It's time to revisit the popular Carbon Copy Cloner program that allows you to create an exact copy of your source machine onto an external hard drive. I recently tested this by backing up my Mac Book Pro running Snow Leopard. It took about 1 1/2 hours to back up 80 Gigs to my portable pocket drive running at 5400 RPM. The latest version also allows you to create incremental backups that can be scheduled. You can even back everything up to a remote Mac on a Network. To create a backup of your entire... (read more)

Media Composer makes it easy to trim asymmetrically (simultaneously trimming some elements to the right and some to the left), but the technique contains a subtle bug. If you make an asymmetrical trim that eliminates a clip by trimming it away, the roller attached to that clip doesn’t know where to go — and it [...] Read More... (read more)

If you thought that there were more than enough tapeless recording devices already on the market by Focus Enhancements, Edirol and Convergent Designs, you would only be partially right. The AJA Ki Pro sparked a lot of enthusiasm at NAB 2009. While it clearly offers cameramen many benefits, it also provides some opportunities for the [...] Read More... (read more)

If you’re using Avid’s new DX hardware (Nitris or Mojo), then you’ve probably been using “Fast Scrub,” perhaps without knowing it. This is a slick new feature that makes the timeline more responsive, by dramatically improving the number of frames displayed as you drag. Fast Scrub offers some of the smoothest timeline performance in the [...] Read More... (read more)

Designorati is an online publication for creative professionals in the fields of visual design (web design, typography, graphic design, illustration, and so on), written by a team of creative professionals who themselves have many years of experience. It’s somewhat unusual for the site to carry a review of music software, but I am delighted that [...] Read More... (read more)

Christian Foerster has started a new Avid screencast of video tips that you can subscribe to via iTunes. There’s only one episode so far, but it’s very nicely done. Check it out. His website is avidscreencast.com. The itunes page is here. Read More... (read more)

Blackmagic Design’s UltraScope gained a lot of buzz at NAB 2009. In a time when fewer facilities are spending precious budget dollars on high-end video and technical monitors, the UltraScope seems to fit the bill for a high-quality, but low-cost waveform monitor and vectorscope. It doesn’t answer all needs, but if you are interested in [...] Read More... (read more)

Composer and Sibelius and Pro Tools user Howard Goodall recently added an Emmy to his long list of accolades when his soundtrack for the joint BBC-HBO production Into The Storm picked up the award for Music Composition for a Mini series, Movie, or Special (Dramatic Score). The film, which first aired in the US at [...] Read More... (read more)

Gain more flexibility during production with Read Audio Timecode, a feature in Avid Media Composer that allows you to capture audio and video separately and then automatically synchronize the sources together as you begin editing. During production, you... (read more)

The November issue of Music Tech magazine contains an article about the live tour of Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds, the seminal 1977 album that is as popular as ever some 30 years on. Sibelius played an important part in taking Jeff’s original handwritten scores and bringint them bang up to date. Speaking in [...] Read More... (read more)

It’s the end of a long day and you’re working on a complex timeline: eight or ten audio tracks, many video tracks. You’ve been patching your source material all day long and the patch panel is scrambled. Now you want to cut something straight across. Maybe you’re assembling two sequences together, maybe you’re integrating part [...] Read More... (read more)

Alexander Prior is a 16-year old British composer and conductor who has been studying at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in Russia for the past four years. A quite remarkable prodigy, he was featured in a Channel 4 documentary series earlier this year called The World’s Greatest Musical Prodigies. Alex uses Sibelius, and has prepared many of [...] Read More... (read more)

The Music For Youth Schools Prom is one of the musical events I most look forward to each year. More than 3,000 young people from schools all over the UK converge on the Royal Albert Hall in London for a three-night series of concerts that showcase some of the remarkable music that is made in [...] Read More... (read more)

People like competition for its own sake, so the NLE argument – just like other platform wars – never dies. In the past year, Apple and Avid have broken new ground with very solid updates to their flagship editor applications. Apple with its introduction of the “new” Final Cut Studio, featuring Final Cut Pro 7 [...] Read More... (read more)

Two weeks ago I was fortunate enough to attend an editing workshop with double Emmy award winning editor Kris Trexler where we looked at how he cuts the genre he’s most known for namely television comedy. Suffice to say I got a great deal from the two... (read more)