Earlier today I tried to copy a large file I had made in Photoshop and I was told that the operation couldn’t complete because there wasn’t enough room on my hard drive for it. So, I needed a way to get a lot of space back, but I wasn’t sure what was taking up all of the room. I set about looking for ways to see what was going on on my drive and I happened upon some really great tools to help you visualize all your files. The process is called “Treemaps”.
I managed to find free Treemap programs for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. For Windows users, you need to get a copy of WinDirStat (Windows Directory Statistics) HERE. Once installed, you can start it up and tell it to either analyze your whole drive, or specific folders. Here’s how it looks.
There is two options for Mac users. Grand Perspective (Gets up and going really quickly, easy to use) and Disk Inventory X (Longer to scan but a more thorough and detailed interface). Here’s how Grand Perspective looks.
And this is how Disk Inventory X Looks.
For Linux users, you can get KDirStat HERE. I havent tried it yet, but it looks very similar to WinDirStat. This screen capture is from their site.They are all fairly easy to use. Just roll your cursor over the big ones and the filename appears in the bottom left corner of the window. You can then decide which files you want to delete, and start enjoying some free space on your hard drive again.
I am sure there are dozens of methods, and dozens of programs and apps that do wonderful things for your Mac computer running OS X Lion/Mountain Lion, but in my opinion, the folks at Apple have built in the best, quickest, and easiest way to give your Apple computer a boost. It’s called “Repair Permissions”.
A few years ago I was involved heavily in editing high def video for a motorsport operation, and it never ceased to amaze me how much quicker and happier my mac pro was after a permissions repair.
**NOTE** – It can take a while for this operation to complete, so make sure you have plenty of down time before tying up your computer with this procedure.
The good thing about OS X Lion/Mountain Lion is that you don’t have to go and find your install disk to do this anymore (Like you used to have to do with Snow Leopard, Leopard and Tiger). When you installed Lion/Mountain Lion, it created a rescue partition for you, and to access this partition, and speed up your mac, all you gotta do is hold down your “ALT” key, and turn your mac on! Once you here the “BONG” sound, you will see this:
When your Mac boots, it selects the regular hard drive automatically. But when you hold down the ALT key, your telling your Mac that you want to see what other devices you can boot. Lion/Mountain Lion creates a very small “Virtual” hard drive, that you can boot into instead of your normal hard drive and operating system, that lets you perform maintenance operations. To restore your permissions, click the arrow for “Recovery HD”. Your computer will boot from this second partition, leaving your main partition unmounted, so you can perform maintenance.
Once your computer has booted up from the Recovery Hard Disk you will see Utilities Window.
To get started, select the “Disk Utility” option, then click continue in the bottom right corner. The Disk Utility will now open.
Select/Highlight your main hard drive partition (the one you want to speed up) in the left side of the window, and click “First Aid” to get to the repair window. Here you can verify/repair the condition of the disk. I usually just hit “Repair Disk” and let it do its thing. This can take a bit of time, so go put the coffee on!
You will see all kinds of activity, but the only thing you need to worry about is that green text that says the disk is ok, and that the repair is complete. The next step is to click “Repair Permissions”. Again, this may take some time, but when it is complete it will tell you down the bottom of the window in bold font.
When its done, Quit out of Disk Utility using the “Disk Utility” menu bar option.
Then Quit out of the Utilities Window from the Mac OS X Utilities menu bar option.
The final window/step is to click “Restart” from the “Choose Start Up Disk” Window. As we didnt permanently change the start up disk, there is no need to change any other parameters here, just click Restart.
Your computer will now restart (It may take a little longer than normal to do so – so don’t worry if it does!) and hopefully you will notice a pleasant increase in performance!
I have been looking at sites and blogs lately that describe how to make a 3D Anaglyph (viewed using Red/Blue Glasses) picture from a 2D picture using the channel mixer in Adobe Photoshop, and I was wondering if this method could also be implemented in Adobe Premier Pro? After a little bit of testing, and finding a few video’s on Youtube about it, I decided to give it a try.
This video is shot in 720p Hi Def, with great audio, and it does a great job conveying what it is like to be so close to one of these fire breathing monsters. Please check out z400hauls other videos too!
To begin, open Premiere Pro (If you don’t have it, you can download a fully functioning 30 day free trial from Adobe.com) and create a new project. As z400hauls source video is 720P at 30fps (Frames Per Second), I am going to stick with this for my 3D transformation settings.
Once you have created the appropriate editing environment for your videos specs, import your source/donor video by selecting the file menu, dragging down to “Import” and selecting your file.
Once you have it in Premiere Pro, Drag it to the timeline.
The next step is to create a second video track from the first, so we can make the left and right channels required to trick our brains into seeing 3D. To copy the video track only (because we don’t need two identical audio tracks) click the video in the timeline to highlight it (Notice the audio track will highlight as well), then right click it and select “Unlink”. This will unlink the video and audio tracks.
