Photoshop batch command

I have a couple hundred gigantic layered TIFF files I'd like to save as JPEGs to make them easier to handle. I thought I could set up Photoshop to do this after I went home last night. No such luck:



"could not complete the batch command because the disk is not available." You've got to hand it to Adobe for the hilariously unhelpful dialog boxes. Of course, that doesn't mean people won't treat you like an idiot for asking "what on earth does THAT mean" in a help forum. One guy says "The message is telling you exactly what's wrong." No it isn't — the disk is mounted just fine. Photoshop just thinks it isn't for some reason.

The same guy later suggests trashing the prefs. When asked which preference files to trash (Adobe like to make dozens of them all over the place), another user dishes out the classic "you idiot" styled line: This is covered in the FAQs. I love it when people tell users to "read the effing manual." Yeah, the gigantic poorly indexed 600 page monstrosity. Read that thing. Buried somewhere in there is what you need to know. Or not. Maybe. Just Google it.

But the guy does tell our user how to trash his prefs. I did the same, and Photoshop gave me an even LESS helpful error message.

So anyway, Photoshop's being stupid. And it's your fault. So shut up. We're coming out with CS5 soon anyway.

Delete Gmail Attachments

I'm a graphic designer, and I wind up sending people loads of fairly large, high-resolution attachments. All these hefty messages sent over the course of a year or two are clogging my mail box, and my Gmail account is just about completely full.

It's be nice if I could just tell Gmail to delete these attachments, but apparently there is no way to do this. Google is well aware of this problem, as its users can attest, but has no interest in solving the problem. Instead, we get delightfully useless features in Google labs like a snake game.

The only solution users have come up with is to send the message to myself. Of course, this won't work for hundreds of e-mails clogging my account, and when I try to search for the message, the date will now be messed up.

Seriously, Google. Either give us the option to delete attachments from old, sent mail, or triple the room we have to store the junk you apparently won't let us delete.

Final cut express can't import video

I almost had to use pen and paper to write this down — the good old Rainbow Spinner was back again.

Final Cut Express is being a pain today. Our Senior VP wanted me to help him make a video for his dad. He already had the video on DVD and just needed me to add some MP3s for Sound. No problem, right? I have a copy of Final Cut Express. I just rip the video with Handbrake and then use QuickTime Pro to turn the resulting MP4 into a plain old Quicktime video. Right?

Wrong. I was able to copy the video from the DVD just fine, and Quicktime Pro turned it into a plain old Quicktime file just fine. Final Cut Express, however, refuses to import it. In fact, it refuses to import ANY video file. It just says, "File error: Unknown file."

Not particularly helpful, right? After digging with Google, I eventually figured out that Final Express doesn't like the "H.264" compression that Quicktime uses by default. Of course, it's not like Quicktime gives you any other options when exporting as a "self-contained file," and it's not easy to figure out what magic format it is that Final Cut Express WILL use. I've dragged and dropped AVI files from my digital camera unaltered and FCE uses them just fine, but it apparently won't touch a Quicktime video "H.264" compression.

Of course, I could export the file as a DV stream. But then guess what? Quicktime makes it crappy. Really crappy. Compare the difference below between the Quicktime Movie it WON'T use (left) and the DV stream that it WILL use (right). Yeah, I think we already have a "crappy video" filter in there somewhere.

So where did I eventually find my solution? Why, with NON-APPLE freeware, of course! MPEG Streamclip is a program recommended on the Apple forums and by employees at the Apple store. It had all the settings I needed to turn the video from the DVD directly into a usable Quicktime format (I used the Apple Intermediate Codec). I'd used this program before with both Perian and the Apple MPEG-2 Component to extract video from a digital video camera, and it comes it quite handy. You've got to wonder why a couple hobbyists who make software for free do a better job at this than Apple does with their own commercial video software.

Of course, this still doesn't solve the sticky little problem of exporting video from Final Cut Express in a format that doesn't suck. Plain Quicktime video is set to widescreen for some reason even though the source video is 4:3, stretching it horribly out of shape. I used MPEG-4 and told it to be 640x480, and then iDVD pixelated the hell out of it when encoding to DVD. I'll probably keep playing with new exports, waiting half an hour at a time, just to see if anything else out there works.