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.

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

Adobe Premiere

• Swap edits bug (thanks Strypes)
• Issues with AVCHD media on OS X 10.8
• Color correction tools clamp to broadcast levels inconsistently
• Dragging video and audio clips together can move them out of sync
• AVI import options disappearing on Windows

Final Cut Pro X

• Many people have been unable to Share with 10.0.5
• Negative render progress
• Several threads documenting issues after installing OS X 10.8

Avid Media Composer

• Workaround for clips in an AAF not being seen by Resolve
• Dongle problems after updating to OS X 10.8

In the Preferences dialog for Premiere Pro there is a section called Memory that allows you to specify how Premiere Pro and other Adobe applications will use your RAM.

Premiere will allow itself a certain percentage of memory by default and you can decrease this by increasing the RAM reserved for other applications and the operating system. This is a maximum limit and the memory is only used up if it is actually needed.

Premiere, After Effects, Encore, Prelude, Media Encoder and Photoshop all use the same memory pool so the RAM is assigned between them. Premiere and After Effects are assigned the highest priority within the pool so closing these applications can improve performance in the other apps.

Adobe applications are designed to share data in realtime through dynamic linking so it is common for users to run multiple apps at once. It is therefore recommended to set these settings as high as possible. The default is around 70-75% of total RAM. Note that it's possible for third-party plugins and importers to exceed the memory limit.

After Effects has a Details button in its Memory & Multiprocessing pane that for some reason the other applications don't have. If you click this button you can see which Adobe apps are running, how much memory they are using and what priority has been assigned to them. As you switch applications from foreground to background, watch the maximum allowed memory change as the priority is lowered.

If you install additional memory in your system and it is not reflected in the Memory dialog, close all Adobe apps and delete the file ~/Library/Preferences/Adobe/dynamiclinkmanager/6.0/memorybalancercs6v2.xml (or whatever version you are using). On Windows 7 the file is located at C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\dynamiclinkmanager\6.0. When you relaunch Premiere the file will be recreated and it should see your new memory.

In the Memory pane you can also optimize rendering for performance or memory. In performance mode Premiere runs several tasks in parallel and uses all of your processor cores (up to 16). In memory mode it runs fewer tasks simultaneously so these settings will lower both CPU and memory usage.

Tips for optimizing memory usage

• Close Adobe applications that are not in use
• Turn off thumbnails and waveform displays
• Reduce the size of large images
• Optimize rendering for memory
• On Windows, try increasing the size of your page file (virtual memory). It should be at least the size of total RAM and some people recommend that it is twice as large.

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

Automatic Duck Somewhat-Almost-Best Practices

Lots of tips, tricks and gotchas for using Automatic Duck.

How to create a DCP

A video tutorial on creating a cheap DCP for digital projection. You still need somewhere to test it though.

DaVinci Resolve Lite for transcoding Avid MXF media

Workflow for applying LUTs to ARRI Alexa footage for bringing into Avid.

Best Mac GPUs in 3D Game Shootout

The range of graphics cards for Mac Pros is poor so Bare Feats tested how fast Windows-compatible cards were after being flashed to work on OS X.

They also confirmed that the difference between Lion and Mountain Lion for graphics processing is negligible.

Adobe recommends OS X 10.8 for Premiere Pro

Premiere Pro CS 6 makes use of OpenCL so Adobe is recommending OS X 10.8 due to its OpenCL improvements. We'd recommend not using a brand-new OS for critical work though.

Switching to Premiere Pro: Day 1: Prelude to a fall

Michael Murie details his first impressions of Adobe Prelude. (It's also interesting to note from the comments that Wes Plate, formerly of Automatic Duck, is now the product manager of Prelude.)

Carbon Copy Cloner goes commercial

Useful backup tool Carbon Copy Cloner is becoming a paid tool but previous versions will remain free. Users who donated in the past will get free licenses.

Details on Xsan 3.0

Alongside Mountain Lion, Apple launched Xsan 3.0 without fanfare. It's based on StorNext 4.2 but there aren't a great number of new features.

The Foundry Summer Sale

The Foundry is offering 30% off their products if you switch from a competing product. I'm still running Shake so this is very tempting.

New encoding presets for Adobe Media Encoder

Adobe has released additional encoding presets covering mobile devices like the Kindle Fire and Nook and new presets for XDCAM EX and AVC-Intra in MXF wrappers.

How to re-download Lion from the Mac App Store

Now that Mountain Lion has been released, Lion no longer appears as an option in the Mac App Store. You can get it back if you've already purchased it by Option-clicking the Purchased tab.