Now you can click on the video track to highlight it only, and the audio track will stay unselected. When your video track only is highlighted, right click it and select “Copy”.
The next step is a little tricky, so follow carefully. Premiere Pro is a bit like Photoshop, in that it uses Layers to build up the scene. If you were to select “Paste” from the edit window now, it will place the copied video on the same track as the original one, which doesn’t help us. We need to place the copied video onto a separate layer, or track, in order to achieve a stereoscopic effect. If you look closely, you will see that video track 1, and audio track 1 are highlighted, and are a different color from the other spare blank tracks that Premier Pro set up for us when we created the document.
This means that these tracks are active and are the ones we are working on. As we want to put video onto video track 2, click the blank area in the video track 1 and audio track 1 attributes bar to deselect them, and then click the blank are next to where it says “Video 2” to Activate/Highlight this track.
Now that we have Video Track 2 selected, we are nearly ready to paste in the second video channel. Premiere Pro will place the video wherever the play head (red vertical line) is, so to make sure our two video tracks line up, press the “Go To In” button to make sure the play head is at the very beginning of the timeline.
Now that the play head is at the beginning of the timeline, and Video Track 2 is selected, click edit from the menu bar, and select “Paste”. Now you have two video tracks! WOOHOO!!!
Now comes the fun part! Our next task is to separate the color channels, and create the “Parallax” effect. This is what tricks our brains into thinking that what we are seeing is 3 Dimensional. As we are creating a Red/Blue Anaglyph 3D effect, we need to separate the red and blue colors in our 2 video tracks. At this point, we will define “Video 2” track as our left/red channel, and “Video 1” track as our right/blue channel. To separate our colors, we will be using the “Color Balance RGB” effect. Open “Video Effects” then “Image Control” and drag and drop the “Color Balance” effect icon onto Video 1 track, and then again onto Video 2 track.
First, lets do the left/red channel. Click the video in the “Video 2” track to highlight it, and in the “Effect Controls” window set the green and blue channels to Zero. This will leave only red.
To create the “Parallax Effect”, whilst in “Effect Control”, click the little triangle next to “Motion” to expand this option so we can tinker with its settings.
As this videos dimensions are 1280px x 720px, you can see next to “Position” that the center point of the video is at 640px on the horizontal plane, and 360px vertical. To create the Parallax, we need to offset the left channel to the left of the screen slightly. To do this, simply adjust “640” to “638”. This will move our left channel 2 Pixels to the left of the screen.
We are now finished with the left channel for the moment, so lets make it invisible, so we can get to work on the right channel. To make it invisible, simply click the “Eyeball” icon in the attributes field as shown below.
Your video preview window should loose the red tinge, and be restored to normal. Next, Highlight the Video 1 track (Right/Blue) in the timeline, and set the red to zero in Color Balance, leaving blue and green at 100. Then, enhance the Parallax by moving the Right/Blue channel 2 Pixels to the right. Again, click the triangle next to “Motion” to expand and reveal the options, and set the horizontal plane to 642. If you have done everything right, your video preview will now look all Blue-Ish.
It is now time to bring the left and right channels together and create the Anaglyph. Go back to the Video 2 (red/left) track’s attributes area and make it visible again by clicking the eyeball icon. Your video preview will turn red again. If you click the eyeball repeatedly a few times you will see that not only does your video turn from red to blue, but it also moves position – Yes! That’s the Parallax Effect – You have made a 2D video 3D!
YAY YOU!!!!!
To finish up, we need to blend them together. This is where Premiere Pro borrows from Photoshop. Blending is what makes Photoshop so powerful. With your Left/Red channel visible (Eyeball Icon clicked so the video preview window has the red tinge), click the little triangle next to “Opacity” in the “Effect Control” panel. Click the drop down menu next to “Blend Mode” and select “Screen”.
VOILA! ANAGLYPH VIDEO!
Using these settings, the 3D effect is only mild. To really make a strong 3d Parallax Effect, you move the left and right frames further apart. Instead of 638 for the Red/Left channel, and 642 for the Blue/Right channel, try 636 for the left and 644 for the right, or 630 for the left and 650 for the right. Experiment with these numbers until it looks right for you.
But BE CAREFUL – Don’t push these numbers to far, because you can make the video really blurry.
To save and export the video, select file, export, media from the menu bar. I will be exporting it in exactly the same format as I imported it, but you can play with these settings if you want to export your video in a different format, or for another device.
Once you have exported your new Anaglyph 3D video file, All you need to do now is put on your Red/Blue 3D glasses, turn your volume up to 11, and enjoy this AWESOME video from z400hauls in 3D!
If you, or your friends pass out, or barf, try reducing the Parallax Effect by moving your Red/Left and Blue/Right fields closer together 🙂
Recently, a Webernets reader (Yes, there is at least one person looking at this site) crashed their XP Pro virtual machine, and it made me think about a really quick and easy way to back up and restore a VMWare Virtual Machine in the unfortunate event of a terminal failure.
