Posts Tagged ‘Mac OS Leopard’

Cover Flow is such a cool tool that missing album artwork in my library becomes a big drag.  Fortunately, it is really simple to find and add missing artwork in iTunes so your library can be complete and beautiful.

The easiest way to get missing artwork is to go up to the menu bar at the top of the screen and select Advanced>Get Album Artwork, then click the ‘Get Album Artwork’ button on the window that pops up.  Now, at the top of the iTunes screen, you’ll see a status of iTunes inventorying all the artwork and, hopefully, filling in the blanks.  This process is going to run for a few minutes and when it is done, you may get a screen that tells you that iTunes was unable to get some artwork.  If so, then you’ll need to find the appropriate art yourself and add it to iTunes.  Fortunately that’s a pretty easy process as well.

The first step to manually adding album artwork is to get the artwork you want for the album.  Amazon.com is a great resource for this.  Go to the site and search for your album in the Music section, when the search list comes back, select your album from the list by clicking on the album’s title.  When the album’s page comes up, you’ll notice an image of the album cover on the left side of the screen, sometimes this is accompanied by two or more smaller images below it.  These images are all different versions of the album cover/art; Amazon loaded the big one, and other Amazon customers have added the smaller ones.  Move your mouse over each of the smaller ones to determine which one you like best and select it by clicking it.

Once the larger size image has loaded, either in its own pop-window or in the same window you selected it from, control+click (right click) the image and select ‘Save Image As’ and save the image to your computer. 

A few notes on saving those images:  Firstly, I’d make a folder for them somewhere and put them all in one place instead of having artwork files strewn about the desktop or downloads folder.  I have a folder called Album Artwork inside my Music folder and I save them all there.  Secondly, RENAME THE FILE when you’re saving it!  The file name is going to be something lengthy and meaningless and, if you’re doing more than one album at a time, it will be difficult to know which file is which.

Once you’ve downloaded the artwork, go back to iTunes and select the song, or songs, you’re adding art to.  (Don’t forget about the Shift and Command keys for makng multiple selections.)  Once selected, choose File>Get Info (or Command+I) to bring up the info screen about the track(s).  (If you’ve selected multiple songs, you’re going to get a warning asking if you really want to change multiple tracks at the same time, sure we do!)  Now, look for the Artwork section, if you’ve only chosen one song, Artwork is the last tab across the top; go there, click the ADD button and add the file we just downloaded.  If you selected multiple tracks to add this art too, you’ll see the artwork well right there on the right side of the screen; double click in the well to add a new image.

Either way, the artwork is added to the file and will now show up in Cover Flow and on our iPod or iPhone!

‘Green Screening’ (also called ‘Chroma Keying’) is a technique used in the film industry to use a certain shade of green as a key for removing unwanted portions of an image in the compositing process.  One of the new features of iMovie 09 is the ability to Green Screen effect on your own home video.  This is really great news if you’re making short films and need to have a scene at the Eiffel Tower or on the moon.  The other great news is, its really easy!

If I want a shot of my main character standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, I’ll need two pieces of media:  the video of my main character (standing in front of a solid green wall) and a shot of the Eiffel Tower, either video or still will work although video will result in a more convincing result.  The green wall can be an actual wall you’ve painted green a paper sweep or, in a pinch, a green sheet or other fabric that’s been ironed really well.  Your local filmmaker’s rental house will probably sell ‘chroma key’ paint you can buy if you want to paint a wall, but if you don’t want to spend that much money, just get a good quality paint in bright green and apply it really evenly. 

When shooting the video of the main character, keep in mind that the subject (actor) and the background (green wall) must be lit separately to make sure there are no shadows being cast on the wall and that the green is as evenly lit as humanly possible.  It is also essential that the character NOT be wearing anything green, otherwise, parts of his/her body will disappear in the compositing process.

Shoot the video of your actor and acquire the footage of the Eiffel Tower, if you don’t happen to have the media of the Eiffel Tower, you can check out places like iStockphoto for royalty-free images and video at a really reasonable price.  If you’re making a short film or music video that’s going to play at film festivals or other pubic screening, it is absolutely essential that you know you have legal rights to use the images in your film so DO NOT just copy images out of Google or other websites as those are NOT public domain images or free to use as you want.

Ok, now the hard part is over!  We’ve got our character, we’ve got the Eiffel Tower and we’ve got both pieces imported into a project in iMovie 09.  The first step is click on ‘iMovie’ in the menu bar and select Preferences.  Make sure there’s a checkbox next to ‘Show Advanced Tools’.  Close the Preferences window.

