Category: Reviews-HowTos

When filmmaking was in its infancy, making transitions was a tricky prospect. You had to do it all “in the real world,” so to speak, by superimposing two projected videos and recording the result. Needless to say, it was hard work and only used in specific parts of the film — such as the end of a scene — but once the effect was done, it was done. If it was off by a few frames, unless you could afford to reshoot the transition, that was that. 

These days, with the advent of digital desktop video editing, the process is infinitely simpler. You can choose where to apply the transition, alter it as you please, and even replace it with a different one that’s more to your liking. In comparison to what you had to work with before, your options are practically limitless, and it’s all fairly easy to do, too.

As you’d expect, you’re not limited to a basic cross-dissolve with Adobe Premiere Elements 12. In fact, you can choose between no less than 53 different types of transition (nine of which are available in Quick mode; the rest you’ll find in Expert mode) to make your project as visually stimulating as possible. Remember to use them sparingly, though. There is such a thing as too much sparkle, and this could end up distracting your audience from the story you’re trying to tell.

This month, we show you where to find the transitions and how to use and alter them to suit your needs. The methods detailed work just as well in Quick and Expert mode, but we work in Quick mode for the purposes of this exercise.

1. The Transitions Menu

Open or create a project with at least two video clips in it. The transitions are located in the bottom toolbar, in a menu appropriately called Transitions. Click on it to see the various options at your disposal. You can resize the menu by dragging its top edge up or down.

2. Previewing Transitions

You’re presented with a series of thumbnails, each bearing a title describing the transition. It’s often hard to get an idea of a motion effect with a static thumbnail, though, so click on one to get an animated preview of the transition. You can only animate one at a time.

3. Drag and Drop

Drag the transition onto your project. As you do, the menu closes and a thick green line appears along an edit point. Keep moving your cursor until that line is between the two clips you want to apply a transition to. Once you’re there, release the mouse button.

4. Timing

A menu called Transition Adjustments appears over your chosen edit point. You can choose the transition duration in seconds. If one second is too long, you can forgo the up/down arrows and type in a value such as, say, 0.5, to give you a half-second transition.

5. Alignment

The alignment determines when the transition starts and ends. Left Clip means the transition takes place at the end of the first clip; Between Clips, the transition’s duration is spread between both; Right Clip means the transition is only over the second clip.

6. Square Display

Select an alignment and click Done. Depending on the alignment chosen, there’s a small thumbnail square on the left clip, half a square on either side, or one on the right clip. Move the playhead a little to the left and tap the spacebar to see a preview.

7. Alteration

Obviously, it’s only when you play it that you see whether a transition works. If you’d like to make changes, double-click the small square mentioned earlier. This reopens the Transition Adjustments window so you can make alterations. Click Done to preview your changes.

8. A New Transition

To see what another effect looks like, select a new one from the Transitions menu and drag it to the same edit point. The duration and alignment settings are preserved from your previous transition, but the new look takes precedence. Click Done to see what it looks like.

Thanks to Siri, we’re all getting familiar with voice recognition. Where the technology really comes into its own, though — in a business sense — is in OS X, where Dragon Dictate is the long-time leader in converting what you say into neatly typed documents and accurately executed commands.

Most of the features have been carried over from the previous edition, which already boasted excellent recognition and zippy performance even on mid-range Macs. Transcription tools are new this time around, having previously been sold as Scribe, a separate app. Feed it a 90-second sample of your subject’s voice and it should be able to transcribe a recording. Nuance reckons this will benefit students who’ve recorded a lecture on their phone, and business users who dictate quick notes while on the go.

We found the results to be mixed when in this mode. It performed well when transcribing one of Barack Obama’s online addresses, but it was less effective when working with a well-spoken and clearly enunciated British voice, even though we’d told it to expect an English accent.

Reverting to regular dictation proves more predictable, and lived up to our expectations. First-time setup requires you spend five minutes reading samples as they’re displayed on screen, so that Dictate can compare what it hears to what it knows for sure you’ve been asked to read. This builds a profile for it to use to decode your speech.

