Author Archives: WG_Mac20Q

FinalCut Express and the magic mouse

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Magic Mouse

Apple Magic MouseI have the Magic Mouse for a couple of weeks now and I have to say it is thumbs up all the way. I was listening to the Mac Geek Gab podcast this morning and Dave was going into huge detail about his experience with the mouse. One of thing he said was about the size of the mouse. It is not very high or thick, or tall and seems small, built for small hands. The comment was that Steve Jobs must have small hands. Well my hands are not that small but for me the mouse is a good size. I had suffered with some RSI pain for about a month prior to getting this mouse and now after using the Magic Mouse for a couple of weeks I now can shake hands with people when we meet without wincing. Definitely a big plus for me there.

Another problem that other people have reported is the tracking speed of the mouse, and perhaps needing to run a third party utility to get to work fast enough. Strangely I have not had that problem. I installed 10.6.2 before I started using the mouse, which could have been a factor with this, and the tracking has been good. I adjusted it to the speed I wanted in System Preferences and that was that. I am working with 2 screens on my iMac also and I can easily track the whole width no hassle whatsoever.

So if you have not had a chance to try one of these Magic Mouse rodents from Apple then I would say you should definitely jump in there and have a play at your local Apple Store.

FinalCut Express

I have been learning how to do things in FinalCut Express during the week and using Lynda.com to teach myself. It is taking some practice time to get my head around the roll, ripple, slip and slide tools but I am getting there. The training videos in Lynda are very good and makes the learning much quicker and in depth. Reading the PDF manual is painful in comparison. So far I have been working on one video with footage I took while at a friends’ horse riding school. I had some good shots in there and I managed to make a short movie with FinalCut Express without too much bother. I struggled with moving clips on the timeline and I still need to learn how to make the audio fade where I want it too. In this case I looked at the length of the audio required and opened up AmadeusPro to do the job for me, but it can be done in FinalCut Express.

Apple - Final Cut Express

In the Lynda training videos there are details on how to set up the preferences to work better. It seems the standard prefs are not the best for working with. If I had not got Lynda.com to work with I would never have found this out. There is always a gap it seems between the designers of software and the users, the lessons are from people that know the application inside out and that is a huge benefit. As part of my learning I have been watching the videos for Final Cut Pro also and there is a separate series that deals with LiveType, the application that deals with titling. I am quite impressed with that application.

I have noticed that there are some small differences between the Express application compared to the Pro but for the most part you can do all that you need in FinalCut Express. For instance one difference is the speed controls. I see that in Pro it is possible to have easing in and out of the speed of a clip or a selection of a clip, so that when ramping the speed you can do it with more finesse. There is no 3 way colour corrector in FinalCut Express, which I saw being used in tutorials on the FinalCut King site. So nothing major anyway and watching the tutorials for the Pro application are also helpful and not potentially confusing.

The first video I sent out of FinalCut Express is now on my channel at YouTube, if you would like to have a look,

Mac user JC Hutchins the author of 7th Son the podcast novel talks

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hutch_clone_largeThis morning I finished editing the interview that I did with J.C. Hutchins. I really had a great chat with him about the craft of writing and about the podcasting part of what he has done. Didn’t get to talk much about the fact that he uses the Mac to do his work in Pages from iWork and with Garageband for making his podcasts of his novels. Maybe I will have to get him back to talk just about being a Mac user.

I really enjoyed talking to him and also enjoyed listening to it again when I edited the interview. If you want to listen you will be able to find the podcast at the Writers20Q web site. JC is a great guy and I teased him a bit about mental hospital experience, which he thought was very funny, he has an excellent  sense of humour which is always good in a person.

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The story that he podcasted is called 7th Son: Descent and is all about human cloning. It is a Science fiction, thriller adventure story and I enjoyed listening to the series.

He now has a book out called Personal Effects: Dark Art and is a fully immersive experience which is augmented by physical items included with the book to allow you to actually take an active role in the adventure. I have started to listen to the prequel story connected to this novel ‘Personal Effects – Sword of Blood‘ and have been enjoying it so far.

Mac20QTip 10 Setting up keyboard shortcuts

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You know when you turn on the caps lock and type in a pile of text then have to either type in again or find a way to change it. How about if you were to turn off the Caps Lock Key, you know you hardly ever use it. Seems that it is more there to annoy than to be useful. Well in this video I show you how to turn off the Caps Lock.

