October 7, 2007

October 5, 2007 Pages (October 7 follows)
Since I already have posted an October 5 entry to my blog and I want to write some more with pages on the MacBook, I will name this document October 5,2007 Pages. I was using the Alienware computer and found that it will not log on to the internet through the airport extreme, which it did yesterday. I really do not understand what is going on, so I took it back to the office, plugged in the ethernet cable and started to download OpenOffice.Org which I wanted to play around with. I used to have NeoOffice.org on the PowerBook but took it off when I was running out of disk space. At the moment I have 11.5 GB of available space so I don’t want to put it on here. Anyway I am using Pages as my experimental word processing program.

I received the upgrade to Final Cut Studio today and wonder if I have enough space to install it on the MacBook. Will it remove the old program as it installs the new? If it does not I will certainly run out of space on the hard drive. I do not think I can install it on a firewire drive. I believe it has to be installed on the boot drive. I could backup the system to the firewire drive with SuperDuper, boot from the firewire drive and then install the new system on that drive.

I like the way the text for Pages looks on the computer screen as I type. I am using the default font which is Helvetica-12. This is something I can do sitting in the blue recliner without being connected to the internet. I would, however like to get the wireless network working on the earthlink DSL connection. I am also going through some lessons for Flash MX on the MacBook.

October 7, 2007
The information on Final Cut Studio 2 upgrade says that it requires 30.6 GB of memory. There is 10.19 GB available on the Macintosh HD on the PowerBook. So I backed up the hard drive to a firewire drive with SuperDuper! I then proceeded to install Final Cut Studio 2 to the firewire drive. The first time through it gave up when I got to the last installation disk (motion content) and it quit installing so I had to cancel and start over again. The second time through the installation worked fine and I ended up installing Final Cut Pro 6, Color (new to FCP studio), Motion 3, Soundtrack Pro 2, Compressor 3, and DVD Studio Pro 4 on the firewire drive named BT3. I then booted the system from BT3 and tried out the new installation of Final Cut Pro, it assigned the BT3 drive as the repository for distribution files. I did not input any new video from a camcorder or tape deck at this time but I did set up a new project to work on the Prairie Project footage from Bill, Rud, Bob, and Al. I then rebooted the system from the original hard drive, opened up the old version of FCP and exported four quicktime movies, the in progress videos for Bill’s Prairie Project (2.26 GB), Rud’s Prairie Project (6 GB), Bob’s Prairie Project (3.39 GB), and Al’s Prairie Project (3.09 GB) to the BT3 hard drive. The distribution files were on another external hard drive, Summer2007, so I had that attached to the computer via a USB port during the process. I also moved a folder of Al’s audio files (399.5 MB) to the BT3 hard drive.

This was Sunday and time to check that all my responses to student assignments and email responses were up to date so I could post the student gradebooks for Ed 602 and Ed 603 to the internet and save backups of the two class folders and the practical press folder, to another external hard drive (BT5).

I then rebooted the system from the BT3 hard drive and proceeded to get all the exported files in to a Final Cut Pro 6 project. This went just fine, I imported all the video clips and the audio files. These are large files (as video files are) but when I import them into the FCP project the files are not copied, the FCP project just has pointers to the files which remain on the BT3 hard drive. I then created a sequence for each of the four prairie projects, dragged the project file to the timeline and saved the entire collection. I am now ready to edit the footage, add the audio to Al’s project, and get the edited output to a DVD disk. I will need to get some audio background from Bob for his project, but for the moment I will back it up with some music. I have some royalty free (or royalty paid for) music from Gene Michael Productions (AV117 Bluegrass Treasures) that I think would work nicely.

Tomorrow, I plan on getting started with the editing of the prairie projects, and when that is finished add videos from the Burnt Roots Tour to the mix.