Archive for September 2007

Two Useful Buttons for Your Keyboard

September 13, 2007

Here are a couple of keyboard shortcuts that I’ve grown very fond of recently:

Return to Previous Trim

Option-Trim

As my sequences get more complicated, I set up more complex roller combinations in order to trim them. I’ll trim something, drop out of trim mode to check a cut in context and often want to return to the previous trim and make an adjustment. We’ve been asking for “return to previous trim” for a decade or more, and Avid has finally added it in recent versions of Adrenaline. It’s invoked by holding down the option key and hitting the trim mode button. I like it so much that I’ve added it to my keyboard. Doing so is a two step process. First drag the Trim Mode button from the Other tab in the Command Palette to your keyboard settings. Then drag the “Add Option Key” button on top of the trim mode button. This creates a trim mode button with a little dot on it. When you hit it, you’re hitting option-trim.


Turn Waveforms On and Off

Waveforms On-Off

When making a first cut I now leave waveforms on all the time. It’s just too useful to have them visible and with a fast G5 or Intel Mac they display quickly. But with longer sequences it’s another story — it just takes too long for waveforms to update. So I’ve come to use a keyboard shortcut to turn them on and off. That makes it trivially simple to leave them on most of the time but quickly get them out of the way when they’re slowing things down. To do this, select “Menu to Button Reassignment” in the command palette, and click on the key you want to dedicate to this function. Then click on the timeline popup menu (the timeline “hamburger”) and select Audio Data > Sample Plot. The letters “SP” will appear on your chosen key. Just hit that key to turn waveforms on or off.

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The Next Debate Will Not Be Broadcast

September 3, 2007

Turns out that there will be another Democratic debate — next weekend, Sept 9, in Miami. How do I know? It was buried in an article in Sunday’s NY Times — on page 18! A big 2-page “Election Calendar” (which wasn’t published online) didn’t even mention it. It took me ten minutes of Internet research to get the particulars.

It’s being broadcast — by Univision — but apparently won’t be aired in LA. Yea, I guess nobody’s interested in a debate from Miami. What a backwater! It sure has nothing to do with presidential politics.

We have a US post office today because our nation’s founders thought that an informed public was an essential prerequisite for democracy. Today, we’re supposed to get our candidate information from late night television, network pundits and 30-second spots.

Isn’t it self-evident that these debates should be aired live nationwide and should be on the Internet as soon as they’re over?

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Two Bucks an Episode?

September 2, 2007

On Thursday, NBC indicated that it would not renew its contract to sell television episodes on the iTunes store. Though nobody is absolutely certain of the reasons, money is certainly one of them. Then, on Friday, Apple retaliated by dumping NBC shows ahead of the contract expiration date, but NBC disputed this.

The whole thing strikes me funny. Apple charges $1.99 per episode, and apparently, that isn’t enough for NBC. But if you look at what the networks make when you watch a show over the air, that sure looks like big money to me. If you divide the total commercial revenues for a typical prime time show by the number of people watching, you get a figure more like 50 cents per viewer. So when you buy a show for $1.99, you’re really being gouged. True, watching the network broadcast isn’t exactly the same as buying a digital file that you can look at over and over again, but you could easily Tivo or tape the broadcast, and thus own it, and, in any event, who wants to permanently own an episode of a TV show? How many times are you really going to watch it?

I’d love to buy my TV and watch it ad-free. But give it to me for a reasonable price — the same price the network is getting when advertisers pay for access to my eyeballs.

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