EDU

OSX FIND FIX

Posted on August 21, 2022 by Tim Prebble

OMG!!!

This supposed feature of OSX has annoyed me ever since Spotlight was introduced!
The problem: FIND became dysfucntional.
For example: I want to find a drone shot I labelled as “TREE 360”
I hit cmd F, type “TREE 360” and OSX is USELESS!
It finds every occurrence of any of the words in anything eg inside emails, PDFs etc..
I have hated this feature and actually installed NeoFinder to try & solve this.
NeoFinder scans your HD and creates a database of filenames.
Handily it works with offline HDs too, so perfect for searching offline archive drives.

But today I learned how to fix OSX FIND permanently!
This article explains how

Change the Finder search default to Find by Name (search by file name) rather than Find by Content

Here’s a step by step:
#1: Open System Preferences
#2: Click on “Keyboard”
#3: Click on “Keyboard Shortcuts”
#4: Click on “Application Shortcuts” (on my system this was the last item located on the left-hand side window)
#5: Click the little “+” right below the right-hand side window
#6: Click on the “Application” menu and choose “finder.app”
#7: Click into the field “Menu Title:” and type “Find by Name…”
(Type it exactly like that including the three dots. Don’t type the quotes BTW.)
#8: Click into the field “Keyboard Shortcut:” and press the command-key and F at the same time.
It should look like this ⌘F
#9: Close System Preferences

That’s it. Basically what you are doing is remapping the command-F key (⌘F) to “Find By Name”.

OH THANK YOU RANDOM STRANGER!!!

DIY, EDU, EMF

DIY LOM Priezor

Posted on July 19, 2022July 27, 2022 by Tim Prebble

As you may know, LOMs products often sell out in minutes. I had been waiting, patiently hoping that LOM would do another run of their Priezor EMF Sensor for years, and had all but given up when a FB comment (thanks Shaun!) mentioned that LOM products were open source, with full build docs available on Github!
I had a look at the instructions and realised I could easily build a Priezor, step 1 was ordering the parts: some copper wire and small bolts, spacers & nuts. Step 2 required laser cutting acrylic for the frame, which I had done previously with Ponoko.com when I had them laser cut Daxophone tongues from wood and plastic.
But one minor issue I ran into was that the dxf file for the parts had been created with all parts stacked in layers. Ponoko require a single layer with no overlaps so I reorganised the dxf file and ordered enough parts for two Priezor sensors. But I also thought it is silly if every person who wants to make a DIY Priezor has to rearrange the dxf file, so I contacted Jonas at LOM and gently requested he provide an updated dxf, with all parts laid out flat with no overlaps.
Last Friday he updated the LOM Github with a new A3 size dxf file, which makes ordering laser cut parts simple!

See priezor_a3.dxf at:
Github LOM Priezor

So I ordered the parts and this arrived:

Next to wind the coils…

Encoded

Posted on July 19, 2022 by Tim Prebble

Close-up of the edge of a 35mm film print.
Every last bit of space is used for audio data:
Left: Sony Dynamic Digital Sound (SDDS)
Between sprocket holes: Dolby Digital
Waveform pairs on the right: Analog optical sound
Right dashed lines: DTS time codes

via Twitter

EDU, Sound Design

UNDERWATER sound design

Posted on June 27, 2022 by Tim Prebble

A reblog from MUSIC OF SOUND: Underwater

Someone asked about making underwater sounds so I thought I’d post a few examples of approaches I’ve tried that worked to varying degrees. And an escape clause before you listen to anything: while physics is fascinating, unless you are working on a documentary about how sound is heard underwater, then the aim is to evoke the feeling of being underwater. Often when I hear hydrophone recordings I think that isn’t how I remember underwater sounding. Now my memory is partly based on decades of hearing underwater sounds in scuba documentaries and films, but I don’t think thats actually what makes me think this, its more visceral than that. My memory comes from going for a swim – in a pool or in the sea. And what I hear from hydrophones doesn’t tend to remind me of my own underwater experiences…. But that isn’t to say you cannot get interesting sounds from a hydrophone as plenty of people have. But for the project that I needed underwater sounds for, using a hydrophone was not on the top of my list…

A few years back I worked on a short film called WATER, directed by Chris Graham. The basic premise is that there is a leaky tap in someones house & no one notices except a young girl who tells her family, but they all ignore her. Slowly the house fills with water, until the family are all swimming around the house, seemingly oblivious… Its a not hugely subtle meditation on global warming & people living in denial, but anyway they went to great lengths to make it work visually – literally sawing a house in half so they could slowly lower it into a swimming pool. Accordingly making appropriate water sounds was vital, especially for the climax, much of which was underwater….

So I tried a lot of different approaches – we had some great wildtracks from production sound of people moving in water within the half submerged house. And for a previous film I had done a lot of recording at an exterior swimming pool, exhausting a poor swimmer getting him do things like dive to the bottom of the pool, release all his air & then surface…. I also dug through my library for interesting sea, lake & mud sounds… So the main starting point for me was a lot of great recordings and armed with all this source material I started trying different processes with them…

First I tried doing pitch sweeps in Metasynth – parts of this file are very useful and other parts aren’t (ie when the grain starts to show)

Next I tried vocoding, back then I had the Digidesign Orange vocoder plugin which has the usual cheesy synth built in for when you want to sound like bad euro synth pop, but you could disable it and use a second audio file as the source. So this file I was taking sounds like those swimming pool water bubbles and vocoding them against explosions….