mac

Sep

2013

Change AVCHD packages to folders on a Mac

(Warning: use the following tips and tools at your own risk. Always back up your original media, and never work directly on your only copy!)

AVCHD Media and Mountain Lion

Apple’s OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion has added a new feature for playing AVCHD media, and along with this feature, they automatically treat AVCHD folder structures as packages. They are still navigable in Finder via the “Show package contents” contextual menu, but this isn’t always ideal.

OS X 10.8 shows AVCHD folder structures as packages

When is a Folder Not a Folder?

One tip mentioned a few places online is renaming folders in the AVCHD structure so that OS X no longer recognizes it as a special item and presents it in Finder directly as a simple folder. One clever variation on this idea is renaming the folders such that they’re lowercase — renaming PRIVATE to private, AVCHD to avchd, BDMV to bdmv, etc. This keeps the names intact and shouldn’t spoil case-insensitive file paths, but since AVCHD is not supposed to be lowercase, OS X doesn’t treat it as AVCHD.

Renaming to lowercase preserves the names, but prevents OS X 10.8 from displaying the AVCHD folder structure as a package.

While the all-uppercase to all-lowercase renaming is theoretically reversible, please note that renaming folders does permanently change their modification dates.

Automation

Renaming these folders in the Finder is tedious, so I’ve written two Automator workflows. The first, called AVCHD Package to Folders traverses the folder structure and renames everything inside it to be all lowercase. The second, called AVCHD Folders to Package, traverses the folder structure and renames everything inside it to be all uppercase. These workflows can be installed as services, making them available in the Finder contextual menus via right-click, or they can be installed as applications, which accept drag and drop from the Finder.

Again, use these at your own risk, and please always duplicate your AVCHD originals (the entire folder structure) for safekeeping. Using these tools on files or folders other than AVCHD media is possible, and if you do, it will destroy any mixed-case naming in the folder structure you run it on. I haven’t broken anything here yet, but you might not be so lucky!

Of course, comments and feedback are most welcome.

You can download the Automator workflows here:

Download AVCHD Package Folder Services

Download AVCHD Package Folder Apps

Double-clicking the services items will allow you to install them as services (right-click in Finder), or allow you to open the workflows in Automator. Dragging and dropping folders onto the apps will run them; dragging and dropping the apps onto Automator should open the workflows for examination.

If you’d prefer to build them yourself, here are some screenshots from Automator that show exactly what these do.

Screenshot of the AVCHD Package to Folders workflow

Screenshot of the AVCHD Folders to Package workflow

Dec

2009

Smoke on Mac

Autodesk Smoke 2010 for Mac

Smoke on Mac: It’s Here

Big news: Autodesk has released Smoke on Mac. Smoke is Autodesk’s editorial finishing solution. It combines editing, color correction, and compositing into one application.

This is an important release for a couple reasons. Firstly, price: what used to be available only as a $150,000 turnkey Linux system is now available, software only, for just under $15,000 (around $50-60k with new hardware). Secondly, QuickTime: Smoke on Mac uses the QuickTime libraries, so it can understand QuickTime acquisition/intermediate codecs (ProRes!) natively, instead of forcing users to transcode to image sequences. Thirdly, workflow: Smoke can live on an Final Cut Pro edit system, import FCP timelines via XML, and reference the original FCP media with transcoding.

I went to a demo earlier this week in New York, and seeing Smoke in action was impressive. The demo emphasized the Final Cut workflow, basic keying, and motion tracking. The workflow is tight, the rendering is fast, and the output is beautiful.

The Business Case

Watching the demo, Smoke didn’t strike me as being more capable per se than my existing tools; there wasn’t anything there I couldn’t accomplish with my Final Cut Pro / Cinema 4D /After Effects / Color tool-chain. However, it is way faster, and way easier at many finishing tasks, especially pulling keys and motion tracking. It’s also all available in a single application, so baking effects, round-tripping, and managing edits is greatly simplified. While Smoke won’t automatically make your projects look better, it will simplify your workflow and reduce your finishing time.

For shops whose primary business is editing and compositing, or who frequently do client sessions, this is almost a no-brainer. For shops like mine whose work is more graphics-driven and unsupervised, I’m not sure Smoke would become a daily part of the workflow.

For freelancers, I’d suspect that this release will create incredible demand for talented Smoke artists, and there is no time like the present to get up to speed.

There are just a few things that give me pause about the system, and that are keeping my Amex in my wallet. There are currently no plugins (called “Sparks” in Autodesk nomenclature) available, limiting what Smoke can accomplish natively. I imagine this is temporary, and I’m eagerly watching GenArts and The Foundry to see how they react. Smoke’s built-in color corrector, with a primary and three secondaries, strikes me as a big step down from Color. Also, Smoke is qualified only on NVIDIA Quadro cards, and Apple Color prefers ATI Radeons, so it may be necessary to maintain multiple finishing workstations, defeating the point of the “all-on-one-box” approach.

This Is Not iSmoke

Smoke is the first product in a long time targeted at the middle tier of post-production. Its price, system requirements, and learning curve put it beyond the reach of many low-end shops and freelancers, but it is well within range of serious small shops as well as the larger houses.

It’s worth noting that Smoke on Mac is not a watered-down version of its turnkey Brother. It has the same feature set as Smoke HD; it’s only missing Batch from Smoke Advanced.

Where There’s Smoke…

I’m really curious to see what the ramifications of Smoke on Mac turn out to be. Is Autodesk dipping their toe in the software-only water, or would they like to exit the turnkey workstation market? Will we ever see a Mac version of Lustre? How will other high-end developers react?

Autodesk has released a 30-day demo of Smoke on Mac, so please: ladies and gentlemen, start your engines.

Aug

2009

Time Management on a Mac

Open the Date & Time system preference pane on Mac OS X

Activate Mac OS X setting for speaking the time aloud on the half-hour

When you’re working on a project, it’s all too easy to get lost in the zone. You’re getting work done, but you’re unaware of the passage of time. While this state of flow has some huge benefits, it makes it hard to manage your time effectively, especially if you’ve got multiple deliverables and tight deadlines.

Mac OS X has a built-in system option that speaks the time aloud on the interval of your choice—every hour, half hour, or quarter hour. It’s pretty unobtrusive, and the new voice for Leopard is vastly improved over the speech synthesis from Mac OS 9.

I have this enabled on my workstation to help keep me on track through the day. It just takes a few clicks. Open System Preferences, and open the Date & Time preference pane. From there, choose the Clock tab, and tick the Announce the time box.