Arts IT Savvy

There are some OS X keyboard shortcuts you don’t want to forget when, for example, your bluetooth mouse runs out of juice and you can’t find your tether-mouse, like, control-F2 (highlight the menu bar). Others you need to know when the computer is off or staring up; e.g. hold down the C key to boot from an optical drive. Having forgotten some of these useful shortcuts once too often I’ve put together a handy-dandy, double-sided, tri-fold crib sheet containing every default (many are configurable) OS X keyboard shortcut I could think of. I thought this might be of use to others so here it is: Default OS X Shortcut Keys (external link). Comments, sugestions, corrections etc. always welcome. – Originally posted at PSDC.

Which may not mean a lot to most people, but they produced the software I blogged about on here recently called VisualHub and AudialHub.  The second I didn’t get to try out in the end, and the first is the primary solution I use for converting video files from one format to another, and in my case specifically, producing the iPod compatible mp4 files (H264 codec).

Apparently the products will still be compatible with the next Mac OS (10.6 – Snow Leopard), but with the recipient hardware changing regularly and rapidly (iPods etc), the software will become dated very quickly.

It is disappointing, and somewhat surprising that they’ve simply closed their doors and discontinued the product, rather than selling it.  Guess I will be looking for a new conversion solution in the near future.

The Turbo264 is ok, but doesn’t produce as small a file with the same quality, and more importantly, cannot handle static images (such as powerpoint slides) inside the video file – they tend to run like a watercolour painting in a rainstorm – weird, and unusable.

This goes way beyond what I normally wanted as less technical info on this site, but at least having it listed here might be useful one day.

I’m having problems with a backup harddrive and keep getting “Time Machine Error Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while creating the backup directory.”  Really useful information.

So I decided to try to find out what is actually wrong, so step one was to try to create a directory myself on that drive.  “Error Code -50″ Now that was useful.

So I tracked down the Apple error codes, and found that it means “Error in user parameter list”.  Guess that is good to know.  Don’t know what it means (yet).

One program that I have found invaluable since its release has been Adobe Lightroom. It is aimed at professional photographers, but is certainly not limited in value to them.

I currently have a photo library of over 18000 images, and Lightroom not only catalogues the collection, making it easy for me to find the image that I want, but also provides a full suite of tools to enhance the images for when I need to use them.

There are colour correction tools, cropping tools, and on and on. I used to use Adobe Photoshop a great deal – pretty much every image I worked with spent some time inside that program to tidy it up, and that step has been replaced in literally 99.9% of cases with the workflow being completed inside Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (to use its full name).

One really beneficial aspect of the program, is ALL the changes you make to the image are non-destructive, and I can’t emphasise just how important that fact is on so many levels.

The point of this entry is that Lightroom 2 is now available – with a swag of new and enhanced features added. Oh, and it is for both PC and Mac.

A quick note – the makers of Visual Hub (an amazing video conversion program) have now released an audio conversion program called AudialHub.

If their video conversion program is anything to go by, this audio conversion program will be a must get!

I’ll report back once I have had a chance to put it through its paces.

This is not going to be a long discussion on all the ins and outs, or even requirements of converting videos, but a look at 2 solutions, one hardware, one software.

I have been using a MacBook Pro to do the conversions, and to date have been using a program called Visual Hub – a really cool (Australian?) program that can convert videos from many different formats to another, including mp4, mov, avi, flv etc.

An alternative is a hardware solution, called the Elgato Turbo.264.

It is touted as being a co processor for the video conversion (and with a significant speed gain)

I have been giving the Elgato a serious workout, and am becoming increasingly impressed with the device. For some reason the first tests were underperforming, but since then, speed has increased 3 fold. As I write this, I have a conversion happening in the background, and there is still plenty of CPU spare for other tasks. The Turbo.264 and associated program are consuming around 60-70% of the CPU, and it is encoding at a cool 90 frames per second. (Update – the fastest now experienced has been 149 frames per second. I was almost expecting to smell burnt rubber!)

The software equivalent encodes around 30 – 60 FPS, and consumes every bit of resource available, and almost 100% more again. (I know that doesn’t make sense, but what does 180% of the CPU actually mean?)

If it continues to be as impressive, this will quickly become an indispensable device for anyone doing this sort of function – whether that be converting movies from DVD to watch on an iPod, preparing videos for podcasting/delivering video online etc.

