I’m going to try to recreate it, but I don’t have high hopes. Let me know if you’ve run into this before.

It turns out the noise is just the default render error noise. I guess I’ve been lucky enough to not hear it before! Oh yeah, it’s also more like a sheep than a donkey.

Walter Soyka said this on the creative cow post

You can trigger the goat sound effect manually in AE by shift-clicking on the second line of the effects panel (the one that identifies which layer is selected, i.e., “Comp 1 • Black Solid”).

There you go!

At work I am working my way through nuke, and it is really a pain to be able to use Mocha with AE but not nuke. The simplest fix would be to buy Mocha for nuke, but the powers that be haven’t done that yet, so I had to figure out a way. I got to thinking the other day, and tracking data at it’s simplest is only x,y points, so what is stopping me? It turns out that the only thing is formatting!

I whipped up a quick applescript to strip the x,y data out of the MochAE exported text file and put it into 4 separate txt files for nuke. It’s really that simple! One thing that you need to do in nuke is to set the y axis to (frame height-curve) because the two apps have a different coordinate system.

After all of this I have a passable workflow, but I want to stress that if you have enough dough to be using nuke, buy Mocha! This app is intentionally a little rough around the edges because I don’t like the idea of taking away anyone else’s business. It also isn’t a replacement for the standalone Mocha; it doesn’t offer any of the other (quite worthwhile) features. It’s a fun little hack, and hopefully it helps someone out of a jam somewhere, but if you need this, then you need to buy the full version of mocha!
Click here to download the MochAE to Nuke converter

The first script is called “Render Notification 1.0.2” by Josh Petok from the current cut. It is a nice little script that watches the processor usage of a few pre-selected apps and will email you when the load goes down. In other words it alerts you to your render finishing. This is possible in a few other ways, but there hasn’t been a nice clean solution that works across multiple apps before.
Josh’s version is available for download here.
I poked around in the code a little bit and enabled it to work with after effects. This is relatively untested, so it might give you an email too early or too late. All credit goes to Josh, as I’m just adding a few lines of code to his.
If you’re feeling lucky, you can try the AE compatible version here.

The second script is the strangely named “AE Suicide” (try to find an ad for that google!) from scott at http://scott.j38.net/. It is a great little app that does one thing: it kills after effects! AE has a pretty good crash control system built in so that if it crashes, then it generally will save a version of your project file to you current directory. The only problem is that AE also loves to hang. It will get stuck for hours if not indefinitely. What this app does is it gives AE the little nudge off of the cliff that it needs for it’s self-preservation to kick in and save out a file. The author does have a disclaimer saying that it doesn’t always work, but then again if it ever works it is better than the alternative.

You can download AE Suicide here

If you have any other useful workflow scripts I would love to hear about them! Hit me up on the “Contact me!” box to the right, or leave them in the comments!

Money Money Money – “Gettin’ Money With a Mouse and a Wacom Pen (Fuck Comic Sans Fuck Papyrus, Too)” from Brad Chmielewski on Vimeo.

So, keep it RGB, and stay in school!

Do you use any ingest management software? (such as fcp loader or flow by gridiron)
Network setup (do you edit off of a san / internal drives / external drives)
backup plan for old jobs?
do you have any network rendering set up? for what apps?
what do you use as your go-to codec?
do you have any must-have hardware?
how frequently do you version your project files?
(how) do you name your assets?
how do you arrange your folder structures?
Do you have a preferred bin structure in final cut?

Also, what are the worst parts of your current setup? Is there anything that you would like to implement but can’t?

Feel free to post in the comments, email me at r at this domain, or use the comment form in the sidebar. I can’t wait to hear what you have to say!

Overview – The Intuos 4 is Wacom’ latest offering into the input tablet arena. It is available in 4 sizes. The smallest is 6.2″ x 3.9″ and the largest is 18.2″ x 12″. There is also one wireless model. They offer the bamboo line on the lower end and Cintiq on the higher end. The Cintiq line is really neat in that you are able to draw directly on the screen, but it also comes in at around a grand for the smallest (12 inch) model. I have the large Intuos, and I would LOVE to use the Cintiq, but you came here looking for a review, not a wish list, so…

mouse – good but not great. the felt layer that it slides on gets gummed up pretty quickly and develops some stiction. That gets rather annoying. The scroll wheel + button in addition to the buttons in front of and behind the wheel make for a good variety of options without having to shift your hand position. I could see mapping the scroll click to insert edit, and the other two to cut and paste. One cool feature is that you can hit the ‘precision mode’ button and gear down your mouse speed by a lot. That is great when dealing with a fiddly mask.

