is a four-step process, and not many shooters I know would go through all of that to set up a single shot. The help it gives might be good for new shooters, but anyone with any experience will get the needed info from the waveform and video monitors.

But the negatives I cite are mere quibbles. Overall, Serious Magic DV Rack is a knockout application that holds the promise of better video for all kinds of shooters. I can easily see DV Rack giving laptops indispensable status on EFP shoots of all types.

System Requirements: Intel Pentium 4, Celeron, or AMD Athlon XP processor 1.4 GHz or faster; Windows XP or 2000; 256 MB RAM; 20 MB hard drive space for app; 180 MB per minute of recorded video; 32 MB AGP graphics card with 3D acceleration (64 MB recommended), Nvidia GeForce or ATI Radeon recommended; Ethernet card or IDE hard drive; IEEE 1394 input.

Bruce A. Johnson has been torturing cameras, editors, and all kinds of other television gear for over 20 years now. You can reach him at bruce@dv.com or in the DV.com Cameras Forum.

Best Wishes,

Mitch

[Mitchji]

Hi,

https://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/16#qt7

Excerpts:
QuickTime 7 summary
Despite the ongoing annoyance of the “QuickTime Pro tax,” QuickTime 7 is the most important upgrade to QuickTime in the Mac OS X era. It solves long-standing architectural problems, leverages several of Tiger’s other new technologies to do things only dreamt of by QuickTime 6 and earlier, includes its own best-of-breed video codec, and is finally embraced by Cocoa. The new QuickTime Player is good enough to be in danger of reinforcing the (largely uninformed) folk wisdom in the Mac community that rewriting an application in Cocoa automatically makes it better. QuickTime 7 has been a long time in coming, but it has turned out to be well worth the wait.

There’s one final unpleasantry to deal with: QuickTime Pro. Like its predecessors, the Tiger QuickTime Player is crippleware. Many of the most useful features are disabled, and can only be enabled by paying Apple $30 for a QuickTime Pro license. The menu items for these “pro-only” features are grayed out and have obnoxious little “PRO” badges next to them.

Don’t misunderstand, none of the disabled features in the QuickTime Player are actually disabled in QuickTime 7 itself. They’re simply disabled in the player application. Anyone can create a QuickTime player application that goes right ahead and calls the APIs that the QuickTime Player in “non-pro” mode refuses to call. Oh and by the way, the QuickTime browser plugin-suffers from the same intentional feature debilitation.

This has been the case for years with QuickTime, so why get all riled up about it now? Here’s why. Mac OS X ships with a complete integrated development environment that supports C, C++, Objective-C, Java, and all of the APIs in Mac OS X (not to mention distributed compiling, a GUI design and layout tool, and a suite of performance monitoring applications). Tiger includes a free web browser, e-mail client, address book, dictionary, thesaurus, font manager, and AIM/Jabber instant message client. When you buy an iMac you get all of the above plus iLife: iPhoto, iMovie, Garage Band, and iDVD.

The total development cost of this software bundle is absolutely huge. The total retail cost of iLife alone is $80. And yet after spending $1,500 or more on a new Mac with this great software bundle, what’s waiting for you when you fire it up for the first time and try to watch a QuickTime movie trailer in full-screen mode? Why, it’s a nag screen asking you to pay $30 more for the “privilege” of calling the QuickTime APIs that are sitting right there in the library code on your disk.

This is just criminally stupid. It mars the otherwise exemplary out-of-box experience for buyers of consumer Macs especially. Having spent well over $4,000 on my current crop of Mac hardware (plus $80 for iLife ’05 plus who knows how much for the Mac OS X Public Beta through Tiger), I find it personally insulting that I’m still not entitled to the “wonders” of QuickTime Pro.

Yeah, sure, I can download a third-party movie player application and find a third-party QuickTime browser plug-in. I can watch movie trailers in iTunes, which will go full-screen even without the magic “pro” key. Or I can google for an illegitimate QuickTime Pro key code. I can even shell out the $30. But it’s not the money that bothers me, it’s the principle. I’d be happy if Apple simply raised the price of its hardware by $30. On a $4,000+ bill, it’s practically a rounding error.

But please, Apple, give up on the QuickTime Pro thing. It’s always been annoying, but when viewed alongside today’s suite of bundled Apple software, it’s downright ridiculous. Worse, it makes the Mac platform look bad when the bundled QuickTime Player application can’t do all of the things that make QuickTime so cool: cut, copy, and paste together different kinds of media into a single file, extract and recombine tracks, import and export a huge number of formats, and yes, view video in full-screen mode.

Yeesh. Rant over.

Best Wishes,

Mitch

[Mitchji]

Hi Keith,

Macfixit recommends similar (repair the drive, fix perms) steps for the dot (10.3.x to 10.3.+). I’m not sure if they recommend backups for those more minor updates but I do.

One additional step they recommend for the dot updates is downloading and running the “combo” installer. They have found that running the combo often fixes problems caused by running the non combo updates.

Best Wishes,

Mitch

[Mitchji]

[MPE] “Well not really. Adobe has shown that it can be done. After Effects runs great on both platform. “

Hi,

The last time DV magazine benchmarked AE and Premier they both rendered almost 2x as fast on a PC. FCP was about 2x as fast as Premiere because it was optimized for the Mac.

Best Wishes,

Mitch

[Mitchji]

[Jerry Hofmann] “My 4 1/2 year old dual 533 G4 could be sold on ebay today for well over 500 bucks. Show me a 4 1/2 year old PC that sold for about $2,000 that you could say this about… you can’t. 4 1/2 year old PC’s are doorstops. “

Hi,

I think if you make intelligent purchases and factor in the resale value owning Mac hardware can be cheaper than owning PC’s. A few month’s ago I sold my two year old DP 867 for $1,400 on Ebay and bought a DP 1.8 refurb for $1,800. Try that with a PC.

Best Wishes,

Mitch