One again we've hunted out important, unusual or interesting bugs that you should be aware of.

Avid

Line at edge of video with Use Avid Codec selected

Incompatibilities with stereoscopic AAFs imported into Resolve

AVCHD 50 and 60 unsupported by AMA

Various workarounds for disabling a drive in Avid

Consolidation may not work with NTSC-formatted drives on the Mac

FCPX

Keyboard layout export broken in 10.0.5

OS X

Greyed out .MOV

I wasn't sure what was causing this so I asked on Twitter and got a variety of replies including camera failure, a full card, ejecting the card too early or an interrupted Finder copy operation. No-one seemed to know for sure so if you've seen this before, please let us know by leaving a comment.

Dynamic Link is a key selling point of the Adobe suite that many people rely on for their workflows. Here's what to do if it doesn't work as expected. This article is mainly aimed to dynamic linking between After Effects and Premiere but many of the suggestions will apply to the other applications in the suite.

Make sure your compositions have unique names

Don't add trailing numbers

Check your firewall

Disable simultaneous frame rendering

Clear caches and render files

Render as a movie file

Here are some of the interesting post production articles we found over the last week.

New MPEG standard cuts video bandwidth requirements in half

MPEG has released a draft of its new H.265 encoding video standard. The new standard requires half the bandwidth of the existing H.264 standard so you have the choice of halving bandwidth for the same visual quality or increasing visual quality while keeping bandwidth the same. This is especially useful for 3D TV.

The Smoke Learning Channel now on iTunes

Autodesk has released a new podcast on iTunes for learning more about Smoke 2013.

Anatomy of a Grade - Node by Node Breakdown

Interesting breakdown of a bleach bypass look in DaVinci Resolve 9.

Is there a way to do 'precision dragging' a la FCP?

Interesting discussion about the lack of 'precision dragging' in Adobe Premiere and various workarounds.

Arri Alexa - Legal vs Extended

Very detailed description of how the Arri Alexa handles color and how to work with it in post.

ProRes Faceoff

Interesting comparison between ProRes LT and HQ. I've found LT looks great by itself but when you place it side-by-side with a higher quality flavor of ProRes (4444 in my case) the difference is definitely noticeable to the human eye.

Working with multicam in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6

Scott Simmons gives a detailed tutorial on working with multicam in Adobe Premiere.

This is the Job

Director Joe Carnahan reveals his Daredevil concept trailer.

Once again we've trawled the NLE manufacturer forums to find the serious or just plain weird bugs of the week. Know about them in advance so they don't slow down your workflow.

Premiere

Features and Sequence Presets are missing from Premiere Pro CS6

Bins have to be named twice after dragging clips onto the New Bin button

Cross-dissolves on multicam footage sometimes show the wrong angle

Interesting discussion about clip marker behavior in CS 6

Avid

Marquee is not functional on OS X 10.8 and prevents Avid from shutting down properly

After upgrading to OS X 10.8, Media Composer gives Interplay errors at startup

Reports of lag with new Blackmagic drivers

Interesting discussion about changes to cross-fade behavior

Preference Manager is a useful tool for trashing preferences for a range of video editing applications including Avid, Premiere and all versions of Final Cut Pro. This wipes the user settings for your editing application and can fix a wide range of problems.

However, having to set everything up again can be a chore. With a little bit of preparation in advance, you can ensure you never have to trash them again.

1. Start with a stable foundation. We recommend trashing preferences in Preference Manager and then setting them up again from scratch in your NLE, but you can skip this step if you are confident that your settings are stable.

2. Backup the settings. You can choose to backup additional items such as keyboard layouts if you desire.

3. Optionally, lock your preference files to prevent them from becoming corrupt. Some apps don't work correctly with locked preference files, so for these apps the lock option will be greyed out.

4. When a problem occurs, instead of trashing preferences, restore the backup. This will restore the settings you backed up previously to enable you to get back to work quickly.

Additional tips:

• You can right-click on a backup in the Restore pane and set it as the default backup. This means that it will be automatically restored when running a Quick Fix and you can set it up to fix problems simply by pressing a button on your keyboard.
• If you make changes to your editing software preferences later on, right-click on the backup in the Restore pane and select Update All Files to replace the preferences in the backup with the current versions on disk.
• By default Preference Manager will autosave your preferences every 7 days. This allows you to go back to previously working settings if you did not make a backup beforehand

Preference Manager is a free and useful tool for editors and post production professionals. See the user manual for more workflow tips.

50i-to-50p (or 60i-to-60p) double deinterlacing
Interesting workflow for deinterlacing in FCP 7. Instead of FCP's default method of choosing the 1st, 3rd, 5th, etc fields, it allows you to force the 2nd, 4th, 6th.

Tools Spotlight Interview: Digital Rebellion
I gave an interview with Splice Vine about Digital Rebellion and our new cross-platform strategy.

