Michael Shivers + mdshivers Creative Media » Blog

I've installed Firefox 3 on one of my Mac's, but I've been patiently waiting to install it on my main system and laptop. Why? Well for the past 3 years I have lived on Google Sync for Firefox. This is a extension that you install for Firefox that allows you to sync all of your bookmarks on mulitple machines and platforms. It's awesome and it really works well. All of my bookmarks reside on there. And if I am on Safari and find a link, I'll open up firefox and bookmark it there.
I've got .Mac and it provides the same ultility for Safari. But it doesn't even come close to the functionality and power of Google Sync.
.Mac is a paid service and Google Sync is free. Well I read yesterday that Google is no longer going to support Sync. This really stinks, because if you are like me, bookmarking can make or break your work flow, your ability to learn new things and be able to access that information on multiple computers.

So now I am trying to get my .Mac account fixed and all cleaned up. So far the first few tries have been not too good.
So all you Firefox Google Sync users, you got till the end of the year for support on Firefox 2.

Posted by Michael Shivers at 08:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What a great idea that Tori Amos came up with. She's providing high resolution video clips of her new music video to download from her website. You can download all the clips and make a version of your own and enter it into the contest. Aspiring editors will be able to do what ever they want to it and make it their own. The footage has green screen all over it, so not only can you do some fun edits, you can key the green out and put your own footage, art graphics in it.

Needless to say, this sounds like a fun opportunity. Hopefully I can devote some time to do this... deadline is November 24th. Winners get an I-Pod Touch and tickets to the concert.

http://www.sonymusic.com/artists/ToriAmos/bouncingoffclouds/

happy editing!!

Posted by Michael Shivers at 03:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well it's about that time. October 26th is quickly approaching. The new version of OSX is about to be released. I've seen some great stuff floating around the web showing new features of Leopard, but Apple's new guided tour is one of the best.
Here are some links to get you familar with what is coming out on friday. These are some of my favorite addtions:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/guidedtour/

List of all 300 new features
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html

.Mac's new ablility to share screens/harddrives. Now this makes me want to buy .Mac once and for all.
It's called Back to my Mac
http://www.apple.com/dotmac/backtomymac.html

Posted by Michael Shivers at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Apple Safari on a PC, originally uploaded by mdshivers.

click for larger
I can't believe it. Apple just a few minutes ago has released their web surfing application on for XP/Vista. I've installed it on a XP box. Looks great and pretty snappy. I have noticed when you customize the toolbar, it crashes. I've surfed a few sites and it really does go fast.

The new brush metal finish looks great.

I remember when I-Tunes came out for PC, it was a strange world to see Mac software on a PC. It was awesome... like a family member that you haven't seen forever all of a sudden appears out of no where.

Posted by Michael Shivers at 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Someone on a flickr forum asked a question about how Aperture handles RAW files and if it was possible to send RAW files for RAW processing to another program. Also another question raised was comparing the two different programs in how they handle RAW processing.

@ Aperture handling sending RAW files to another program,

Yes, Aperture automatically handles all the RAW settings. When you open it with another program, you have to convert it to another file format. It can't send a native RAW file to another program. So you can't use ACR to change the settings of your RAW file inside Aperture. You could open the original file inside Finder, change your settings in ACR or Lightroom and then save it as another file format. ACR or Lightroom also doesn't let you edit RAW and save changes to that RAW file and then send the RAW file to another program. RAW conversion only happens once when you need to export the file. You can keep the original RAW with adjustments but it has to live in the native program that you editied with. (ACR,Lightroom,Aperture).

Hopefully in the future these programs can export RAW to another program and be able to reimport RAW.

hopefully this makes since :)

@ comparing ACR/Lightroom with Apeture Raw settings:

I have all three and I really enjoy Aperture's interface and auto tools. But when I need to get a specific look, I have to send it to photoshop.
One thing I love about Lightroom is the presets for adjusting RAW. It seems to be way advanced from Aperture and there are several settings that Apeture doesn't have. There are several websites now that you can download these presets for free or a small price. Excellent.

I am very happy with Apeture and it's file management and interface. But i really like Lightroom's RAW settings and presets. Guess I'll be using both and making sure Apeture mangages my files.

Posted by Michael Shivers at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I got on my PowerMac G5 2.3x2 this morning and my hard drives were really going to town. I looked up and saw Spotlight was indexing. I clicked on it and it says it's indexing my computer and will take 15 hours.