How I installed Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion on my 2006 MacPro 1,1

Older Mac models such as the 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 are incompatible with Mountain Lion. Here's how to install it, but it's complicated and has drawbacks so it's not recommended for a working environment.

We've just started a new blog series called Bugs of the Week. This will be a weekly post that highlights bugs in popular editing software that we've come across in the past seven days.

Adobe Premiere

• Clip in/out is ignored when exporting via AME
• Various issues with MXF files
• If you put mono clips on stereo tracks, you may end up with duplicate audio channels in an OMF
• Autosaves not occurring if you're playing back when the autosave interval comes around
• Timeline redraw problems can be caused by an overheating GPU

Avid

• Workaround for getting external video out from Magic Bullet Looks 2.0
• Avid applications are not yet compatible with OS X 10.8's Gatekeeper feature

Final Cut Pro X

• Optical flow reverting to frame blending

Final Cut Pro 7

• Old third party plugins may cause crashes on OS X 10.8
• Certain XDCAM clips can crash FCP
• How to fix Out of Memory errors

(Crash Analyzer has some additional suggestions for fixing that last one.)

We recently released Pro Versioner 2.0.3, a minor update to our project backup and versioning tool.

Mountain Lion support

Pro Versioner now officially supports the recently released OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.

Mass removal options

If you are running low on disk space and need to clear out some backups, the new Remove Backups options in the Edit menu can help.

You can choose to remove all backups, all except the x most recent, or all older than x days.

The full list of changes is here.

Pro Versioner is an essential tool for safety and peace of mind when editing your project. To find out more, watch the overview video, read the user manual or download the free 15-day trial.

We recently released Video Space Calculator 1.0.4 for iOS and 1.0.2 for Mac.

In addition to the 75+ codecs already supported, we've added support for AVCHD FX, DVCPRO HD 50 and 60 fps, Canon XF 25, 35 and 50Mbps and 3K and 5K support for EPIC.

Video Space Calculator is a useful tool for calculating the disk space taken up by a wide range of codecs. It is available on the app stores for iOS and Mac.

Last week we released Pro Maintenance Tools 2.0.10, a minor update to our suite of tools for keeping your editing system running smoothly.

Mountain Lion support

Pro Maintenance Tools now officially supports the upcoming OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion release later this month.

Faster QuickFix performance

We've made lots of improvements to QuickFix so that it will repair your problems even faster, letting you get back to work sooner.

Media Salvage interlacing support

You can now specify interlacing settings to be applied to the salvaged media file.

Plugin Manager installer improvements

We've had lots of interest in our plugin installer from developers so we've made several improvements to the customizability of the installer. You can now add a license agreement (EULA) that the user must accept before installing, and you can modify the look with a background image and custom icon.

This is a subset of the changes in this version; see the changelog for more.

Pro Maintenance Tools is an essential tool for video professionals that is used by studios, broadcasters and freelancers worldwide. To find out more watch the overview video, read the feature list, check out the user manual or download the 15-day trial.

If you run Avid Media Composer 6 on Lion you may have experienced an issue where a process called hasplmd crashes literally every 10 seconds. This fills up your Console logs very quickly and causes the crash reporter to be constantly running and writing to the hard drive.

Here's a an example of my Console log (abridged):

7/15/12 8:18:10.906 PM ReportCrash: Saved crash report for hasplmd[70958] version ??? (???) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/hasplmd_2012-07-15-201810_localhost.crash
7/15/12 8:18:21.040 PM ReportCrash: Saved crash report for hasplmd[70968] version ??? (???) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/hasplmd_2012-07-15-201821_localhost.crash
7/15/12 8:18:31.208 PM ReportCrash: Saved crash report for hasplmd[70969] version ??? (???) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/hasplmd_2012-07-15-201831_localhost.crash
7/15/12 8:18:41.378 PM ReportCrash: Saved crash report for hasplmd[70974] version ??? (???) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/hasplmd_2012-07-15-201841_localhost.crash
7/15/12 8:18:51.620 PM ReportCrash: Saved crash report for hasplmd[70986] version ??? (???) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/hasplmd_2012-07-15-201851_localhost.crash

hasplmd is used for dongle verification, although it took me a while to notice because I use Avid with a dongle and it worked just fine in spite of the crashes.

To fix this, download the newer 6.23 version of the drivers here (I chose the GUI version).

Alternatively, to disable hasplmd completely, type the following command in the Terminal:

sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.aladdin.hasplmd.plist

You'll need to type your password after doing this.