This MacLife article caught my eye because I recently went through my own hard drive and eliminated all the extra fluff I did not need. I freed nearly 100GB just by following simple guidelines like the ones presented in this article. Sometimes a task that may seem daunting isn’t all that bad when approached with the right tools and attitude. Good luck and happy pruning.

How to Locate What’s Sucking up Your Hard Drive Space

It’s all too easy to say “oh, I’ll just delete some stuff” and then never do it. Take action today and cut the flab from your file system by locating the major space-sucking culprits.

1. Balancing the Blocks

The first step isn’t always the easiest, but this time it is: determine just how much space you have remaining on your Mac’s main disk. If you’ve read this far, chances are it’s not much. To get the complete picture, click on the Macintosh HD icon (or whatever you call your main drive) in the Finder, then type Command-I to bring up its Info window. From here, you can see the capacity of your drive as well as the amount of space available.

Aim to have a third of your drive free.

If the available storage is less than one-third of the total capacity of the drive, it’s worth freeing up more. The benefits of a healthy hard drive are far greater than just having more room to play with. With around one-third of your drive’s capacity available, you should see slight improvements in drive access as well as application speed. Mac OS X will also be able to use some of that storage as virtual memory to help it perform tasks without using your RAM, a great help to those using older Macs.

2. Find and Delete Huge Unwanted Files

Next, with the Finder selected, press Command-F to bring up a search window. Click on the first drop-down menu and select Other and then Size. From the second drop-down menu, select “is greater than” and then enter an amount in the field to the right of it. A good place to start is 50MB.

Next up: find those big files.

The files and folders that now appear in the Finder window all fit the criteria you entered—if you looked for files bigger than 50MB, these are all the files of that size or larger on your Mac. But wait! Before you start blindly erasing some of them, check out what they actually do on your system. Mac OS X includes some rather hefty system files that are necessary to keep things running smoothly. If you’re absolutely certain that you know what a file is, then chuck it, but it’s worth checking if in doubt. An easy way to find out more is to select a file, right-click on it, and select Open Enclosing Folder for more details on its origin.

[Continue Reading Here]

This is a fantastic resource for all of you Podcasters out there.  When recording talent that can’t physically stop in and record, you are going to have to rely on some sort of VOIP (voice over IP) to get the job done.  Skype is the most common because it’s relatively easy to set up, free to use, and has good audio quality (We all know how bad audio can ruin a project!).  From here you just have to purchase a compatible call recorder and most of the work is done!  Take a look at this article from Macworld which has an easy 5 step setup to get you well on your way to recording those podcasts!

Enjoy!
~Kaz

Unless your podcast is based solely on your own charm and wit or you have a lot of local talent willing to stop by your studio, there will be occasions when you need to record interviews remotely. While there are a handful of ways to do this, one of the most popular is making a call over the Skype VOIP service and recording the results. It’s popular not only because Skype-to-Skype calls are free, but because Skype generally has good voice quality and there are a variety of tools for capturing Skype calls. Here are the steps for using one of those tools.

Step 1: Download Call Recorder

After downloading a copy of Skype and setting up an account, additionally download and install a copy of Ecamm Networks’ $20 Call Recorder. This is a Skype add-on that makes it very easy to capture both sides of a Skype call on separate tracks.

Step 2: Configure Call Recorder’s settings

When you launch Skype, a window will open that asks if you’d like to configure Call Recorder. Click Yes. This opens Skype’s Recording preference pane. It’s within this window that you can configure Call Recorder’s audio and video settings. Choose Uncompressed in the Audio Encoding pop-up menu and your Skype calls will be recorded in AIFF format, which result in quite large files. If you’d like good sounding files that don’t take up as much space, choose AAC Compression from the Audio Encoding pop-up menu and High from the Audio Quality pop-up menu. As we’re not recording video, leave the video recording options as they are and close Skype’s Preferences window. A small Call Recorder window will appear.

Step 3: Capture your call

Make or receive your Skype call. (Call Recorder works regardless of who initiates the call.) Listen to the person on the other end of the call and feel free to advise them if their volume is too low, too high, or they’re put their headset microphone too close to their mouth, resulting in a lot of popped Ps and Bs (called “plosives”). With some adjustment in their position, or the position of the mic, they can deal with these issues. Although you have little control over the kind of microphone your guest uses, you should be sure to have a decent microphone in front of you. Inexpensive headset mics generally produce poor results. I prefer a good quality USB tabletop microphone or a “standard” XLR microphone mounted on a boom stand. Such microphones are available from a variety of manufacturers.

Read the rest of the Article HERE at Macworld.

Article Credit: Christopher Breen

Here’s one for the iMovie fans out there.  It’s true that iMovie has yet to earn a reputation for giving us great control over our audio channels, and there’s a good reason for that; because it doesn’t!  However, iMovie ’11 does offer a fun assortment of vocal effects, which can come in handy, depending on the nature of your video project.  Here’s a fun article from Mac|Life which covers these vocal filters, and some quick dialog editing in iMovie ’11.