Neatly, if you’re upgrading from a previous edition you can also upgrade an existing profile. 
It’s a fairly time-consuming process that involves first converting your saved data file and then using it to “retrain” the app, all of which is automatic. It’s well worth the effort, as doing so allows the new version to recognize various things you taught its predecessor, such as non-standard words and various style preferences.

You can also hook directly into Gmail and issue commands such as “Click Compose” and “Click Send” while dictating the body of your email. Doing so requires a plug-in, which to date is available for Safari and Firefox, but unfortunately, not Chrome.

Even without the extensions, you can issue commands like “search Google for MacLife” or “search Bing for Apple,” and it obeys your instructions. Naturally, you can navigate to any link by vocally directing the pointer around the screen. Spoken mouse control is of most use to anyone with a motor impairment, but telling it to switch between apps by voice is also highly beneficial for anyone suffering from RSI or otherwise wants to minimize their mouse time.

The bottom line. The transcription tools are tempting, but it’s the live dictation that remains the main draw here.

Whenever you plug an iPhone or iPad into a Mac and check its data storage in iTunes, a chunk of space is always mysteriously taken up by “Other.” If you’ve ever wondered exactly what that data is and how to get rid of it, you’ve come to the right place!

The “Other” space is reserved for application data and settings.

On an iOS device, the “Other” space visible in iTunes is used to store things like documents, settings, caches, and a few other important items. If you sync lots of documents to apps such as GoodReader that read external files, your storage use can skyrocket. Thankfully, ever since iOS 5 it’s been easy to see exactly which applications are taking up the most space.

In iOS 7, simply head to Settings > General > Usage. After a few moments a list of your apps will appear, showing how much space each one is eating up. You can tap an app to get detailed information such as, say, how data is split between various podcast subscriptions in Apple’s Podcasts app. You can remove a storage-hogging application and all of its data directly from this screen, or manually remove the data by opening the app.

Applications that store large files will use more of the Other storage space.

That’s all there is to it! By periodically checking the Usage screen, you can keep your device from becoming bloated with extraneous data, and create extra room for more important things like duckface selfies and cat videos.

Every Monday we show you how to do something quick and cool using built-in OS X utilities such as Terminal, Apple’s command line application. These easy hacks can make life better and simpler, and don’t require any knowledge of coding — all you need is a keyboard to type ’em out!

How many times have you accidentally hit Caps Lock or another modifier key while typing and wish that the key in question simply didn’t exist? Well, you can have you dream come true with a little-known feature of OS X that lets you remap the modifier keys on your keyboard to make then function differently, or perhaps not function at all, if you wish. Continue reading and we’ll show you how you can change this setting to your heart’s desire.

To begin customizing the modifier keys in OS X, you’ll want to open System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard.

Once in the Keyboard tab of the Keyboard System Preference pane, select the “Modifier Keys…” button in the lower right-hand corner of the window.

After doing this, a dialog box appears that allows you to select the action that happens when a modifier key is pressed on your keyboard. Besides being an obviously good April Fool’s joke, this section can be used to remap the modifier keys on your keyboards.

The modifier keys are “Caps Lock,” “Control,” “Option,” and “Command.” You can remap any of these keys to any other modifier key, which could prove beneficial when typing. The best part is that you can also remap a key to “No Action,” causing nothing to occur when the modifier key is pressed.

Note that in this preference pane, the selection of the modifier keys only affects the keyboard that is selected (if multiple keyboards are currently connected). You can also always restore the keyboard keys to defaults by going back into this Modifier Keys panel and selecting the “Restore Defaults” button. Select “OK” to save the changes.

Cory Bohon is a freelance technology writer, indie Mac and iOS developer, and amateur photographer. Follow this article’s author on Twitter.

Got an Apple, Mac, or iOS tech question? We have the answer. In this week’s installment of Ask, we’ll help you get your Mac’s display (or at least the text) looking sharper than ever.

Question: I was so happy to read the “Get a Crisp Non-Retina Display” article in your April 2014 issue. However, after using the technique listed there for switching to HiDPI mode, text didn’t look as sharp as I expected; is there anything else I can do?

