The ability of the Mac to put internal and external drives to sleep is excellent to reduce wear and lower power consumption. Unfortunately it’s not convenient while editing when your workflow is paused as drives spin up.

I considered writing an AppleScript to automate the on/off of “put hard drives to sleep whenever possible” in System Preferences but hadn’t gotten around to it. Digital Heaven has beat me to it with a start-up application called Disksomnia.

Once loaded it looks for any running instances of Final Cut Pro or Express and keeps the drives from falling asleep. According to the Studio Daily Blog it doesn’t work with Avid or Premiere but we can hope Digital Heaven will support them at a later date. Free download from this page.

[via Studio Daily Blog]

It’s hard to believe Stan Winston has left us for the great VFX studio in the sky. What I always loved about his work was the practical element. He created models, masks, and animatronics you could touch, not merely pixels glowing brightly on an LCD display.

If you’ve seen Aliens you know what I mean about models creating the reality. Compare that with the final scene in Species when pure VFX doesn’t really work. ILM may have perfected the elimination of models in Pirates but for me foam latex will always trump the pixel.

Over the six years our film project has been in post-production a number of hard drives have gone to “bit heaven.” Clips had been logged and organized and once lost they weren’t replaced; instead, portions of a fully rendered QuickTime movie were used as placeholders.

Eventually the lost media was recaptured from source tape. One especially tedious task was re-logging ADR from a long recording session. It wasn’t feasible to mark edit points in Final Cut Pro’s Batch Capture because of slow tape transport so I captured the whole session and used the Viewer instead.

Using a mouse in the Viewer to quickly scan audio waveforms and playback was immensely faster but marking edit points for each take was, again, tedious. Looking for a better way, I discovered how to use markers to divide a master clip into subclips - no repetitive in/out points required. The steps:

• Create a bin to hold your final subclips.
• Open the master clip in the Viewer. Scrub through the Viewer timeline and in between takes drop a marker using M. Tap M again and enter what will be used as the subclip name.
• In the Browser expand the master clip to reveal the markers inside. Select all of the markers within the master clip.
• Drag the selected markers into your new bin.

You’ll find a subclip for each marker you created and they will be named accordingly. Because each subclip is created using an imaginary in/out point based on the marker, it’s important to place the markers based on slate (and “cut!”) or leaving sufficient handles in takes without slates.

You may want to copy the master clip before dragging the markers into a bin because the markers are deleted once you perform the drag operation.

A short while ago I was researching an alternative to on-line backup because Mozy hasn’t been reliable for me. Just after signing up for an Amazon S3 account I clicked a link to return to the home page and was greeted with this fine error message:

Same result on another computer and my mobile phone. It’s not every day you get to witness a giant web site down and out.

During the course of a day, business or otherwise, I use many Mac shortcut keys. When working with Finder and application windows I’ll often use Command ~ to switch from window to window. Often, in haste, I’ll accidentally hit Command Esc which opens Front Row and disrupts my productivity.

Turning off the Front Row hot-key is easy. Open System Preferences, Keyboard & Mouse and the top entry (for me anyway) is “Hide and show Front Row.” Uncheck the box and it’s done. Until you re-enable the hot-key you can open Front Row using its icon in your Applications folder.