Archive for July 2008

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Heard in Passing

July 16, 2008

I continue to hear good reports about Media Composer 3.0. Yesterday, I talked to somebody at a rental house who is supporting a show running five new Macintosh-based MC systems using the new hardware and cutting DNX36. So far, very solid. And I’ve heard from several friends who are running MC-software that they like what they are seeing. Some will say that reports like this are long overdue, and I wouldn’t disagree. But it seems that Avid’s long effort to kill bugs and improve reliability and efficiency is paying off.

Meanwhile, I’ve talked to members of the editing faculty at two Los Angeles film schools who all indicated that students tend to come in much more comfortable with Final Cut, but after being exposed to both MC and FCP at school, they almost always end up preferring MC as an editing tool.

Both comments are little more than rumors. Take them for what they’re worth. But in my experience there’s a trend here. Media Composer is improving, and people are noticing.

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Categories: Avid vs. Final Cut

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SuperDuper

July 14, 2008

As a lot of you probably know, SuperDuper is a great Mac backup application. I recently used it to restore a laptop with a dead drive, and I was reminded of just how good it is. Even if you’re using Apple’s Time Machine, you ought to check it out.

SuperDuper clones your drive. That’s all. But because it can do an incremental clone, something the company calls “Smart Update,” the software becomes a sort of all-purpose backup solution. In many cases, especially with the failure of physical media, it’s exactly what you want.

It can either clone your drive to another physical drive — creating a fully bootable, identical copy — or it clone it to a disk image, a single file that can co-exist with other data on a drive. Either way, you can use Smart Update to compare the copy to the source and only update the changes. This takes just a few minutes.

I the case of the laptop I resuscitated, I used a disk image. With a new, working drive installed, the procedure goes like this: plug in the backup drive, boot the machine with the OSX installer DVD, open Disk Utility, open the disk image, and click the Restore tab. Drag the image to the source well and the disk to the destination well. Click Restore. That’s it.

In an hour and a half I had the computer working again.

SuperDuper is really handy when you’re going to do a big system upgrade. If things don’t go well, it’s trivial to get back to where you were before the change.

The basic version is free and you can use it to do normal backups. To use Smart Update you’ll have to pay $28. I call that a bargain.

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Categories: Avid Technical Tips

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