We at bexmedia find ourselves constantly relying on little utilities that help our work flow better and us make better video.
We thought it might be useful to put a list of utilities together that have helped us out in the past and can help you.
Mpegstreamclip
This is a fantastic little encoder and encodes way quicker than using Apple Compressor (non-clustered).
It’s based on the QuickTime framework and will take all the codecs out of your library and allow for full control over them. It has great batch workflows to set your jobs up overnight and the new version allows for a basic watermark to be added.
It is a little hard to get used to and the user interface is a little bit clunky but a well-deserved number 1 spot on our list!
LINK HERE
Switch
Switch is a great little app. especially if you are working with Final Cut Pro and Mp3’s
We all know final cut doesn’t like mp3’s and loves .Aiffs, right? Ok we can open up the mp3 in ITunes, make the conversion settings and convert it, re-find it, and copy it into final cut. Phew that’s a few steps isn’t it!
Switch makes this a whole lot easier. Simply drag the file or files on to the switch app and you can batch convert to .Aiff or other flavours of audio file.
Oh and there is a check box at the bottom to save them in the same directory from where they came.
All settings can be changed for each encode allowing optimisation of the quality and you can even normalise too!
LINK HERE
Flash Media Live Encoder
This is a great utility if you ever want to play with webcasting. At bexmedia we do this a fair bit, so this is an essential piece in our tool-kit.
It allows you to encode a live video source on your mac and send it to a media server for distribution across the web.
You can set all the parameters to allow for the right bandwidth profile. This is a powerful bit of kit but be warned you need a fairly good machine to make it run well.
Grand Perspective
Ever wondered why all the space on your mac seems to be used up and you can’t find the culprit, look no further than Grand Perspective.
It will show you where that massive uncompressed video file is! It uses some nice visualisation based on folder structure that will highlight the large files easily.
You can then go and inspect them in finder and delete them if you are sure!
Black Magic Disc Speed Test
In hunting around we found this great application that allows us to test drives and work out if there is one that REALLY isn’t suited to video! In-fact in that batch of drives we found a 20% variation on the drives we tested! This is a great app and it plays great with all types of drive, internal and external.
That’s all for now folks, I hope that this was interesting and useful and please check back for more updates!