Adobe promotional pricing about to end
The $29.99/month introductory offer for Adobe Creative Cloud expires at the end of this month.

Making Lion and Mountain Lion more like Snow Leopard
This article details many of the options in OS X 10.7 and 10.8 for restoring 10.6 functionality.

Put colorful Finder icons back in Mountain Lion
Here's how to get rid of the grayscale icons in Lion and Mountain Lion.

Random tweets from Edit Fest LA 2012
Scott Simmons summarizes some of the more interesting aspects of Edit Fest LA.

What's the best way to count clips in my bin?
Lots of different ways of counting clips in an Avid bin.

Here are some of the more interesting bugs we came across in the past week.

Premiere

Audio repeats until the end of the clip if conforming is interrupted

Hover scrub previews appear inverted and upside down

Cannot scroll unless thumbnails have been generated

Orange lines on rendered video (Windows)

Avid

Avid has released Media Composer and Symphony 6.0.3. There are lots of changes including an I/O hardware toggle switch, performance improvements and bin names can now be up to 64 characters in length.

It also supports OS X 10.7.4 and 10.8. It is still not Gatekeeper-compatible so Avid recommends switching off Gatekeeper, installing Media Composer and then switching it back on again. It's also worth noting that ISIS and MediaNetwork don't support OS X 10.8 at all yet.

EuCon boards seem to work better with a router in between than a direct connection

Workflow for relinking AMA files that lose their links

Slow database access can be caused by too many files in a folder

Final Cut Pro X

Various issues with Mountain Lion

"Cannot allocate memory" error can be caused by NTFS drives

Over a billion plugins installed

OS X

Mountain Lion users reporting poor battery life

Some users reporting improved NLE performance and stability in 10.8 (most likely due to OpenCL improvements)

Last week we released Pro Media Tools 1.1.6, a minor update to our suite of media management workflow tools.

Mountain Lion support

Compressor and DVD Studio Pro-compatible chapters

QT Edit can import markers from an FCPX XML file so this is a great solution for users wanting to easily get Final Cut Pro X markers into their compressed export or DVD. It can also import markers from Final Cut Pro 7 and Avid.

QT Edit frame export

New QT Edit Quick Tasks

The full list of changes in this version is here.

Pro Media Tools is an essential toolkit for editors, assistants and other post production professionals. To find out more, watch the overview video, read the user manual or download the free trial.

Until recently, most of our users were still using Snow Leopard. Then suddenly a massive switch occurred and a majority upgraded to Lion. This may have been because applications like Adobe Premiere and Avid Media Composer now require Lion or it may have been because the MobileMe shutdown forced people onto iCloud.

Whatever the reason, here are some tips for making 10.7 or 10.8 more welcoming for a 10.6 user.

Reverse scrolling

Works on: 10.7+

Show Finder status bar

Works on: 10.7+

Show scroll bars

Works on: 10.7+

Hide All My Files

You can also set it to default to the home folder by going to the General tab and choosing your home folder in the "New Finder windows show" popup.

You may also like to show your hard drives and DVDs on the Desktop, which can be set from the General tab.

Works on: 10.7+

Stop restoring windows

However, in practice, these options have never worked reliably for me and applications will often try to restore old windows regardless. I therefore close windows manually before quitting an application and this fixes the problem.

Works on: 10.7+

Restore classic Expose grouping

Works on: 10.8+

Dictation

Works on: 10.8+

Notification Center

Here is a tip for removing the icon completely but you should do it at your own risk.

Works on: 10.8+

Turn off autosave

Works on: 10.8+

Here are some interesting articles we discovered over the past week.

Final Cut Pro X and Mountain Lion – now that’s interesting!
Philip Hodgetts tests out Mountain Lion's new dictation feature with FCPX.

Avid Mountain Lion test thread
Avid have provided an official thread for people to discuss issues with OS X 10.8.

Make your sound editor love you
Best practices for recording sound.

Six, (er) Seven New Features in Resolve 9
Alexis van Hurkman summarizes his favorite new features of Resolve 9.

Animate Chapman
Adobe is holding a competition to animate old Monty Python sketches for a new film about Graham Chapman.

Switching to Premiere Pro: Days 2-5: A Few Problems in Premiere
More on Michael Murie's switch to Premiere.

Free legal documents for freelancers
Docracy is a resource for boilerplate legal documents.

Installing QuickTime Player 7
How to install QuickTime Player 7 on Mountain Lion.

Mountain Lion bugs: Chopped battery life and nonsensical 'Save As' behavior
I really don't understand why providing a proper Save As function is so difficult for Apple.

Stability - At Last
Andy Jenkins details how he managed to get Premiere Pro CS 6 running smoothly.

Hacked iCloud password leads to nightmare
A horror story about what can happen if someone gains access to your iCloud account. It later turned out that the hacker had convinced Apple Support to allow him to reset the password.