If so, download and install the free beta version of Flip4Mac for Snow Leopard. That should fix the issue.

Download the Flip4Mac beta for Snow Leopard here: http://dynamic.telestream.net/downloads/download-flip4macwmv-beta.asp

NOTE: I’ve decided: I seriously dislike Telestream and its Flip4Mac, and Episode Encoder applications. The latter simply wouldn’t even install properly and just threw up user authentication errors when I tried to make it work on Leopard a few months ago. Their “service” was non-existent. Costly piece of junk. And Flip4Mac Pro HD created horribly choppy, out of sync WMVs, while cheaper solutions such as DV Kitchen worked perfectly using the same source files and settings. I actually tried it on two different Macs, just to make sure I’m not crazy. For $179 you’d expect software (sorry…”app”) to at least work. And now Telestream can’t even get a fully working version of Flip4Mac out to Snow Leopard users. It’s the only way to play WMVs on a Mac so it’s a pretty important piece of software. You’d think making it work with Snow Leopard would have priority, and the free version (the one EVERYONE downloads) would have been fixed by launch date. No, you have to figure this shit out for yourself. Like Snow Leopard’s release just snuck up on Telestream. Incompetent and overpriced. I’m done with ‘em.

1) After installing Windows 7 go ahead and disable automatic defragmentation, automatic download and installation of updates, search indexing, and tone down some of the visual stuff like fading in and out of boxes, animated windows and all that. By default scheduled defragmentation is on and you do not want this stuff to start up right when you’re in the middle of editing or exporting your movies.

Don’t animate / rotate your wallpapers. Choose one and stick to it.

Disable any services you don’t need. I usually get rid of any printing and spooling services, touchscreen features, games, and XPS services. Windows 7 makes this very easy: Control Panel > Programs and Features > Turn Windows Features On or Off

Automatic updates sometimes force an automatic reboot – you don’t want that either. Search indexing can slow things down. And removing some of the visual stuff will help with performance as well.

2) Right after installing Windows 7, run Windows Update and install any drivers and updates that are suggested to you. Restart when you’re prompted to, then keep coming back to Windows Update until there’s nothing more you need to install (language packs and other non-essentials can be skipped). AFTER you’ve installed all important updates and drivers disable the automatic downloading and installing of any updates (see above as to why).

3) Before you install any of your programs (Premiere, Avid, Photoshop, whatever) download and install any and all drivers you might need. Windows 7 is very good at detecting and, if necessary, offering you to get the latest drivers for your graphics cards, monitors and so forth but it could miss it. Also download drivers for your audio cards, and any other peripherals you might have attached.

4) This is one hard pill to swallow for many of you but do not install any anti-virus software on your production system. That stuff just causes more problems than they’re worth. I have not used any anti-virus software in four years on my editing systems and never had a problem. I do scan every few weeks, just to be safe. Never once did I get hit with a virus or spyware. Just don’t go online unless you really have to, and only go to reputable sites. Not having anti-virus junk hog your computer’s resources will make a huge difference.

5) Do not install iTunes, Roxio, Nero, or any other application you don’t absolutely need. No email programs either. A surprisingly large number of programs hog resources and run unneeded stuff in the background. The more junk runs in the background the more problems you will have.

I’ll write a more in-depth guide on optimizing Windows 7 for Content Creation soon.

Premiere Pro 4.1.0 has been expected to be released late May of this year so Adobe is pretty close. This update is important as is (supposedly) addresses numerous severe problems with Premiere Pro CS4.

We’ll see after a few weeks of using this new version if the update actually fixes these problems. Without going into too much detail (plenty of hate threads online about this) Premiere Pro CS4 was definitely not what it could have been and what it should have been.

Maybe…hopefully…today will change that.

Installation Notes

Adobe’s updater is notorious for being crap. Don’t get frustrated if your downloads or (more likely) installation of the updates fails on the first try. Simply go here to manually download and install all the latest Adobe fixes.

You also need to close all Adobe programs and probably manually kill the “processcoordinationserver.exe” process via the Task Manager.

Good luck and let me know about your experiences with these new updates.

This is great news for video editors like myself who couldn’t wait and already migrated everything over the Windows 7. The only thing missing for me was MacDrive.

Click here to download the MacDrive 8 beta for Windows 7

Note: there is a big difference between HFS Explorer and MacDrive. The former is a very basic utility that lets you open up HFS formatted hard drives and copy (“extract”) files to your PC. It doesn’t work the other way around and you can’t use it to, say, edit directly off of the HFS drives.

