MediaStorm’s Guide to Backing Up

There are two types of people, the saying goes, those whose hard drives have already failed and those whose will. That's why it's important to have redundancy. For every drive you use, you should always have a backup. At MediaStorm, we keep our system software–the OS and all applications including Final Cut Pro–on a drive named A. The media for our projects reside on a B drive. We have a duplicate of each that is backed up religiously. A gets backed up to A_backup; B to B_backup. For that task we use SuperDuper! from shirt-pocket.com. The application copies the entirety of the drive to it's respective clone. In other words, you are mirroring the whole drive, not just backing up specific folders. SuperDuper's! one window interface is quite simple. Simply choose the drive you'd like to back up from the Copy pulldown menu and the backup destination from the to: menu. Choose…

Continue ReadingMediaStorm’s Guide to Backing Up

MediaStorm’s Guide to One-Frame Audio Fades

In previous blog posts, I've described the cure-all properties of the one-frame fade. (See Ten Ways to Improve Your Multimedia Production Right Now and Ten Tips for Working with Music in Multimedia). Here's how to set up a one-frame fade as your default audio transition: Open the Effects window (command-5). In the Audio Transitions folder, note that one of the transitions has a line beneath it. The line indicates that it's the default transition. If you have not previously changed the fade time, you'll see '00:00:01;00' in the length column. That's a default time of one second, zero frames. Highlight the number in the length column and enter '1' (just the number, no quotes). Then, press return. Your default transition time should now be set to one frame. Sometimes though, due to a Final Cut bug, you may find that when you now select an audio edit point and add the default…

Continue ReadingMediaStorm’s Guide to One-Frame Audio Fades