I’ve been getting quite a bit of traffic to my website the last couple of days from both the DevaII mailing list at Yahoo Groups and the rec.arts.movies.production.sound newsgroup. Hello all!
It seems that someone posted a link to my article on dealing with Sound Designer II (SD2) sound files on the FAT16 DVD-RAMs that you get from a Deva II field recorder. (And the problem of losing the resource fork.) I hope people have found it helpful.
I still don’t know for sure if Apple has fixed the FAT16 DVD-RAM driver in the OS. Two versions of OS X, 10.3.3 and 10.3.4, have come out since I wrote that piece and I haven’t started a new Deva show in that time, so I haven’t been able to test it. And the report I filed at Apple’s Bug Reporter lists it as “Closed/Duplicate” which just means “Yes, we know about it and someone else has already told us about this.”
The AppleScript I wrote to fix the broken resource fork problem could be modified to fix a broken resource fork on any file really. Assuming the problem is that it got stripped on due to a transfer to a FAT16 disk, and that you still had the resource fork.
I found this German company, Spherico, that’s written several programs for dealing with sound dailies and Final Cut Pro. Most of the programs are about bringing all the functionality of the Avid to Final Cut Pro. There is one however called CopyRestore SD2 which does the same thing as my AppleScript. It will copy the files off the DVD-RAM at the same time. Maybe it’s cooler. I don’t know. Like I said, no Deva movie to try it out on yet. It’s also $25.
They have another program BounceUsII which plays multi-channel Broadcast Wave files (BWF). Plus you can display and edit the metadata. Do mix-downs for editing against a “comp” track. Convert to and from SD2. And it’ll spit out XML for importing into Final Cut Pro. It looks pretty cool. I’ve been trying to play with it using some BWF sound effects with metadata, but it keeps giving me strange AppleScript errors. Not sure what I problem is. Anyway, you might want to check it out and see if you have better luck.
There’s another handy program I came across called BWAV Reader which shows you all the metadata and other information about Broadcast Wave files that you drop on it.
It has this very tempting “Edit Metadata” button that when clicked simply pops up a “BWAV Writer will do what you want. Contact the author.” window. I checked the website and there’s not BWAV Writer program there. Looks like I’ll have to send him an email.