Answer: Enabling the Hi-Res item in the Display Preferences is done by going to the Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities) and typing:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist 
DisplayResolutionEnabled -bool true

However, this feature that may or may not be fully compatible with your external display. If the display is not a hi-res display, then you may encounter an issue where fonts look jagged. That being said, you can enable font smoothing, which may either help or worsen the situation, but is worth a try if you wish to keep the hi-res feature enabled on your external display. 

To enable global font smoothing on all displays that the MacBook is connected to (including its own internal display), you’ll want to open the Terminal application and perform the following commands (on one line), followed by the enter key after entering each command: 

defaults -currentHost read -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing 

If you read the setting for Apple Font Smoothing and get an error, this simply means that the variable was not set before.

Depending on if it’s enabled or not, you’ll get a message such as “The domain/default pair of (kCFPreferencesAnyApplication, AppleFontSmoothing) does not exist.” This is actually OK; it tells us that the font-smoothing feature of OS X is not enabled, and could be to blame for your fuzzy fonts. To enable font smoothing, enter the following command, then the enter key: 

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2 

If, after entering this command, you don’t see any difference, or the font smoothing looks worse, the you may want to adjust it by re-entering the above command replacing the 2 with a 1. You can completely remove this setting by typing the following command into the Terminal: 

defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing 

This should solve any troubles with fuzzy fonts. Note that to see any changes to the font smoothing, you may need to log out of and then back into your OS X account between entering the commands.

After entering the command to set Apple Font Smoothing, you should see a change; if not, then log out and then back into your OS X account.

Ask is written by Cory Bohon, a freelance technology writer, indie Mac and iOS developer, and amateur photographer.

Got a tech question? Email ask@maclife.com.

Label makers are traditionally simple machines that perform a single task which people feel they can either live with or without. In many ways the LW-600P fits perfectly into this niche, however, the integration of Bluetooth connectivity and a powerful…

Ever viewed a photograph that partially came to life with motion? These so-called “cinemagraphs” are a relatively recent innovation that typically require hours of painstaking effort for deceptively simple results, but can now be created within minutes.

Cinemagraph Pro allows Mac users to import QuickTime movies and turn them into a breathtaking “living photos.” While most of the frame remains motionless, the viewer’s eye is drawn toward one or more areas with movement, and the results can be quite striking. Any video camera or DSLR can be used to create cinemagraphs, but for best results, a steady tripod is a must.

Despite the pro-level price, the user interface makes the process effortless. Select up to 10 seconds of video and then mark a static frame, which can be exported to other applications should it require further touch-up work. In Mask mode, users paint areas that will be in motion; familiar size, hardness, and opacity options make it easy to fine-tune or erase selections. The resulting loop can be adjusted to bounce back and forth or repeat endlessly, and the app includes tools to adjust exposure and color, add vignettes, or apply nearly 30 Instagram-style filters to further stylize the image.

Cinemagraphs can then be uploaded to Flixel’s website (and optionally, Twitter or Facebook) for public sharing with others, or made private with just a click. While earlier versions were limited to lower-resolution H.264 or animated GIF exports, version 1.1 adds Apple’s ProRes 422 or 4444 to the mix, so cinemagraphs can finally be saved at full resolution.

Despite being fun and easy to use, the app tends to be a resource hog, consuming enough CPU time whenever video plays onscreen that it bogged down other applications running on our MacBook Pro with Retina display. We were also disappointed to discover Flixel-hosted movies exhibit an annoying black frame at the loop point, which is something of a showstopper for such an expensive application.

Speaking of price, Flixel recently made headlines by offering this app for $14.99 on the Mac App Store, an absolute steal for such an innovative tool. Unfortunately, at the normal price ($99.99 as of this writing; it has been as high as $199), Cinemagraph Pro becomes a more cautious recommendation, especially for novices and prosumers on a budget.

The bottom line. Cinemagraph Pro makes it a cinch to create living photos from videos, but the app’s processor usage is nearly as high as its price tag.