Enjoy!
~ Kaz

When I was a kid, I really wished I had one of those nifty voice changer boxes to prank call the pizza place with. Now, I’ve got something better, and way more convincing. iMovie 11′s voice changing feature is what we’ve been waiting for a long time, and it’s sure to add some flair to your home movies. All you need to get started is a video with some audio in it.

To get started, you’ll first need to drag a video clip into the project. Next, mouse over the clip and click on the gear that appears near the start of the clip. From this drop-down menu, select Clip Adjustments.

This will open up the Inspector. From here, click on the Audio Effects selector button.

Read the rest of the article, HERE at Mac|Life.

Warning

do NOT upgrade your iPhone 3G to iOS 4.  Despite what claims Apple makes on their website, the iPhone 3G is simply not powerful enough to handle iOS 4.

I’m personally of the opinion that the iPhone 3G doesn’t even handle iOS 3 very well, and if you were to test an iPhone 3G and an iPhone 3GS side by side, I’m sure you’d agree with me.  I’ve received no less than a dozen HELP ME! calls in the past couple weeks from folks who have upgraded their 3G to iOS 4 only to experience crashes, freezes, and slow-down.

Well, all is not lost.  You can turn back time, and back down to iOS 3, but there’s a bit of a process involved.  It’s not simple, though it’s not overly difficult either.

Here’s an article that appeared on Mac|Life  today outlining the process.  Good luck!  If you do try this, and run into trouble, or get stuck, or even get scared, click on the big HELP button at the bottom of this page, fill out a ticket, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

Here goes ~

Author Credit: Susie Ochs

It’s official. Four out of four Mac|Life editors still using the iPhone 3G have said sayonara to iOS 4. Many of its marquee features aren’t compatible with our two-year-old handsets anyway—no multitasking, no nifty orientation lock, not even background wallpaper. And worst of all, it hobbles our once-functional phones until they’re near-useless. Apps crash, or they’re teeth-pullingly slow to open. Download speeds are so slow we feel like we’re back on dialup. The entire OS even crashes back to the Apple-logo screen. It’s just not worth it. So we rolled back. And if you feel our pain, we recommend you do too. Here is everything you need to know.

Difficulty: medium

What You Need:
>> iPhone 3G
>> iTunes (free, apple.com)
>> RecBoot (free, www.sebby.net/443-recboot-final-release/)
>> iPhone OS 3.1.3 firmware image (see Step 3)

1. Check Your Back(-ups)

I’ve got some pre-June 21 backups, but alas they are all for various office iPads.

Not to get ahead of ourselves, but before you restore your iPhone with the older OS, it’s a good idea to consider if you’ll be setting up your newly downgraded phone from scratch as if it were a new phone, or if you’ll be restoring it to a backup. The catch is that you can only OS 3.1.3 backup, not to a backup made after you put iOS 4 on your phone.

iOS 4 came out June 21. So to see if you have any iPhone backups made with OS 3.1.3, navigate to ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup and see if any of the folder inside are dated before then. But since iTunes doesn’t keep more than one backup per device, if you’ve synced your iPhone to iTunes after upgrading to iOS 4, you probably don’t have a backup of your phone with OS 3.1.3.

2. Data Dump

3. No Data Left Behind

iTunes can transfer iTunes Store and App Store purchases onto your Mac.

If you buy music or apps directly on your phone, connect it to your Mac and choose File > Transfer Purchases from [Phone Name] in iTunes. You’ll also lose your SMS and MMS messages, so take screenshots of those, or follow the instructions at insend.de to back them up as a PDF, CSV, or XML file. Basically, you need get every scrap of information on your iPhone onto your computer somewhere, because you’re about to wipe your iPhone completely. One more note: Any apps you put back on your restored phone will behave as if you’ve never used them. So if you use apps with accounts tied to them (Facebook, Flickr, Instapaper, etc.) you might want to jot down your account info. And sadly, you’ll lose your progress in any games, plus lose access to the iBooks app, which requires iOS 4.

CLICK HERE to continue reading this important article at Mac|Life.

The Video team at FoleyPod divides their time pretty evenly between providing video production services and training people how to handle their own video projects. 

Sometimes we are charged with the task of cleaning up videos shot by our clients, and in all honesty, more often than not, these videos clips are of pretty low quality. The lower the quality, the more difficult they are to fix. And so we’ve decided to put together this Video How-To series.

Most of the video issues we see all boil down to the same few problems, and in most cases, these problems are easily preventable, and when avoided, make an enormous difference in the overall quality of your videos.

Create great videos yourself! Tune in every Monday, for another installment in our How-To video lessons series.

—–

Lesson 1: Audio Audio Audio

Nothing will ruin your video projects faster or more thoroughly than bad audio. Think back on most of the amateur videos you’ve ever seen up on YouTube, or on your friends’ Facebook pages. Most of them are shot with a consumer-grade camcorder with a built-in microphone which picks up the sound of passing cars, room noise, white noise, and other undesirable elements better than it picks up the sound of your subject’s voice.

Luckily, this is pretty easy to remedy. The trick lies in understanding this one important fact:

The built-in microphones on camcorders are terrible.