See how you can set up active corners that will work with a modifier key so that it doesn’t just annoy you when you are trying to something in one of the active corners, like hit the Apple in the menu bar at top left.

I made this video with ScreenFlow to capture the screen and narrate, then I put it in Final Cut Express to set it up. It is really the first project I have set up in Final Cut so I was pleased that it went so well. I have been using Lynda.com to learn how to use Final Cut. It cost $25 to get Lynda for a month and I would say that with the quality of the screencasts it is well worth it. I have been doing the TrueType lessons as well as Final Cut.

I have been amazed by the capabilities of LiveType and being able to do some round trip editing between it and FinalCut Express. I have opened a Live Type section in FinalCut Express – gone in and changed it, saved it and returned to Final cut to see it updated ready for action.

Here is the Video and if you want to see in High Definition then go to the YouTube site to watch it in 1280 by 720

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Mac20Q Podcast 72 – Iconfessimageek

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Today I am talking to a guy that nearly confessed to being a makeup guy, you know lipstick and blusher and all that, but did confess to being a geek. Unfortunately his wife is not a Mac person yet but he is working on her, I tell him to get out the thumbscrews. His son aged five though is a computer user with a laptop of his own.

David does have an iMac 20 inch model and is a recent switcher. He got drawn into the Mac world with iPods and moved into it with a white Macbook, he has moved on to a later model MacBook though. He is a firm believer in AppleCare. I have not had AppleCare on any of my Macs but he has got his moneys’ worth out of it.

We talk about Boxee and Plex, I don’t use those because I can’t get the best out of it because I live in Spain. I just wish I could use the BBC iPlayer, I may have to get something that will hide my IP address.

I talk about getting a satellite box from Elgato which will allow me to save things to watch later. He has a Sanyo Xacti video camcorder and loves using iMovie to make professional looking DVDs for the family.

He has his own podcast and is on episode 14 at the moment. He said the latest was going to be about Christmas presents for the Geek in your life.

David confesses to being an inbox zero type and also to having been outside the Milton Keynes Apple Store at 4am in the morning to get an iPhone. He uses Tweetie two and uses Brizzly which is a web based twitter client. There was a Twitter client in the latest MacHeist, Twitterific

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Hooray I finally got my hands on Final Cut Express, Only took 2 weeks to get here from Birmingham to Spain. There is a chance that it was in the post office here for a few days because I didn’t get the note to say it was in the post office to collect. Often the post person is completely useless putting the post in the wrong box. Some of the house owners don’t check their post for months because they don’t live here – they live in Holland or Germany. Then when they do check and find a letter or whatever that is not theirs, they just dump it rather than put in the right box

Grrrr !!

Ah well I have it now just because I called to correos and asked if they had anything for me, or it would have probably sat there for a few more days or weeks. I still am happy to have saved 70 euro by buying off the Apple Store site in the UK rather than getting from the Apple Store Spain.

As soon as I had installed FinalCut Express I had to download a 180 mb  to update it to the latest. I will talk more about how it is going in a blog post and podcast.

Mac20Q Podcast 66 Talking to MacCreate

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canon 450Another of my passions is photography and I am lucky to have David Schloss from MacCreate as a guest who is a photographer too. He tells us about his equipment and how he uses it for his sport photos and also his macro photography. We chat about the new SLR cameras that do video as well as stills. Stock photography gets a mention – I do some micro stock with Fotolia and sell some of my images, both illustrations and photos. I would have to put in more effort though to make it pay me much of money but I do get some money out of it from time to time. It all helps

In the interview we also mention HDR photography and some of our favourite photographers. I like the work by Dave Hill – no not the old Slade guitarist and for HDR there is a guy called ‘Stuck in Customs’ on Flickr He has made a tutorial to show how he does it also.

clapperboardSeeing as I am interested in Video it is great also that the stock sites like fotolia and iStock also sell video clips. I have only uploaded a couple of clips so far of some wind turbines I saw in France. So I will Have to get out and shoot some more.