Next, in the Library, select the clip or still image of the Eiffel Tower and drag it into the Project.  Then, select the clip of your main character and drop in directly on top of the Eiffel Tower, select ‘Green Screen’ from the resulting pop up menu.

iMovie automatically goes through and removes all the green from the foreground image, resulting in a picture that looks like your main character standing in front of the Eiffel Tower!  AWESOME!

iWeb and Mobile Me provide a quick and easy way to make beautiful web pages and host them easily, but the resulting URL can be a little unpleasant.  In this age of web savvy people where everyone and their grandmother (literally) has a personal domain its great to know that you can map your own domain name to your Mobile Me web page.

The first step is to acquire your domain name.  There are about a million places to do this like Network Solutions (Setting up a Personal Domain in iWeb using Network Solutions) and Dotster.com , but our favorite is www.GoDaddy.com the mail is terrible (POP only) but the domains are super cheap.

Once you’ve got the perfect domain name acquired, let’s say “monkeyluv.com,” head over to iWeb.  Click on File in the Menu Bar and select Set Up Personal Domain.  This is going to launch a Safari window and take you to the Account section of your Mobile Me membership.  In the sidebar on the left, you’ll see Personal Domain, down near the bottom of the list, click on it.

The resulting screen is the Add Personal Domain screen, just type in your domain name in both sections here and click continue.  When finished, you’re going to be asked to go back to the site where you bought your domain and update the CNAME. The CNAME for your domain is “web.me.com”.   FYI, in my experience, this process is much clearer and easier using www.GoDaddy.com

Once you’ve got that part done, go back to iWeb and click the Done button on that  screen.  You’ll get a message that says it could take up to 48 hours for changes to occur, but mostly I’ve seen it happen in minutes rather than hours.

Now, when people visit your domain, they will be forwarded to your Mobile Me webpage and there’s no need to remember the web.me.com/somelongname address for your Moblie Me site!

For detailed instructions on setting up Network Solutions for your mobile me web site check out Setting up a Personal Domain in iWeb using Network Solutions.

Making a copy of a CD with your Mac is simple and easy using Disk Utility which is built right in to Mac OS X.  First, insert the disk you’d like to copy and open Disk Utility.  Disk Utility is located in the Utilities folder which is inside the Applications folder.

Once its opened, you’ll see that there’s a sidebar on the left, very similar to other applications in OS X.  In that sidebar, you’ll see all your hard drives, external drives, and disk drives.  If you’ve already inserted the CD, you should see the disk listed there as well.  Click once on it.

What we’re going to now is to make a ‘Disk Image’ of the CD.  That basically means we’re going to take a picture of exactly what’s on the disc and save it so we can use it in the future, sort of like lifting comic strips up with Silly Putty.  To do this, we just click the New Image button at the top of the screen.  Its going to open a dialog box asking us where we want to save this image.  If you’re only copying this once and will never need it again, you can just put it on the desktop and delete it later, but if it’s a disk that you’ll probably want to copy over and over again down the road, save it in Documents (or other meaningful location) so you can access it later.  Click Save and here we go.

This part might take some time, so feel free to grab a coffee or something.  Let’s say you’ve got 10-15 minutes.

Once that step is complete (and we’ve had our morning Latte) we can eject the original disk and put in the new, blank disk that we’re going to copy to.  Your blank media should be a CD-R or DVD-R and (in my opinion) not made by Memorex.

Once the new disk is in, it will show up in the sidebar, but what we really want to look for is the image we made a moment ago.  It should also be listed in the sidebar now with the name we gave it ending with ‘.dmg’.  Click once on the name and click the Burn button at the top of the screen.

Go get another coffee and you’ll be finished when your return!  Don’t forget to delete the Disk Image if you’re not going to need it again and, for the love of bananas, label your new disk!

There are sometimes you really want to take a picture of your screen on the computer.  OS X has a couple of quick short cuts built in to help you do this quickly and easily.

Shift+Command+3 will take a picture of the entire viewable screen in one step.  This is great if I’m viewing something in Full Screen mode or if I have my window maximized.   If I want to just take a picture of a small section of the screen, though, there is a better shortcut to use.

Shift+Command+4 will change your cursor into a little crosshair marker.  Put the crosshairs at the top, left corner of what you want to take a picture of and drag it to the bottom, right corner (you’ll see a marquee outlining what you’re selecting.)  If you miss it on the first try, just try again.

In both techniques, an image is placed on your desktop called “Picture 1” (or “Picture 2” or “Picture 3” depending on how many you’ve taken.)  This image is a jpeg and can be renamed by clicking directly on the icon’s text.  You can then add it to iPhoto, attach it to an email or keep it for later.

I find this is an especially helpful tool if you’re having some problems but can’t get the computer to act up when you’re visiting the Genius Bar or in your OnetoOne.  Just take a picture of the error message or problem when you’re at home and you’ll have it documented so the people at the Apple store will know what’s going on.