There are a ton of free tools out there that can help you with minor annoyances and in some circumstances; they can save your editing session. Lets take a look at some of these freebies. The freebies shown this month will save you time and money.
Carbon Copy Cloner
Carbon Copy Cloner is a must-have tool for anyone using a Mac. Carbon Copy Cloner (or CCC) is an image-creating tool. What that means is that CCC will take a snapshot of your operating system, media drives or any other data that needs protection.
Image the scenario where your Mac auto-updates itself and breaks compatibility with your editing software. With Macs, there is no simple way to restore an update that Apple rolled out. That’s where CCC can help you. With CCC, you can back-rev to an image of your Mac that you previously created. This protects you from bad updates, hard drive failures and other nightmare scenarios that editors can face.
Other things that this software can do is create a Mac OS Lion installer. With Lion, Apple changed the way they deploy their operating systems. Gone are the days of installer disks. Apple now provides Lion via the App Store. Once you run the installer, it auto-deletes itself and if you need it again, you need to re-download it from the App Store. CCC will back up your Lion installer to a disk image so you don’t need to re-download.
The CCC user interface is very simple and very intuitive. On the left hand side Source side, you select what drive you want imaged whether it’s your operating system or media drives. The right hand “Destination” side is where you want to store the image you are creating. You can put your images on a network drive, flash drive or wherever you like.
You can download CCC here: http://www.bombich.com/.
AJA System Test and Data Rate Calculator
AJA is one of the most generous companies in our industry. They provide a myriad of free tools for Mac and PC, but the ones that are the best are the AJA System Test and the Data Rate Calculator.
What System Test does is tests the speed of your hard drives. It will calculate the amount of data that your drives can handle. Knowing what your drives are capable of saves you from the scenario of taking on an edit that your hard drives can’t support. Think you are going to edit 3 streams of RED files off your Mac internal hard drive? No way, Jose. These tools will show you with tangible math, why that won’t happen.
In my screen shot below, I see that my internal Macintosh HD is capable of writing 64.9 MB/sec and reading 59.2 MB/sec. I can now take those numbers to the AJA Data Calculator and see what resolutions I can support on that drive.
The AJA Data Calculator is another free tool hat will tell you what your hard drives are capable of in regards to bandwidth. How it works is you select your target video resolution on the “Presets section.” The top “Video” section will show you what you would need for bandwidth to support 1 stream of that video resolution.
The other great aspect of this tool is the “Storage” section on the bottom. This will tell you how much hard drive space you will need to house the media you are ingesting based on your target video resolution and how many minutes of said target video resolution that you plan on housing. So we see below that each stream of RED will be 35.99 MB/sec.
Another good use of this tool is taking a read on your drives the first day you have them, and then doing health checks on them to make sure that your storage is not degrading
You can get all the free AJA tools here: http://www.aja.com/en/products/software/
Disk Inventory X
Disk Inventory X is a Mac hard drive tool that will do an analysis on a hard drive and tell you what is on your drive and how much space it is using. It answers the age-old question “Where did all my hard drive space go?”
When you run Disk Inventory X it will take a few minutes and do a complete audit of the files on any given hard drive. It will then provide you with a very comprehensive report exactly where your space went. The one aspect about this product that really makes it stand out is how it shows you that information.
Once you run your analysis on your hard drive it will provide you with this excellent diagram that shows you how much hard drive space your base OS folders are using and how much space each file type is taking. Each little square in the diagram below represents a different folder. When you click on the square, you get the folder. It’s so simple, its brilliant.
You can download Disk Inventory X here: http://www.derlien.com/
Preference Manager
Preference Manager is used to back up preference files of Mac based editing and creative software. It supports Final Cut Pro, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Creative Suite.
We have all had wonky things happen to our editing systems. Exports crash, playback stutters, bus thread errors…the list goes on and on. You call into tech support and they tell you trash the preferences and somehow magically that fixes the problem, but you have lost all of your editing preferences. Custom export settings, keyboard shortcuts, toolset layouts…it’s all GONE!
What Preference Manager does is lets you do is back up all of your editing preferences for all your editing applications in one click. Take the time to remove preference files one at a time? Or just do it all with one simple click?
What this can also do is make sure that everyone editing in your facility is using the same preferences. You hire 10 editors and 8 of them can export their sequences just fine, but those last 2 editors always seem to have problems. They use the wrong aspect ratio, wrong resolution or even wrong file format. With Preference Manager, you can clone the settings for one of your 8 stellar editors, and paste them on the 2 problematic editors. This eliminates what is known as the “P.I.C.N.I.C.” issue. In other words “Problem In Chair, Not In Computer.
You can download Preference Manager here: http://www.digitalrebellion.com/prefman/
Keep in mind that most of these tools are created by individuals, and where they do not charge you, they will take a donation. So if there is a tool that you use all the time, feel free to donate to keep these tools going.
Steve McGrath is a Broadcast Sales Engineer for HB Communications. He has worked with NBC, ABC, CBS, NESN, NECN, Fox, Versus, ESPN, Reuters, Pentagon, USDA, Powderhouse and many others. You can reach him at Steve.McGrath@HBCommunications.com.