Some of you may want to have screen casts recorded with screenflow that work on an iPad. Not only that, you’ll probably want chapter markers too. If so, here are the following export settings you’ll need. Be sure to do a small export test using in and out points and not to go over either 1024x768 or 1280x720. You can actually bump a little past both, but not much. Safer to stay underneath the supposed physical size limits.

Most important is having the Multipass, as not setting this will render your movie unusable by an iPad.

Sorry, couldn’t help the fifth element reference.

Since moving my home server to Snow Leopard, AKA OS X 10.6 I recently bought a drobo to keep all my archives on for relatively fast access. At least faster than searching my archives with CD Finder, then pulling out the appropriate DVD to restore. One thing that I was really excited to use was spotlight on my archives. After setting up my AFP shares to my drobo, I tried searching. I got a big fat nothing. Local or networked, a big fat nothing in the results. I looked in my sharing preferences which had Enable Spotlight Indexing properly checked. Hopefully, if you’re reading this you had this problem too. The solution is simple (at least it was for me).

Make sure that you turn on SMB sharing as well.

Once I enabled SMB on the same drive/folder that was running the AFP share, the spotlight icon lit up instantly to show that it was indexing. Now I have a healthy 1GB index instead of the paltry 1.1MB that works quite well over the network. I guess the question I’m left with is why in the hell do you need to enable SMB, a non apple file format in order to get spotlight to index a network drive?

Andrew Kramer over at videocopilot.net, one of the coolest sites for After Effects tutorials, has a free plugin called Sure Target. In a word, it is awesomeness. It lets you easily shift from 3D element to 3D element with nothing more than setting a few parameters and keyframes for a fluid movement from one object to the next. I’ve scoured the net looking for this very same thing for Cinema 4D to help improve my workflow. Alas, I couldn’t find anything that wouldn’t set me back 70+ bucks so I’ve written an xpresso/c.o.f.f.e.e. setup for Cinema 4D that is based off of the ideas of Andrew Kramer’s “Sure Target” and a variation from one of Tim Clapham’s camera rigs from Making it look great 6. Be warned, this is my first time programming c.o.f.f.e.e.  and I only spent a couple hours on it, so there are bound to be some bugs as I have not tested it with every object in Cinema 4D, and it currently only allows 10 objects. I highly suggest wrapping objects inside of nulls so you can have more control of the objects orientation. As I get some feed back (hopefully) I’ll put together a little FAQ and perhaps a demo and some improvements.

2010.04.04 Update: Now with dolly tracking
With my own personal projects I found the need for individual dolly tracking for each target (just like the original) so I added that functionality into Beta V2.

2010.05.08 Update: Now a release version and new video tutorial
Seems this sucker is getting updated about once a month.

Watch Tutorial | Download Sure Target for Cinema 4D (V1.3)
Download Sure Target Example Scene

It would seem that techsmith loves to torture its mac users saying that their download page contains both the techsmith encoder and decoder to write out your compressed files. Hog wash I say! This is the true hidden link that contains the encoder as well. Don’t forget you’ll need a valid license to install this version:

Techsmith Video Encoder for Mac (Universal)

A lot of sites these days use swfobject. It’s probably one of, if not the the best flash embedders out there. Any site that needs flash, it’s the first library I go for. It’s pretty elegant in its solution:

var flashvars = {};
flashvars.name1 = "hello";
flashvars.name2 = "world";

var params = {};
params.menu = "false";

var attributes = {};
attributes.id = "myDynamicContent";
attributes.name = "myDynamicContent";

swfobject.embedSWF("myContent.swf", "myContent", "300", "120", "9.0.0",
"expressInstall.swf", flashvars, params, attributes);

There is one problem though if you are trying to use the ExternalInterface.Call function with any IE browser. If you are trying to pass attributes and have an attributes tag, such as attributes.id = ‘flashContainer’ (like I did) the ExternalInterface.Call functionality will be totally lost. It will work with Firefox, Safari, Chrome, but not Internet explorer. To fix this issue, I had to change the function, removing the attributes tag all together, making the like this:

swfobject.embedSWF("myContent.swf", "myContent", "300", "120", "9.0.0",
"expressInstall.swf", flashvars, params);

Luckily for this particular project I didn’t need the flash attributes all that bad. This handy tidbit brought to you by 16 hours of debugging.