Essential Tools: Carbon Copy Cloner

Carbon Copy Cloner is a utility for performing an exact clone of your hard disk. The idea is that you install your operating system and software and then immediately run Carbon Copy Cloner. The program will create a bootable disk image on a separate disk or machine. If you run into problems in the future, you can then immediately boot from this image and instantly have a working system again.

The problems people have been running into lately make this an essential utility for video editors, or indeed anyone who cannot afford any system downtime.

The software is donationware, which means you can download a fully working version for free but a donation is appreciated.

New tool: Aspect Ratio Calc

We've just added a new online tool to the site. Aspect Ratio Calc allows you to calculate the aspect ratio of various film and video formats. It also offers you the ability to work out the pixel width or height of the footage based on the aspect ratio.

This tool is very useful in ensuring that you are meeting the standards specified by your broadcaster or distributor, and also to make sure that you are delivering at the correct resolution and aspect ratio when creating CG footage from scratch.

It is available in standard and iPhone versions. We also have tools for calculating the disk space taken up by video footage and calculating the number of film reels needed to shoot a certain number of hours of footage. See our Resources section for more details.

Tool bug fixes - improved browser support

I made a few bug fixes today to the web tools we offer. I had had a couple of reports of them not working at all for some people but I couldn't work out why that would be. Turns out that MS Internet Explorer differs slightly to Firefox and Safari on how it processes certain aspects of Javascript code. These issues are now fixed and the tools will work for Internet Explorer users now.

I also improved the XML validity of the mobile versions so these should be a little less browser-fussy now.

I owe it all to a little tool called ie4osx that allows you to run Internet Explorer 5 and up on an Intel Mac through Darwine. It's really useful for me because you don't have to install an entire operating system just to use one program. It comes highly recommended

The tools are located in the Resources section of the site.

New site feature: Glossary

We've now got a Post Production Glossary up and running at the site. This is intended as a reference for our clients and we hope it will give people more of an insight into the post production process and any complex terms we may use. We will be updating it regularly.

If you can think of anything we're missing or spot a mistake, please click on the Feedback link at the bottom of the page. As always, your views are highly appreciated.

Offline tools

We've had a lot of requests for this, and it took a while but your wishes have now been granted: we are now offering offline versions of our tools.

This means that you can use them in the field even when you are not near a wi-fi point. It's very easy: you go to the resources section, click the "Offline version" link for the tool of your choice and then bookmark the resulting link in your browser. You can then access the page and all of its functions without needing to be connected to the internet.

Please note that we are constantly updating and improving our tools and often times the changes will not be immediately obvious, so it is advisable to update your bookmarks regularly to make sure you are not running an outdated version.

Footage Calc (offline)
Film Rate Calc (offline)

New tool features

We've updated our online tools to allow you to link not just to the page but specific settings as well. This is great for showing friends, clients or colleagues the results of the calculation without having to get them to give them settings to enter manually.

Just click the "Link to this calculation" link at the bottom of the page you can then copy the location from the address bar on your browser and pass it on to someone else.

The updated tools are here:
Footage Calc
Film Rate Calc

And their mobile equivalents are here:
Footage Calc Mobile
Film Rate Calc Mobile

As always, use the feedback function at the bottom of the page to give us your suggestions.

Alsoft DiskWarrior

Now this is a piece of software no Mac user should be without. I can't count the number of occasions that this has saved my life.

There are a lot of occasions where an external hard drive will become corrupted and refuse to mount or appear in Disk Utility. If it doesn't appear in Disk Utility, you can't use the Repair Disk function to fix it so you might think that your only solution is to wipe the whole disk, losing all of your data in the process.

DiskWarrior can detect disks that Disk Utility can't and it will scan them for errors (you'd be surprised how many errors even an operational hard drive has) and repair them, bringing the drive back into operation again and saving your data. The only times that the software has failed to work for me were when drives had physical damage and obviously the software can't do anything about that.

It's not free but you have to ask yourself how much you would lose if your data was destroyed. It is available here for $99.95 and it is well worth it.

New Tool: Film Rate Calculator

We've just released a new online tool to our Resources section, Film Rate Calc.

This tool enables you to calculate the amount of film required to shoot for a certain amount of time, and vice versa. This is really useful in planning the most efficient use of your film and should be in any script supervisor's toolkit.

We also offer a mobile version for those on the move. It's aesthetically designed for the iPhone but should work on any modern phone browser.

As always, we appreciate your feedback and will use it to improve our tools. Just use the link at the bottom of each page to tell us what you think.