I need to backup or copy all of the files from one server to another but mac users can save their files on windows servers with characters that are illegal for NTFS. OK Don't ask me how they can do it and windows users can't, but they obviously can.
So there may be hundreds of files over multiple directories that will interupt my copy or backup and I do not want to babysit a copy all weekend... wait for error, rename, continue copying...wait for error, rename etc...
The best way I found to solve this is to use PFrank to rename them all.
http://www3.telus.net/pfrank/
I choose to "delete all non-alphanumeric characters in" "all"
and edit the list to include:
(?x)[?"/\:*<>|] # delete non-alphanumeric
That whole line goes in there BTW.
The symbol will also get rid of those little dots underneath characters. Funnily enough, sometimes it looks like a pair of scissors. Weird... but probably not.
So quickly... I have a butterfly that I want animated. I have 3 layers, a body and the 2 wings. On the left wing I center the pivot about where the joint would be using the pan behind tool. I alt-click the rotation y and enter the expressions " wiggle(4,65) ". That works nice.
Now I need the right wing to follow. Obviously the wiggle command won't work because it is completely random and has no memory of where it has been or where it is going. So I alt-click the rotation y again and pickwhip the opposite wings rotation y. Now we have the exact same rotation except we need it to be inverted or opposite... so on the end of the expression, add " /-1 " which means divided by minus 1.
Working...
Add a little of that on the rotation z (I made it (5,6)) and turn on motion blur on the layers and also the comp and were done. It will do anyway for a background element.
OK this is purely for my reference in case I need it at a later date...
During production the default render path for every scene in the TV series has been changed from it's default. There is no inbuilt way to change this path back to it's default, or another path, without opening every scene, opening the render network node and selecting 'default' as the path.
So to avoid spending days on such a menial task, I instead used textpad to load all of the .scene files and do a replace using this expression:
Search: <drawingname val="[^"]*/
Replace with: <drawingName val="frames/
That's it.
There are a couple of apps out there that will allow editing of mpeg2, mpeg 4, h.264 etc... footage without the quality loss of re-encoding. MPEG Video Wizard (MPVW) is what I have been using for 6-8 months and it has been fantastic. Adobe Premiere fails to render ANY long form projects (I doubt I will be able to hold myself back from a rant in this blog about Premiere's flaws for long, but I will try...), so I am forced to render into segments. We have timelines full of Quicktimes or tiff sequences and break them up into 5-10 mpeg2 (DVD) files. I simply import them into MPVW, drop them on the timeline and render out a perfect resulting dvd file for Adobe Encore for DVD Authoring.
I had tried simple joining programs but the results were non-standard so unaccepted by authoring programs, where as this process is flawless... to this point.
Now comes the next step. Blu Ray joining and editing cannot be done in MPVW unfortunately so I have been on the hunt for another alternative. So far I have found 2 promising apps.
Smart Cutter http://www.fame-ring.com/products.html ($40)
AVS Video Remaker http://www.avs4you.com/AVS-Video-ReMaker.aspx (for all their apps: $199 unlimited, or $70 for a yearly subscription).
Both products are similar for DVD and Blu-Ray but AVS does more than just authoring formats (also AVI, Quicktime, WMV, Flash ...) so the clear winner there. AVS also has a better interface and clearer workflow. i.e. you can fire up the app and do what you need to do with little or no help, unlike Smart Cutter, which is a great app but I needed the help file to do joining of multiple files. AVS also will create simple menus and will burn. What I do love about Smart Cutter though, is it has a portable version. I LOVE portable apps! Any chance I get to use a portable version of an app I will. Smart Cutter can also fix the streams, which gives more more confidence that it will produce a compliant output.
If you don't need the extra avi, mov etc editing then the portable Smart Cutter would be great, else AVS seems like the go.
I had better mention I have not done much testing with these apps yet to say whether they remain format compliant (i.e. will be accepted, or even work once burnt, by authoring apps). I will update once I have.
Of course there are more higher end programs that probably provide similar functionality, but I am only looking for the quickest and most efficient way.
Another 2 that are available are
Elecard AVC HD Editor http://www.elecard.com/products/products-pc/consumer/avchd-editor/ ($49.95)
TSPE Transport Stream Packet Editor http://www.bitstreamtools.com/ (shareware, yay)
Both do only DVD and Blu-Ray with not much else. I prefer the portable or extra features of AVS and Smart Cutter, although shareware and the claim that it does wide compatibility makes TSPE well worth looking into.
Sony Vegas and Nero can edit without re-encoding under certain conditions as well, but find more hit and miss results. Plus I would never use Nero, period! I hear great things about Vegas though and appears to be a great product. Even some professionals have gotten decent results out of it, but in regard to non-re-encoding, it is overkill and not designed specifically for this.
The End
We brought an Sony EX1 camera a little while back and while using Adobe After Effects there were some real issues with being able to edit the footage. We would get black frames all the time, random ones. You could edit them out, but lots more would appear. The answer I finally found was to extract the video (m2v) and audio (wav) out of the mp4 container. Attached is the setup and files needed for that. So edit the file locations in the ExToMpeg2.cmd file to reflect where you have put the files. Then just drop and mp4 files into the ToConvert folder and double click the .cmd file and they will get extracted to the Converted folder, all ready and able to be used in After Effects or other app.
We have an email exchange and a couple of apple mac's which we use pop3 for. Pretty much every time the exchange is rebooted it will start up with pop3 not working, even though it says it has started. I stop the service, then kill it, then start it again. This seems to do the trick - If I recall this info is from another site (thanks to that smart person!):
Yes more wacom issues. We tried a couple of other brands of tablet to compare and if they worked, they never worked as well as the Wacoms! So I can bear with a few problems here and there.