This is true for professional level camcorders too. Built-in microphones suck. That’s just how it is. So where does that leave you?

Before you buy a camera, make sure that it has a microphone input. Most of the cheaper consumer camcorders do NOT have one. A microphone input allows you to use external microphones to capture your audio instead of being stuck with the built-in mic.

If you’re shooting interviews, or a single person talking into the camera, you’ll want to have a lavalier microphone that you can put on the subject’s collar, or lapel. You can go with a high-quality wireless model, like this one (this is what we use at FoleyPod)

or you can go with a less expensive wired version like this one (click the image to view product)

If you’re shooting “man on the street” type interviews, you’ll probably want to get a hand held microphone instead, so that your roving reporter can speak their part, and then point the microphone at their subject.

If you’re shooting more general scenes, you will want to put a stereo shotgun mic onto your camera’s shoe, so that you capture whatever you point the camera at.

What should I do if my camera does NOT have a microphone input?

Well, that would be unfortunate. My first advice is to go and rent a camera that has a microphone input, but I realize that not all budgets allow for this, and not all projects are serious enough to spend money on.

In any case, if your camera does not have a mic input, there are a couple of things you can do. The first, is to use a separate recording device to capture your audio, and then merge the resulting audio file with your video file in your Video editing software, such as iMovie, or Final Cut later on.

NOTE: if you’re on a budget, and already own an iPhone or an iPod touch, there are a few apps available for doing just this.  I wrote an article last year about how to record high-quality voice memos on your iPhone and iPod touch. That process can be used in this context to capture very good dialog for use in your video project.

The second way to salvage your project if you’re forced to use your camera’s built-in microphone is to carefully control and manage your shooting environment.
Some tips:
1. Don’t shoot outdoors. This one really should be pretty obvious, but I’m afraid it’s not. Too often I have seen a video recording of the owner of a shop standing out on the sidewalk in front of his store talking about his business, while cars are passing by, birds are chirping, and the world is just generally being loud all around him. This is NOT fixable in post-production, by the way. Just saying…

So the moral of the story is, don’t shoot outdoors. If you live in California, as I do, shooting outdoors poses other noise issues. Since it’s always spring or summer here, there is a constant barrage of gardening and landscaping noise at all times during the day. Lawnmowers, leaf blowers, weed whackers, etc. If you’re in the city, you get traffic noise. If you’re more rural, you get gardening industry noise. Shoot indoors, within an environment you can control.

2. Get the microphone as close to the speaker as logistically possible. When a person speaks while inside of a building, there is a certain amount of reverberation that goes on, as that person’s voice bounces off of the walls, the floor, the ceiling, etc. The microphone picks up this echoey stuff, which causes the dialog to become difficult to understand. The danger increases the further the microphone gets from the subject’s mouth.

Proximity Effect. When a person speaks directly into a microphone, there is a quality of the voice recording whereby the sound of the voice itself, being routed right into the mic, is louder than any room noise, and louder than the sound of that same voice going into the mic after bouncing off of the walls or ceiling. This is called proximity effect. You want this, this is good. That sweet spot is lost once the microphone gets more than even a few inches away from your subject’s mouth.

We recommend creating as wide a shot as your camera’s lens will allow, and putting the camera (and therefore the microphone) as close as you can get to your subject without losing the shot you’re going for.

3. Make sure that all other noises in your location have been silenced.
• Turn off all cell phones. Note that I didn’t say turn off the RINGERS. No, power your phone down, or put it in another room.

Why? Have you ever placed your cell phone next to your stereo, and heard that flutter sound that’s created when/if your cell phone rings? Even with ringers off, cell phones can wreck havoc on a microphone, and having this happen can ruin your shoot.

• If there’s a television in the room, make sure that it’s turned off as well. Even with the volume turned all the way down, televisions emit frequencies which can been “heard” by your microphone.

• Whenever possible, try to operate your camera on batteries and avoid plugging the camera into a wall outlet for power. Electricity can be pretty noisy, and some power outlets, especially in buildings that for some reason or another are not properly grounded, can inject a very noticeable hum into your video’s audio feed. Interestingly, you won’t notice this hum until after the shooting has wrapped, and you’ve imported your footage into the computer. Then it will be loud and clear.

4. Always use headphones. I can’t recall how many times I’ve seen an amateur shoot an interview and forget to test the microphone sensitivity, or in the case of mics which require batteries, I’ve seen those batteries go dead in the middle of a shoot, and in a few cases, the operator forgot to turn the mics ON. Having a pair of comfortable headphones (avoid using the earbuds that came with your iPod) plugged into the camera while you shoot will allow you to monitor the audio feed being recorded into the camera. Doing this will save you some heart brake later. It’s just Murphy’s law, and it’s always in full effect on set!

I hope that you found this article helpful, and remember that people will forgive quite a lot when it comes to quality, but good audio is what separates the amateur videos from the professional videos. Bad audio is immediately noticeable, and will greatly reduce your video’s impact.

Stay tuned for the next installment of this How-To series, which will go up next Monday.

Thanks for reading!

~ Chris