The reality is that writing a full length post with a variety of tips neatly woven together takes more time than I have to spare.
Thus, I’ll be blogging more bite sized nuggets surrounding a particular technique, hack or workflow. That way I update more often and get more useful information in the public sphere.
Some of these tips are old but too minor to fit into any of my other articles, or so ingrained as part of my workflow that I don’t quite realize it might not be as obvious to everyone. Either way, enjoy.
On occasion, I’m asked what my best work is. Other times, I’m asked which is the best project I’ve worked on.
The answers to these questions aren’t always the same.
Sometimes, when you’re working on a really polished product, where the footage is well shot, sound is recorded perfectly and the director is organized and clear with what he wants, all I do really is to not screw it up. That’s when a great team effort culminates in a good commercial, film or program.
On the other hand, sometimes a project arrives in your hands as a complete mess, and it’s through relentless searching through rushes, splicing individual words or syllables, finding the most obscure cutaways, making non-native speakers sound fluent, that you salvage a decent product from what could have been an unmitigated disaster.
When you put these two different project side by side, the difference in overall quality may be stark, even startling. But sometimes, your best and most inspired work comes from saving lost causes.
On a seperate but remotely related note, the proliferation of easy to use NLEs has heralded the rise of youtube/flash video mashups, some amusing, many crap.
We bought it to replace the Planex BLW-HPMM-G router we had and it is brilliant.
Firstly, the combination of Gigabit ethernet and Wireless Draft N mean our file transfers are going so much faster than they used to.
A 1 GB file that used to take me 2 or 3 minutes to transfer over the network is now copying over in less than a minute.
Of course, it helps that the MZK-W04G supports jumbo frames but the feature that gets me excited is the dual USB ports at the back to connect harddisks to serve as an NAS.
Essentially, if you want write support on Macs, Windows and Linux, you can partition the drives to ext2 and download the necessary drivers for all OSes to read the filesystem, should you choose to connect them directly to your computer. I don’t see any reason why it’d be necessary though because the transfer speeds over Gigabit are sufficient.
As a test, I ingested a 20 minute file encoding to DVCPRO50 PAL with 2 tracks of 24 bit 48kHZ audio with nary a frame dropped.
The wireless performance is also really impressive.
My director sits on the opposite side of the office about 80-100 metres away from the router.
The signal also has to pass 2 edit suites and a machine rack to get to him.
He experiences some signal degradation but still has no problems copying and transferring video files to and from my computer.
My decision to get this router was pretty simple.
I researched every single router I was considering by googling their product name and the following phrases.
Issues
Problems
Dropped
Basically, what I was looking for was any potential problems or widespread build issues.
The only results I got for the MZK-W04G were glowing forum posts and recommendations.
Add this one to the list.
Well done, Planex. Please expand your product line in Singapore, I’m especially interested in your 2.5″ Harddisk-Memory Card Reader Combo that has still failed to be available here.
EDIT:
Just to add to this, a few weeks after this post, a freelance editor who takes over me once in a while, got his iPhone added to the router permissions list.
The next day, as he came in, he asked me for the model number and make of the router. Apparently, while he was parking his car 3 floors down in our industrial building, which has 3 metre high floors, his iPhone prompted him to connect to the wireless network. Now that leaves me a little concerned about what those signals are doing to my brain chemistry, but a very impressive connection strength story nonetheless.
Marker tool is a great find, it allows you to transfer markers from clip level to sequence level with many options.
Been busy of late working on the Creative Cow print article, look out for it in 6 weeks or so on the Creative Cow magazine.
In the meantime, I’ll be updating with more tutorials and writing in the near future.
Thanks for your entry on automator.
Have you ever heard of anyone making an interface with automator, so that for instance you could trigger your mac to perform an automator function remotely?
Thanks
Mark
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There are a couple of ways to achieve this.
First of all, you need to build a workflow of the script that you want to execute.
This won’t be easy because you want to make sure it runs regardless of the situation the computer you’re running it on is currently in.
The best test of this is to restart and see if it runs correctly from a fresh boot.
This might even mean including commands to start FCP, etc.
Now the part you’re interested in is how to trigger the script remotely.
First of all you need to have remote access to the computer.
If you have a static IP, this is easier.
You only need to VNC, or login to your fileshare through your IP.
However if you have a dynamically assigned IP, you can use a VPN or have your router forward your ip to a DNS for you to access. I recommend the VPN route, I use hamachix for this, it’s as easy as setting up an IM client.
You can trigger the script by creating a workflow that searches a folder on your hard disk for files of a specific name.
For example, you could share your documents folder and have the automator “Find Finder Items” action look for filenames that contain “Export”
If you login to your fileshare remotely and create a text file in that folder named Export, it’ll trigger the Automator workflow to run. Then it’s just a matter of placing the actions you want run, after the “Find Finder Items” action.There are many ways to trigger an Automator script remotely, but I would say, focus on getting the script running locally without a hitch first, before you consider remote triggering.
That’s the reason the posting here has dried up somewhat, this blog will be more of an opinion/tech geek out space and I will link to my tutorials on Creative Cow from here.
Thanks for the patience and check out my 3 articles in the latest issue of the Creative Cow Newsletter.