The Turbo.264’s onboard processor encodes video into the H264 codec with approximately the capabilities of a 2.GHz Core 2 duo Mac.  If your computer is faster than this, you may be able to encode it quicker with a software only solution (although it will consume more resources to do so).  If you have a computer slower, then this will definitely give a huge boost in performance.  On a PowerPC for example, the Turbo completely outstrips the CPU for performance, so will turn an otherwise slow old computer into quite a reasonable H264 encoder.

In any respect, the graphs Elgato use compare the Turbo to the encoding done with Quicktime.  Based on that, I’d certainly say that Quicktime is a poor choice for H264 conversion – there are much faster software-only solutions.

At the moment, you can only use one Turbo.264 at a time- I’m hoping in the future that there will be the ability to double them up for a further performance boost.

There are a few products out there that can convert the spoken word to text, but the two standouts are still:

Dragon Naturally Speaking Preferred (currently version 9) for Windows, with an education price of $154 (+GST) and

MacSpeech Dictate for Mac (Intel based Macs only) for $363 (+GST) (which includes a headset).

Despite years of development, we are still a long way off from a perfect solution, and both these require you to train the computer in your speech style and syntax. I have found in the past that the accuracy of the package is greatly improved if you submit some of your written work into it, as it then learns how you write, and can improve its ability to anticipate your next word (similar to how we interpret what someone is saying to us – from the context, we have an idea of what is coming up, so are listening out for specific words rather than the entire vocabulary).

Where the programs will still undergo significant development is understanding multiple speakers. At the moment, they are very good at recognising an individual’s spoken words, but cannot handle (for example) a group discussion.

Ok, so the second part is a furphy – the Apple Operating System (OS X) will not be seen on any PCs anytime soon. Also, to clarify – A Mac is a Mac, and by definition is a PC (personal computer), but it has become common usage to distinguish between an Apple Mac and a Windows based computer (PC).

And now, the basis for this article, that definition becomes even more gray, as an Intel Mac (ie one that came out in the last few years, with an Intel CPU) can be used to run Windows.

What is more, you can either run Windows in a window inside the Mac OS, or you can use Windows as the Mac OS. It can even get more confusing.

For example, I run an Apple ][e emulator inside a Windows virtual machine running inside Apple OSX on a Mac laptop. So is my laptop a Mac, a PC, an Apple ][e, or some weird genetic (silicon life) science experiment that has gone horribly wrong?

Ok - back to what really matters here. If you have an Intel Mac of some form, you can run Windows on it, simultaneously with the Apple Operating System (OS X) (OS X means (mac) Operating System 10, and the current version is 10.5, which is also known as “Leopard”)

The Windows….uh window….can either be on the desktop, can be full screen (so it just looks like a Windows machine, or can be run in a Unity, or Coherence mode (depending on what program you are using to create the virtual machine) which means the Windows programs and the Mac programs all appear to run within the OS X system.

There are 2 main programs out there doing this (allowing Windows to run within OS X) – Parallels and VMware Fusion.

I have been finding that the VMware Fusion to be the better choice of the two – bit more stable, better coherence (what they call Unity) mode etc.

Another new development in the world of Web 2.0

This add-on for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari (ie it works under Windows and OSX) is a way of presenting images and videos in a new way that makes searching through a stack of images and videos very quick and easy.

It is using a similar concept to Cover-Flow in iTunes (and on the latest iPods) to present the images / video thumbnails that you can then zoom in on to get the higher resolutions.

Hard to explain in words – so watch the video and see just how powerful the web is becoming!

As an added bonus, you can also use PicLens to view directories of your own images.

Check out http://piclens.com/demo/ and http://blog.cooliris.com to learn more.

Something that comes up time and again, is the need to be able to record, and manipulate sound files. There are plenty of programs that can do this, but one that is really worth considering is Audacity.

It works on Windows and OSX machines, and as an added advantage (other than being powerful enough for most users), it happens to be free.

Contact the ArtsIT Helpdesk for more information, and availability.

This is a typical screenshot of the program. Might look complicated, but really it can be as simple or as complex as you’d like.

Whether you want to edit out a few clicks, and noises within the sound file, or crop some areas out, fade others down in volume, or edit a few sound files together, Audacity can handle all these tasks very easily.