This week I had to take my mom to the airport at the end of a visit and I decided to drive into Girona to have a look in the Mac shop in the centre of town
I was keen to check out the new magic mouse – I tried it and liked it. The woman in the shop was hovering so I didn’t really play as much as I wanted to but I think I want one. Having the sideways scroll is important for me for the audio editing, and no fear of the ball nipple getting gunked up

ShuttleXpressAlthough I have been tempted to get one of those things that the Final cut pro jockeys like to use, a  Contour ShuttleXpress. The ShuttleXpress is a 5 button Jog & Shuttle Multimedia Control Surface. and it says the ShuttleXpress comes pre-configured for many of the leading Audio and Video applications
I wonder if it is set up for AmadeusPro – but I can see myself using it for Final Cut  Express now that I have got around to buying it. That was the other thing I was asking about in the shop – They did not have in stock though – I have bought online now, because parking is such a pain in Girona

Wanted to check if I would be getting a Spanish version or if it was in English. And it seem that it is available in English – good for me anyway. I actually bought what I wanted from the UK Apple site. I would have paid €248 on the Spanish site and I got it for €181 from the UK. The only thing is that I had to have it sent to a UK address. I should have done this before my mother came to visit and not afterwards.

Mac20Q Tip 8 Recording a Skype Conversation

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I show you how I use Wire Tap Studio to record my interviews and get the output and two separate channels for editing in AmadeusPro. Why I use the lossless export that gives me a .mov file that I have to use other software to split into the two channels rather than just saving directly out. I have a nice work flow that does the job and gives me what I need to edit the interviews for Mac 2 Questions efficiently.

ScreenFlow 2 is ready for distribution and as I have been using the beta to test the new features I can attest that it is a super bit of software. I used it to make the last few screencasts for Mac 20 Questions.

Mac20Q Podcast 65 Ray Ortega

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Ray Ortega otherwise known as the Produce Picker or @Podcasthelper, works as a professional podcaster and I we had an excellent chat about podcasting, using the Mac and making video. Ray searches twitter to find people asking questions about how to podcast then helps them become a better podcaster. Good Man Ray !

So naturally we talked about the equipment that we use to make podcasts and it seems he likes the Heil PR40 microphones. he also has a Blue Snowball, great USB mic. When he is making his video podcasts for the Microbe World Podcast a science technology podcast he gets to use a prosumer Canon video camera and Final Cut Pro for editing the final result.

Ray talked to me about the process that he goes through to make the podcasts for Produce Picker Podcast, telling me about the early episodes being a bit horrible compared to the quality of the content that he produces now. But that is the great thing about podcasting, you can get started with no experience and cheap amateur equipment and move to greater heights when you get further into  podcasting and you know you have gone past the Pod Fade stage of the game.

I asked Ray about the niche he has with produce, as in fruit and veg. and he says that he took the advice, he would give to anyone starting a podcast from new and that is to talk about something that you know about. So seeing as he had been working in that realm for many years while he was a student, it was natural to make a podcast about Fruit and vegetables and how to choose the best from the supermarket or market fruit seller.

At the end of the podcast I asked Ray about the statement that Leo Laporte had made recently which stunned a bemused podcasting world. You would think that Leo Laporte knows what he is talking about seeing as he is doubling his podcasting  income each year, but I don’t agree with him one bit. Listening to podcasts is not hard, you can turn up at a web site and just listen, without any extra equipment. You can easily download a podcast through iTunes or other podcatcher and have the downloaded files ready for your listening pleasure on your computer or even if you feel like it have them transferred automatically to your mp3 player. it doesn’t have to be an iPod either.

PPPlogo300x300It really is not rocket science and all it will take is for the traditional media to promote it in the same way as Twitter is getting mentioned on main stream TV programmes. Podcasting is in its infancy and will evolve more to be hugely popular and not something that has to be explained as it is now, due to it’s newness. The BBC puts out many of its programmes as podcasts and in the U.S the media giants are jumping on the boat to join in with an exciting media that is about to explode.

Obviously Ray and I are biased towards podcasting and there is a possibility that Leo is making statements like that to get his name talked about even more than it already is. Other podcasters have commented on this also. I suspect that podcasting will change as it gets more popular and more of it will be streamed to computers and smart phones, rather than be downloaded. The general public are more and more getting the idea with podcasts and having media available for when they want to watch or listen to it, instead of being hog tied by traditional TV programming.

If you heard the rubbish that leo was talking and would like to comment on it or comment on what I have put in this blog post then please leave a comment. Or you might send  me an email to mac20q at gmail dott com. Looking forward to getting your thought on the matter.

Follow Ray on Twitter  - @podcasthelper