Here is a trick for dramatically improving AVCHD / MTS files using VLC. I was getting a lot of skipping on my macbook and now I have buttery smooth playback.
Thanks to this post on the Photography Within blog, I’ve now found a trick that enables VLC to play these files very smoothly – you just have to change one setting:
Go to Tools > Preferences
In the lower left of the box click the checkbox “Show settings – All”
Then go to Input & Codecs > Other Codecs > FFmpeg and look for the option called “Skip the loop filter for H.264 decoding”
Change it from “none” to “all”
Restart VLC
So I am working on a project in Premiere Pro CS4. I imported a composition from After Effects using Dynamic Link. When I exported the final movie the portion from After Effects rendered as just a black screen. Turn out the problem was that the After Effects FPS did not match the Premiere Time Line FPS. It took me forever to figure this out.
This is the tip that help me figure it out:
Apparently in 4.2.1 there is a bug that if the fps of the Dynamically linked comp is not the same as the sequence fps…it won’t render the comp.
I changed the comp from 30fps to 29.97 to match the sequence and it rendered.
Firefox 3.5+ on the Mac cannot automatically detect what monitor profile you are using and just assumes the profile is sRGB. So even though Firefox 3.5+ does Color Correction correctly, it won’t work correctly because it doesn’t know what the profile your monitor is.
Here is an example:
In order to get things working right you have to tell Firefox where the correct profile is. To do that you have to enter “about:config” in the location bar. Then set:
gfx.color_management.mode to 1
gfx.color_management.display_profile to the location where your profile is.
Your profile is either here: /Library/ColorSync/Profiles/Displays/
or: /Users/[username]/Library/ColorSync
Well, I may have finally crossed over to full on Mac Addict status. I went and got an Airport Extreme… a wireless router from Apple. I looked around and I had a hard time finding another router that did all that the apple does and was much cheaper. There are definitely comparable routers out there, but if I can buy apple for the same amount of money, why not! Also since I am a federal employee I got a $20 discount.
Right now I have it setup in a spare room. I have it wired to a USB hub and have two drives and a printer hooked up to it. It is pretty much like a little server. I had a little trouble getting Airdisk to work at first for Time Machine backups. It seemed to work after switching around the password scheme used for the disk.
So now I have made 3 different apple purchases in the last year. I have also got a Mac Mini and a MacBook. No a bad year.
Well after looking around at small TVs we finally decided just to get a 32″ Samsung, the 32b460. So far it works great and has a great picture. It cost the same amount as the 26″ Sony TV. It is about 6″ wider, but we could still fit it on the dresser no problem. Photos to come.
So we are in the market for a new TV for the bedroom. We have an old 13″ TV, but it will stop working once everything goes digital.
We picked up a Vizio VA22LF from Target. It is a 22″ LCD TV with 1080p… pretty impressive. The only problem is that the viewing angles aren’t the best. We have it on a dresser and the colors get all distorted if you are sitting on the ground. This is because of the type of panel in smaller LCD TV. They tend to be TN type panels which have color shift when viewed at off angles. That said, this would be a great TV for using as a monitor/TV on a desk.
The smallest TV I have managed to find with a good viewing angle is a 26″ Sony. Both the Sony KDL-26M4000 (2008) and KDL-26L5000 (2009) have 178 degree viewing angle both horizontally and vertically. I think they are using an ISP type panel. Either way these are the only 26″ or smaller that had decent viewing angles. The only problem is that it is 720p. The resolution is not a problem if your just using it as a TV, however it is not much if you are going to use it as a monitor.
I had recently redesigned the start page for Cookography.com. Unfortunately it broke under IE6. I didn’t know about it for a bit. It am going to go through and correct things and keep a log of it here. I found a great overview on all the stupid things IE6 does here.
- Width are calculated differently. In all new browsers, div width does not include padding or border. In IE6 a DIV width includes padding and border. However, no matter how big your borders are, they only count for 1 pixel. (actually this may not be correct, now I am just as confused.) Sometimes it seems to calculate widt correctly
- The other problem is if you float a DIV it will double your margins. Adding a display: inline, seems to help. Sometimes you need to add a _margin and set the margin that way
- IE6 is the only browser that will interpurt a CSS element with a _ before it.
Of the week I thought it would be a good idea to upgrade Cookography to Wordpress 2.7. I have never really had trouble with upgrade, so I didn’t bother to do any sort of backup.
Unfortunately when I finished the upgrade, all I got was a blank screen. Not a good sign. I figured I had uploaded something incorrectly so I did a full upgrade, deleting all of the old files first. Still nothing. Then I figured it was something whacky with my FTP program. I was using the free CyberDuck program for the Mac. I hadn’t tried upgrading on a Mac before, so I figured the FTP was doing something weird. Anyhow I registered my copy of Transmit, which is supposed to be a better program. When I uploaded Transmit asked me if I wanted to Overwrite the directories. I click yes, because I wanted to add the new stuff to the website. However overwrite meant completely removing all the custom content I had like themes. Anyhow after what was pretty much a clean install I was still getting a blank page.
Finally after googling around, I found this webpage . Turns out I had an extract line at the end of my config file. UGH! After fixing that, everything worked fine… minus the content I had customized. Luckily I had done a back up sort of recently. Still lesson learned. BACKUP!
So I have had my Mac for about a month and I am still digging it. I like it so much that I have actually gone out and purchased some software for it. I just got Adobe Lightroom, which is great photo workflow/mangement program. It lets you go through your photo collection. Here are the highlights:
- Tag photos with keywords
- Organize them into collections
- Edit them, all changes are virtual which means the original is untouched
- Since the editing is virtual, you can keep multiple virtual copies
- Export selected photos and correctly resize and do special processing.
The end result is that it is easy to go through a bunch of photos, find the ones you want, clean those up, export one downsized version for the web and export another color corrected version for printing, all while keeping the original version intact. With photoshop, you would have to create a custom folder structure where you save different version and come up with some custom scripts. Not fun!
So far I am loving Lightroom, and it is helping me go through more photos.
I also purchase Ecto for blogging. It is not my favorite blogging client. I still like Windows Live Writer better, but Ecto is the best Mac blogging client out there. I searched around and I couldn’t find anything that came close. It has a decent WSIWYG Rich Text editor that allows you to simply drag photos in. It can also resize photos right in the program, if you need that. So far it is getting the job done. I think I will come to love, it is just a change. I think it may also be the first Shareware program I have purchased.
The next thing up for me is a FTP client. It is a show down between Transmit and Cyberduck. Transmit may win out, but Cyberduck is pretty good!