As VMWare Virtual Machines can grow in size pretty quickly, especially if they are not regularly “cleaned up“, in most cases you will need to use an external hard drive or a very large USB key to store your back up. Whilst it is convenient to keep your back up on the same computer, its also no help to you at all if that computer is the one that fails, so keeping a back up some where else is a pretty good idea. I actually would recommend doing BOTH. You can never have too many back ups in multiple locations – ask any one who has ever had a catastrophic failure!
To get started, you need to locate your Virtual Machines, and this is REALLY easy! Open a finder window, click “Documents”, and you will see a folder called “Virtual Machines”
To back up your virtual machine, simply drag the virtual machine file to your back up destination. As you can see below, I have a virtual machine called “XP with Apps”, which is my main Windows computer, and I would be pretty lost if anything happened to it. I also have a FREENAS server, which is just basically a big hard drive that is attached to my home computer network, and shows up as a “Share”, so to back up my XP Machine, I just drag the virtual machine file onto the Freenas entry in the side bar menu, and let it do its work. As my Virtual Machine is quiet large, it does take some time for it to copy over.
Now that we have our Virtual Machine backed up, you are probably wondering how easy it is to restore it? Its just as easy! Check this out!
To restore a saved virtual machine, just locate it on your back up source (In my case, it is on my Freenas server), and drag it into your virtual machines folder. For this demonstration, I am going to restore my most FAVORITE Linux distro, PUPPY LINUX! I started by dragging the Puppy Linux Virtual Machine from my Freenas server to the desktop on my Mac.
Once the file had copied over, I moved it into the “Virtual Machines” folder in my “Documents” folder with my other virtual machines. Then to begin the restore, just double click the virtual machine file.
When you double click it, a window will pop up asking if you have copied or moved the virtual machine. In this case, we have performed both actions, we have moved, as well as copied the machine. Given the wording in the dialogue box, and the confusion that arises after being presented with a multiple choice question where both answers are applicable, I went with “If you don’t know, answer “I Copied It””, and I clicked “I Copied It”.
Almost instantly, my Puppy Linux virtual machine sprang into life, and before you can say “How the heck did I do that?” my Puppy Linux Virtual Machine was up and running!
Thanks to the folks at VMWare for making this so easy!
Its always bugged me how large and bloated my Virtual Machines become. I recently installed XP Pro and ran Windows Update to get it up to scratch, and the raw install Virtual Machine file was a little over 3Gb. I installed a few of my favorite video editing/converting apps (Including Premiere Pro – about 2Gb in size), converted a few files, and within days, the size was over 12Gb? It really doesn’t make sense to me why the virtual machine would blow out to that size so quickly. Its also a real annoyance when you want to backup/copy your virtual machine elsewhere for safe keeping, and your file is unmanageable.
Thankfully, the folks at VMWare have provided a solution to this bloat. Open VMWare Fusion, but don’t open any virtual machines. From the menu, select “Window” and then “Virtual Machine Library”. Right click on your obese machine and select “Get Info”.
You will now see a summary of your Virtual Machine.
You can see from above, I can reclaim over 7Gb of size! Click the “Clean Up Virtual Machine” button.
Now is one of those “Go get yourself a cup of coffee” moments. It does take a while, so be prepared for some down time.
Presto! The 12Gb Virtual Machine is now a much more manageable 5.2Gb!
I know that dialogue warning boxes are there for a reason, and they protect us from accidentally deleting stuff we don’t really want to delete, but I work with dozens of files, and dozens of versions of files at a time. If you are someone who has the need to delete files a lot, and likes to see the “Empty” trash can icon (like me) it is possible to disable that annoying “Are you sure you really want to empty your trash can, even though you just specifically right clicked on the icon and purposely selected the “empty trash” option?” dialogue box.
Click on your desktop to activate the finder, then under the “Finder” menu, select preferances.
Once you have selected “Preferences” and the preferences pane is open, its just a simple matter un-checking the “Show warning before emptying the Trash” option.
Its only a little thing I know, but if you are a true “Power-User”, this is a godsend that can save you a lot of extra clicks.
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Earlier today I tried to copy a large file I had made in Photoshop and I was told that the operation couldn’t complete because there wasn’t enough room on my hard drive for it. So, I needed a way to get a lot of space back, but I wasn’t sure what was taking up all of the room. I set about looking for ways to see what was going on on my drive and I happened upon some really great tools to help you visualize all your files. The process is called “Treemaps”.
They are all fairly easy to use. Just roll your cursor over the big ones and the filename appears in the bottom left corner of the window. You can then decide which files you want to delete, and start enjoying some free space on your hard drive again.
Recently, a Webernets reader (Yes, there is at least one person looking at this site) crashed their XP Pro virtual machine, and it made me think about a really quick and easy way to back up and restore a VMWare Virtual Machine in the unfortunate event of a terminal failure.