MacDrive allows your PC to see HFS formatted drives to be seen just like any other hard drive. You can edit straight off of those kind of drives with Premiere Pro, Avid, Vegas etc. if you wanted to.

You don’t have to. Ping.fm has got you covered – Ping.fm allows you to update your Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, Wordpress, Blogger, Imeem, LinkedIn, and Delicious accounts (among many others) at once.

You can even update from your iPhone or laptop if you want.

Ping.fm is currently in beta so expect a glitch here and there.

If you don’t have a mobile device but don’t want to shell out the money for an iPhone and overpriced AT&T contracts, Ping.fm will happily give you a deal for a compatible device called Peek. It lets you email and of course “ping” (update) your social media sites on the go. I haven’t tried one of these gadgets, just letting you know it exists.

Boilsoft Video Splitter and Free Video Cutter

A simple task such as cutting a clip in two or more parts shouldn’t be so hard but the number of decent video splitters online is astoundingly small. Most of the free splitters I’ve tried are pure junk. Even spending money on a splitter isn’t a guarantee that it’ll do what you want it to. I usually use the Boilsoft splitter because it doesn’t re-encode whatever I’m splitting. So that’s great for making clips out of large movies: it’s very fast and retains the quality.

If you’re building clips for galleries or online promos and just need to split and not edit anything, the Boilsoft splitter is decent. Not always entirely frame accurate but okay for most tasks. It’s not free but because it doesn’t re-encode and handles WMV, MPEG, AVI and other files very well it might be worth it.

Now there’s also the Free Video Cutter.

As the name implies, the Free Video Cutter trims down your movie and saves it in either MPEG4, WMV, FLV, DivX, MOV, or MP3 (Audio only). It’s a very basic application but it’s free and reasonably fast.

Free Video Cutter Notes

It seems to re-encode the clips, even if the output format doesn’t change from the input format. And it uses the old WMV8 codec (Four CC code: wmv2) to encode to WMV. WMV9 is the standard these days, it looks better and is more efficient. I wouldn’t use the Free Video Cutter to encode to WMV, unless the video quality isn’t absolutely critical to you. Still, for a cheap and easy quick video trim job this tool might be your ticket.

TIP: before you do anything, click the “Options” button and check the “Don’t create video thumbs” box. Depending on your system, FVC takes quite a while to create these thumbnails. Kinda defeats the purpose of super quick trimming, ya know.

Download Free Video Cutter (free)

Download Boilsoft Video Splitter (not free)

Both are for Windows programs and they work on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 (yes!)

Here is a driver provided by Dell for the ALPS touchpad. However, this driver may work on other touchpad brands as well so give it a try.

ALPS Touchpad Driver for Vista and Windows 7 32 bit

Other Windows 7 drivers you might find usefull:

Intel Pro Wireless adapter driver (if your laptop can’t get online with Windows 7)

ATI Mobility Radeon driver ( ATI mobile graphics cards only)

Before you download: Always check for newer drivers on the driver providers’ web site. Also remember that these drivers were released by Dell and were originally meant for Dell laptops. The drivers here may or may not work on your particular system.

Here is how you install the proper driver in Windows 7, we’ll use the Intel Pro Wireless driver since that’s the one I’ve had to install for my Windows 7 RC copy. But the steps will work for any wireless adapter driver you want to install on Windows 7.

Note: your wireless adapter may be different and therefore require a different driver. You can download the Intel Pro Wireless driver for Windows 7 and Vista 32 bit here. If  you require a different driver do not download or install the driver here as it may cause problems with your system.

For your reference, the driver originally came from Dell and was provided to owners of Dell Inspiron laptops which have the Intel wireless adapter included. Read the installation instructions carefully please.

It’s not as easy to use as MacDrive but it’s free and it gets the job done. You will be able to move files from your Mac formatted drive over to your Windows machine but probably won’t be able to work with it like you would with MacDrive, ie use, for example, Premiere Pro to access the drive directly.

STEPS

1) Install HFS Explorer (download it here)

2) Once installed, open up HFS Explorer, go to FILE > Load File System from Device

3) From the pop up select Autodetect, or select the device (= harddrive) yourself.

4) It should open up a window of your Mac formatted drive now.

5) Select the folder(s) you want to copy and click Extract

6) Select the folder on your Windows machine you want the files copied to

If it asks you if you want to follow symbolic links click select No

HFS Explorer should now copy your files to your Windows machine. Make sure you close our HFS Explorer before removing the external hard drive.

Hope this helps.