That's really strange. No external hard drives, no new hard drives and no new data. But it's starting over. I guess that it got corrupted or something.

I've had this particular PowerMac for about 2 years, so obviously Spotlight has ran before.

Any ideas?

Posted by Michael Shivers at 09:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For those who use the Adobe Creative Suite Software- I'd wait on the purchase. They are announcing CS3 on March 27th and shipping it later this spring. For Mac users, this will be Intel ready. Adobe calls it "the largest software release in it's 25 history."

http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/03/05/cs3/index.php

Posted by Michael Shivers at 03:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've joined in on several discussions and blogs talking about the best way to backup your Aperture library immediately and long term.

Obviously you can use Aperture's great backup feature called the "Vault". That is smart actions that you take to choose a location to where you want to backup Aperture's files and when you update your photo library or make significant changes, the vault icon will turn red telling you to update. It's recommended to use an external hard drive or at least another hard drive that your main library is not on.

SO what if you want to use DVD's to backup? Well I've been mulling over this for a while. I want to have multiple backups and I want to have a disc based backup too. So the recently released Roxio Toast 8 for Mac came to mind. I just got it a few days ago and my findings are that it's a great upgrade from the older version. It does "Disc Spanning" for both Mac and PC on the same disc. So say my photo library is 100 gigs it would take about 25 4.7 gig discs to use. Toast will automatically embed the software needed to read the spanned disk and will restore your library.

Now optically what should you backup? At first I thought hands down just back up the aperture original library. Drag it into Toast and it will tell you how many discs it will take. Then after I started it, it was going to take about 30min on each disk with verification. Bah. that's a lot of time. So I canceled it and decided to think about it more.

If I backup my Aperture library in it's entirety, I need Aperture to read it when I want to recover it if something goes wrong. So what if I want just my photos and not all the data base stuff? I then thought it would be best to export all of my masters by Year/Month/Day and in a Folder called PhotoBackup. Then I could have all of my original photos backup (it doesn't do versions but it will export PSD files as masters). So i dragged the Parent folder "Photobackup" into Roxio Toast 8 and then do a cross platform disc span.

Now I have all of my photos in their original form backed up to Mac and PC format. Now I'm not swithching to PC anytime soon, but it's nice to know that I have the option. Also if I wanted to stop using Aperture for the next best app, i can just import my Photobackup with the Year/Month/Day scheme into another program. And then my photos aren't archived and be required to have Aperture to open them up. (I'm thinking long term here folks!)

Posted by Michael Shivers at 09:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm a little disappointed with this year's Macworld. Now granted the new I-Phone is amazing. i mean it really really is probably the best phone, ipod, dohicky i have ever seen. But I don't have Cingular phone service. And I have a 1 year 1/2 service contact left on my current plan. So steve spent almost the whole presentation on the i-phone. Which is cool but i can't use it right now! But I can use the new Apple TV. A little device that streams and stores media from your computer. Movies,photos,video,tv,etc. That is only $300.

But we didn't hear about I-Works '07 or I-Life '07! That was completly surprising. nor any mac updates.

so yeah it was cool, but i wanted more.

Posted by Michael Shivers at 02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

His steveness will be showing of all the new stuff.

My Predictions:

New Cinema Display
New I-Pod
8-core Mac Pro
I-TV with hard drive
I-Life'07
I-Work '07
I-Phone
and maybe just maybe something else.

Posted by Michael Shivers at 06:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After days of trying to print with Aperture to my Epson R200, I wasn't have much success. I followed all the rules, change the setting in the Epson R200 perfences to Photo RPM, and turn off color management. Back in forth etc. Print borderless was usless and I was having color banding issues and my prints looked horrible. I tried everything!

Untill i did more research.

Conclusions to all of the headaches and sleepless nights...

For some reason when you add the Epson R200 to your printer set up using the "plus" key it adds the wrong drivers and wrong color proflies. It says it's it but it isnt'.
You have to delete the one you added "normally" and go about it another way.

1. System Pref - Printers and Util
2. click add printer with plus sign
3. more printers
4. choose Epson USB under the drop down menu
5. click on the Stylus photo .....
6. under drop down menu for Page setup choose "Sheet Feeder Borderless"
7. Go back to Aperture and follow all the normal rules of printing.

MY LIFE HAS CHANGED.

well may be not too much but i've got consitent good looking real bona fide borderless printing now on my trusty R200.

