If you’re looking for a way to recover some room on your hard drives you should give DaisyDisk a try. It’s a beautiful app with a sharp focus — to help you find the crap that’s hogging space on your drives. It’s a free download and includes a fully-functional 15 day trial. A license is $19.95.
Immediately after installation I found over 3GB of hidden QuickTime reference files on my Desktop (presumably from Compressor). Not only that, did I mention that it looks awesome? Unlike other applications where your crap still looks like crap, DaisyDisk makes your crap look like beautiful, slick & polished crap.
On Saturday I bought a 16GB iPhone 3GS. On Sunday Meagan and I went to Sail Boston to see the tall ships hanging out in the harbor. I couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity to try out the 3GS’s video mode, the result of which can be found above.
Overall I’m impressed. I was able to achieve a selective focus with a little bit of planning, and the quasi-manual exposure control is handy. I was expecting a frame size larger than 640 by 480, but I suppose that leaves room for the iPhone HD next summer. Even so, I cropped the frame’s ratio from 1:1.33 to 1:1.68 which gave the perception of true widescreen. It sacrifices a little bit of vertical resolution, but most people probably aren’t going to notice.
I spent a few hours doing the editing and color grading, although it should be noted that the raw footage is pretty impressive on its own. Color saturation is fantastic and the auto exposure & white balance worked well in most situations. After importing I had to render the audio before I could play it back in Final Cut, which seemed odd. Sending the project to Color went smoothly, but I must have had some old settings in there because when I sent it back to Final Cut suddenly I was working in ProRes. I went from a data rate of about 3,000 kbps to 64 mbps.
That’s not exactly an efficient use of disk space.
Anyway, I’m excited to see what other people do with the the phone, video wise. I wouldn’t be surprised to see entire filmmaking communities develop around the device. It’s just so much fun to shoot with, and to challenge yourself in spite of the hardware’s limitations.
For years I’ve been using Billable to track my time and create invoices. It’s simple, I’ll give it that. The application is focused only on tasks, clients & invoices. Unfortunately Billable’s time-tracker is stuck inside the application. It’s too often that I’ve forgotten to turn it off (or on) when switching between tasks. I realize that’s probably more my own fault than Billable’s, but without that timer out in the open, it might as well not exist. It’s a decent median application that gets the job done. It’s just not quite what I’m looking for.
Lately I’ve been using The Hit List to track tasks. Everything from household items to professional deadlines. I’m a big fan of keeping only one to do list.
I really think The Hit List could be great for my time tracking workflow except for one significant limitation — there’s currently no way to input time manually. If you forgot to set the timer when you started you’re out of luck.
Granted The Hit List is in beta still (until November? ugh) so this could just be something overlooked. Afterall you can click in the ‘actual time’ field and edit the numbers therein. They just don’t stick.
I know that other applications — Billings, for example — work for other people. Most have too many features, or subscription plans that I don’t want any part of. Everything I’ve tried feels like too much or too little. I don’t need to keep track of every single detail. But I do need to track individual items, and group them accordingly.
I guess I’ll stick it out with Billable for now. But in such a crowded market, I’m surprised there aren’t more median products to choose from.
As Apple throws all caution to the wind by skipping two full versions between iterations 7 and 10, I can’t help but wonder what QuickTime X — and Snow Leopard — means for the future of Final Cut Studio.
For now the only information I can find is the bit about ColorSync that was mentioned in the WWDC Keynote on Monday, and the small section under Snow Leopard’s New Technologies heading. ColorSync is Apple’s system for maintaining consistency across imaging devices like displays, printers, scanners, and digital cameras so that the color viewed on screen is the same as the color printed out.
Maybe this means an end to those tricky gamma-shift issues that occurred when exporting to specific formats in Compressor.
Snow Leopard is due out in September, so it would be great to hear something about Final Cut Studio around then, but I won’t get my hopes up. I wouldn’t be too surprised if it’s April before we hear any mention of Final Cut Studio 3. But holy cow, that would have to be some upgrade, right? It will have been three years since the last major release, and I expect the Final Cut team have been keeping themselves busy since 2007 — especially with all those new Snow Leopard goodies like Grand Central Dispatch to play with.