Pen- This is obviously the main reason for using a wacom. My only qualms about the pen are due to my own difficulties in using it. The behavior of the pen tool and the mouse are different by default. I only recently switched the pen mode to mouse mode and it has been much easier to use.
Other than my own frustrations the pen works great. Pressure sensitivity in the adobe suite is great. The physical “pen flip maneuver” to switch to the eraser makes perfect sense, and it just feels more tangible than trying to draw with a bulky mouse.

User-Definable keys: To the left of the tablet (or right, as it is ambidextrous) are 8 buttons and a scroll wheel. You can set them in the Wacom preference panel. I generally have issues with these buttons as I have my left hand on the keyboard 100% of the time, but they may certainly be useful in some specific tasks.

jog wheel – works great for scrolling through a clip, but when the timeline is selected it merely moves the focus, not the playhead. This can also be set to zoom the work area, change brush size, scroll through layers, and change rotation by clicking the center of the scroll wheel.

radial menu – not that cool, it creates a heads-up display that allows you to select menu items from a circular array. If my left hand wasn’t already on a 100+ key keyboard this might prove useful. As it is my muscle memory for being able to remember command-tab to switch app is much better than hitting the radial menu button, then using the pen to go to the northwest quadrant to select “change app”. I’m sure it has uses, but not for me currently.

Now before I get too carried away, let’s back up. One thing that has quickly revealed itself about this tablet is that it is very good at specific things. The mouse is ok, but the pen is why people buy it. It has minimal benefit for using in final cut, but it is VERY useful when making masks, rotoing, painting or doing any sort of activity you might ordinarily do with a paintbrush or a pen. Since a lot of these tasks are the kind where you will sit down and crank out 100 frames in a few hours it can be an incredible benefit to have something that makes each frame faster and easier. I guess that explains why I got it as I was starting to do more VFX work.

Overall it is amazing for some things, and adequate at others. I use a traditional mouse alongside the wacom one due to the annoying stiction issue, but when I need to sit down and roto something the pen comes in to save the day. If you are doing vfx or hand-drawn design work then this is a no-brainer. At the time I wrote this amazon has it for $440. It is relatively cheap considering the hourly bill rate of VFX work, and it will definitely give you a boost to productivity. Get it!

Oh yeah, I almost forgot; they make all kinds of different pens, replacement nibs, and pen grips.

If you find yourself working on one of these all day then definitely shop around and make sure you get one that fits your hand.

This script is from macworld, (osx only) but the way they posted is not only horribly un-user-friendly, it also wouldn’t compile without a lot of text massaging. I decided to put it up here to save you the trouble and explain 3 ways it can be used. What it does is to look at a file and see if it is the same size as last time it checked. You can change the interval based on the application, and you can tell it what to do once it has detected the file is “finished”

Here are three (of many) ways it can be used. These are all based on the script below, but they would require you to add code in the section below commented with “–this is where you put your “do when finished” code” The script as it is written will beep 3 times once the file is finished and 5 times if an error occurs. If you end up writing something useful to go with this post it here for others to see!

Firefox download monitor
Set this script to alert you when a big download finishes. A small interval ought to work out provided your connection doesn’t timeout.

Compressor secondary action
If for some reason you don’t want to run an applescript through the default compressor interface you can do it through here. This could be because you are watching it from another computer on the network, or maybe you have other specific needs. This will also allow you to open the exported file directly with an application, which compressor doesn’t let you do.

Export from fcp / after effects secondary action / alert
I guess AE dings when an export is done, but FCP doesn’t do a damn thing. If you run this on your export then it will do your bidding once the exported file is finished.

Here is the code!

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving these_items
-- this is the standard intro for a folder action
try
repeat with f in theItems
-- wait for the item to be all there
set Was to 0
set isNow to 1
repeat while isNow ≠ Was
-- the basic idea is that the script loops until the file size is the same for more than 30 seconds. That means the file has finished copying.
set Was to size of (info for f)
-- this section is getting the file size of the video
delay 30 -- modify this for delay time
set isNow to size of (info for f)
-- this section is sampling the file size 30 seconds later
end repeat
--this is where you put your "do when finished" code
tell application "Finder"
beep 3
end tell
end repeat -- get next item f in thisFolder
on error error_message number error_number
if the error_number is not -128 then
tell application "Finder"
beep 5 --if the script errors out, beep 5x
end tell
end if
end try
end adding folder items to

Copy the code and paste it into Script Editor. Then you can save it, apply it to a folder as a folder action and you are on your way!

PS> as a side note, isn’t it weird that userfriendly doesn’t have a good antonym? anti-user? Userunfriendly?