I'm excited and I can finish the christmas gifts that I had in the works!

Posted by Michael Shivers at 08:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you are in the mulitimedia field or ever deal with PowerPoint presentations and movies and AVI's, and you have Mac and PC or your client has a PC and you have a Mac or something to that degree- well the world has gotten a little bit easier with some good 'ol open source software.

What is it you say? Well its Perian. How has this made my life more easier? Part of what I do is create presentations for people and they are usually filled with AVI's. Now Powerpoint for Mac and Powerpoint for Win are two different apps really. And there are issues with embedding movies in one of the programs/platform and then watching it on a different platform. The Mac uses the quicktime architecture to make it happen and windows uses windows media driver- which is different than windows media player. (Good 'ol windows to screw things up.)

Ok- i am side tracking here. Back to my original point. AVI's and MOV's are both container files. you can put lots of different types of files inside the container.

Well Perian will let Quicktime play those screwy AVI files MS-MPEG4 v1, MS-MPEG4 v2, MS-MPEG4 v3, (and more) that Quicktime just can't play until now.

So download it- make your Mac life easier.

Posted by Michael Shivers at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Indeed it is. wow-- Apple came out with some cool stuff! New shuffle,Video Ipods, and nanos. Also updated Itunes 7 and a sneak peak at their new content streaming device code name I-TV. man that is going to be awsome.

I was expecting a little more- maybe I have my expectations too high lately, but over all its a good annoucement.

I mean now you can buy movies off of I-tunes and watch it! very cool. They will be a great way for independent film makers to get their content online.

Funny now that Apple is stuck with the I-Tunes name. They did change it to I-Tunes Store from I-tunes music store.

ok- i give you some feed back of itunes 7 when i can download it!

Posted by Michael Shivers at 01:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well you've probably already heard this, but Apple is coming out with some big stuff today. Last week the introduced the 24inch I-Mac (haven't seen it yet) and today they have a special announcement. Well I just checked out I-Tunes and its completly black the the text "It's showtime- The I-tunes store is being updated"

SO here are my predictions:

Full Length Movies
New Wide screen I-Pod
Streaming device from computer to TV so you can watch your downloaded movies
I-Tunes 7.0
I am going to want to spend a lot of money by the end of the day
Burnable Movies

Well- it starts at 1pm est time- and they already took down the music store. Wow. let the fun begin!

Posted by Michael Shivers at 07:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"iStat pro 3.0 is the next incarnation of the chart topping system monitoring widget.
4 new skins are included which all feature fully anti-aliased cpu and memory usage graphs complete with beautiful gradients.
Also added is the ability to choose which drives, network interfaces, temp sensors and fan sensors are displayed, giving you complete control over what you want to monitor.

Due to popular demand the Processes section previously found in the 1.0 release has been re-added.

As with previous releases iStat pro 3.0 is completly free although we do accept donations(islayer.com/paypal.php). "

What's new in version 3?
4 new and completely different skin designs that make better use of screen space.
Fully anti-aliased cpu and memory graphs, drawn by our iStat Cocoa plugin.
A new "Processes" section that lists the top five tasks.
The ability to control which drives, network interfaces, temp sensors and fan sensors are shown or hidden.
A new icon to match the new skins.

Download it here

Posted by Michael Shivers at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As a sad side note, my PowerMac's harddrive passed
away rather suddenly earlier this week. She started
having problems on Sunday- shortness of breath not
able to get up and move around, the usual signs. I
realized that she wasn't going to make it, so I
bought some expensive medication to help her recover
but didn't work. I put her to rest on tuesday after
having a long heated night of unwarrented recitation.

I replaced her yesterday with a new larger yet faster
model that will hopefully serve to a degree that elder
would be proud of. I was able tp transplant most of
her important organs to the new sibling, which made
her death much much more bearable.

o here is here is the lesson learned:
I had no warning what so ever that disk was failing.
Never made noise, S.M.A.R.T verified on Disk Utility
and Disk Warrior. I had a perfectly good backup but
was older. So I started a brand new back up and while
doing that the harddrive died. Which left me with no
bootable backup.

I will also run Disk Warrior now as a precation instead
of when everything has hit the fan. So if you can
afford it, have two backups on hand. If one fails when
updating, and then your master disk dies, then you have
the second backup to refer too.

I can't afford two backups now, but hopefully soon.
Tonight I am backing up my fresh install with fingers crossed!

mdshivers

Posted by Michael Shivers at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)