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.

Although some folks complain that Compressor is more trouble than it’s worth, I use it regularly to create self-contained QuickTime files and format conversions. No problems, really, until this evening.

Encoding a QT video from the Animation codec to a custom H.264 file resulted in Compressor generating “QuickTime error -120.” My was Mac was recently rebooted and neither Final Cut Pro or QuickTime Player was loaded at the time.

The problem was resolved using a suggestion from Apple’s discussion forum. In summary:

As a workaround for the -120 errors, I noticed the Compressor application menu has a choice for Reset Background Processing… which does get things working again, but isn’t really a good solution and suggests there’s a bug in the background application (qmasterd).

FWIW, the forum post is dated May 12, 2007 and I experienced this error on May 26, 2008 - one year and software version later.

One of my side projects is researching the relationships and work experience between film Directors, Editors, and their Assistants. Unfortunately, IMDb (and IMDb Pro) doesn’t have any reporting or data extraction functions to make this easy - everything is a time consuming and manual process.

After much digging on Google I discovered an accurate search phrase and found a few resources. IMDb doesn’t have its own API although developers have found a way around this using HTTP requests. Thanks to Martyr2 at Yahoo Answers.

http://www.trynt.com/trynt-movie-imdb-api/ - TRYNT web service which can be consumed by languages like PHP and .NET.

http://www.imdb.com/interfaces - imdb does provide interfaces for several platforms. These are often in the form of easily parsable text files. Not the ideal solution, but it can work.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/imdbphp/ - IMDB PHP project over at sourceforge could also be a solution.

No experience with any of them yet but it’s a start.

I have seen the future of live performance and U23D is it. Why spend $20 on parking, hundreds of $ on a ticket, and still need a set of binoculars?

Concerts in IMAX are incredible. The sound rumbles your seat as if you were there. Flying cameras give you the most intimate experience you can get without being on stage with the performers.

Let’s hope this is the start of a trend.